Response to Dr. Payne's "A Framework for Understanding Poverty"

As evidenced by both the brief but informative parent-teacher conferences held at our high school this week and by the detailed perspective on poverty and class structure offered by Dr. Payne's 1996 book, any insight into a secret and wary world that can be offered to an outsider learning to work within that world and clearly express concern for its members is valuable information. One of the major struggles of teaching in the Delta is trying to reconcile love and caring for the members of a group with an elusive language, culture, and familial structure, with outsider ignorance of its inner mechanics and subtleties. As teachers, we care about our students and want to both communicate with them and effetively help them to learn, but I personally feel like I'm conducting sensitive buisness in a language I am just learning to speak.

The systemized examination offered by "A Framework for Understanding Poverty" is helpful for developing confidence and insight into this world we have begun to work within. Especially interesting are the discussions of hidden rules, language, the different roles that students must play as they move between school, streets, and home, and the potential effects of role models. The latter is the easiest to address. It is simply encouraging and a little overwhelming to realize the potential we have as teachers to make a positive impact on students’ lives. Though that is, of course, the intention for teachers, it is encouraging to know that there is research to back up the validity of the attempt. We may actually be helping a little, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

In terms of the different roles that students play, it is again useful to have a researched, solid set of support for observations and conjectures that we make each day. We may guess what our student’s lives are like, but Dr. Payne’s writing really makes the connection between how they live and the behaviors we see them exhibiting. Fighting and aggressive behaviors with each other, for example, difficulty taking instruction if they are used to parent roles, and skills they have to know for the street that are simply inappropriate within a classroom.

A brief comment about language: It seems somehow unfair that they should have to learn someone else’s, and be tested on it, when they have grown up with and effectively used their own since they can remember. Useful to note, however, that this is exactly what happens, and we are here to help our students with this.

In general, the book helps me to see how what I say and do might feel to someone who comes from a different world with a different set of “hidden rules”, accepted set of communications, and to hope even more that I am doing a decent job at learning to connect with a world I am mostly blind to but already loving its members.

Why do we have to know this stuff, anyway?

I am surprised by how infrequently this question is posed. The issue has on rare occasion been raised during a lesson by a student athlete who has a realistic shot at professional sports, or a teenage mother (enough said).

I, however, am constantly considering this issue- along with a thousand others (my peers would say "what, that's it?" right about now). Every time I plan a lesson I try to make it relevant, and each time I present one I try to make it simple, catch interest, explain why the lesson is worth caring about. I still struggle, however, with a very basic question. What information is most important, really? Do I really buy the stuff I'm trying to sell my students?

Of course we all come up with our own answers for this. The students need to learn thinking skills, they need to learn how to approach problems, they need to realize that they are capable of solving them and that their ideas are valid and original, they need to learn how to interpret language and get familiar with common concepts (inter vs. intra, accuracy vs. precision, mass vs. weight. ) I also have the more general answers: Students need to develop skills for college, to succeed in an environment rich (note sarcasm) in societal norms and expectations, to achieve to the best of their abilities.

I think part of the reason that this question of "what do they really need to know?" irks me so much is that I know better than to think I'm really giving them what they need. Everyday in the back of my mind while I'm teaching biology and chemistry, I'm aware that they really need someone to be there when they're going to make an awful decision, they need someone to help them want to strengthen character, to help them find what they love and realize that it's worth something and pursue it. What makes us what we are, anyway? What will make the difference for these kids, and what will they end up doing? I feel like filling out a hundred college applications for them (maybe college applications could be another after school activity/workshop), all for schools outside of their comfort zones so they realize there is more than what they see around them- there is always more-and that they have something to contribute. But then I sound like an outsider, and (I confess) feel like a failure. Every single day. I love what I do, I love teaching and communicating, I love it when it works. I feel like a failure. We were told we would feel this way, but I didn't really believe it, and it doesn't make me more effective if everyone feels the same way.

So I'm constantly wondering "What should I be teaching?". Responsibility, strength, character-?. Do I have enough of that stuff myself for anybody to learn it from me? My kids complain when they're hungry, when they're tired, when its cold, when it's hot. I tell them all the time- it won't always be comfortable- in fact it rarely will. You're going to be tired, you're going to get hungry. Circumstances are never perfect, but strength comes from getting through it anyway. That's how stuff gets done. I wonder if they hear me at all. I sound like I'm lecturing, even to myself.

Out of the billion things (or so it feels) that I'm worried about, I thought I'd update my blog a bit (not touched for over a month) and at talk a little about one of them. I have at least three really urgent things to be doing right now....I think average is about seven these days...thanks for reading. Hope your night's a good one.