Understanding Poverty, or Po' Like Me
I have only worked in impoverished areas. I realized early on that I'd never really get along with middle-class people, let alone the rich. I went out with a guy from an upper-middle class suburb of Chicago once. His sense of entitlement sickened me. I spent my formative years in a double-wide trailer.
Stay with me; this is going somewhere.
When I was in my first year of teaching, I went to some training session that excerpted a book titled A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. I read the passages with all the seriousness befitting someone trying to do well on her first salaried job. Much of what I read made sense to me anecdotally.
When we moved out here, to a district where 98% of the kids are on free or reduced lunches, the same text was excerpted and the book was made available to us. I read it immediately, trying to make some sense of my new situation. What I unearthed was a jumble of slapdash clip art (I cannot cope with that), stereotyped "case studies", and a shrug of the shoulders. Evidently poor folks don't want in on the middle class world, and since the educational system embraces middle class values, they reject it, and with it all the trappings of literacy, culture, and financial security.
I don't buy it.
I know a good many poor people, and they don't necessarily like the lifestyle. Sure, it's familiar, but to assume that they don't have the courage or gumption or whatever to leap into a life of bills being paid on time, cars that are street-legal, and PTA meetings is biased and unfounded. Likewise, I know people with money, money, money, and a college degree or two who believe that buying a new car every three years, buying tickets to see Rent, and buying into Fear and Consumption makes them fashionable, cultured, and patriotic, respectively. (I know firsthand that money can't buy taste. People will pay for the stupidest, ugliest, most inane things. This was one of the harder things to come to grips with upon becoming a paid artist.)
Yes, there are things afoot that exist to keep the caste system firmly in place, but I object to the blanket statement that po' folks want to stay uneducated so they fits in wi' other po' folks. I can't ever recall wanting to be undereducated and culturally limited. In a defunct mining town with few opportunities, I scrambled to get all the culture I could possibly scrounge. Many others took the same initiative in various ways: academically, athletically--some even traveled.
What is the problem with this area, then? Is it the isolationism, the desire to remain cut off from the potential for progress, save for driving an hour to shop at a Super Wal-Mart? Is it intergenerational poverty, just never being able to escape living for the basic human needs? Is it simply lackadaisical parenting?
I don't think I'll ever know. With any luck, we will escape teaching, and this blog will be no more. I'll replace it with some blog entitled Cute Kittycats I Have Known or something equally cloying, and I'll stop shallow-breathing and grinding my teeth when I sleep. (That's called bruxism, by the way. It can make you chip your teeth, or get a divorce.)
Stay with me; this is going somewhere.
When I was in my first year of teaching, I went to some training session that excerpted a book titled A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne. I read the passages with all the seriousness befitting someone trying to do well on her first salaried job. Much of what I read made sense to me anecdotally.
When we moved out here, to a district where 98% of the kids are on free or reduced lunches, the same text was excerpted and the book was made available to us. I read it immediately, trying to make some sense of my new situation. What I unearthed was a jumble of slapdash clip art (I cannot cope with that), stereotyped "case studies", and a shrug of the shoulders. Evidently poor folks don't want in on the middle class world, and since the educational system embraces middle class values, they reject it, and with it all the trappings of literacy, culture, and financial security.
I don't buy it.
I know a good many poor people, and they don't necessarily like the lifestyle. Sure, it's familiar, but to assume that they don't have the courage or gumption or whatever to leap into a life of bills being paid on time, cars that are street-legal, and PTA meetings is biased and unfounded. Likewise, I know people with money, money, money, and a college degree or two who believe that buying a new car every three years, buying tickets to see Rent, and buying into Fear and Consumption makes them fashionable, cultured, and patriotic, respectively. (I know firsthand that money can't buy taste. People will pay for the stupidest, ugliest, most inane things. This was one of the harder things to come to grips with upon becoming a paid artist.)
Yes, there are things afoot that exist to keep the caste system firmly in place, but I object to the blanket statement that po' folks want to stay uneducated so they fits in wi' other po' folks. I can't ever recall wanting to be undereducated and culturally limited. In a defunct mining town with few opportunities, I scrambled to get all the culture I could possibly scrounge. Many others took the same initiative in various ways: academically, athletically--some even traveled.
What is the problem with this area, then? Is it the isolationism, the desire to remain cut off from the potential for progress, save for driving an hour to shop at a Super Wal-Mart? Is it intergenerational poverty, just never being able to escape living for the basic human needs? Is it simply lackadaisical parenting?
I don't think I'll ever know. With any luck, we will escape teaching, and this blog will be no more. I'll replace it with some blog entitled Cute Kittycats I Have Known or something equally cloying, and I'll stop shallow-breathing and grinding my teeth when I sleep. (That's called bruxism, by the way. It can make you chip your teeth, or get a divorce.)
spoken by Sister Morpheme at 10:58 PM
1 Rants:
I hope you have your email set up so you can see comments on old posts.
I've met Ruby Payne. While on many levels I resent that she has made a very good living teaching teacher how to understand poor folk, I've found some use with that book, particulary in the area of how different social classes interact, or don't. Then things like *generational* wealth and *generational* poverty.
Anyway, I think she wrote that book to show upper-middle class teachers with lawyer husbands how to get down with chil'uns who grew up on an Indian reservation.
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