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.