One must steel oneself to work in at Title I school

I was just reading this post from Elementary, My Dear...

She mentions hurting for her students who are so impoverished that a foam snowflake is enough to make their day, seeing as how they'd otherwise have no gift at all. I can relate. My students (and my daughters' classmates, as they attend the same school) are a struggling lot. Homes filled with extended families or multiple families. Parents without jobs. Parents in jail. Older siblings and cousins in gangs. Parents who've lost these kids to foster care. (Some parents who perhaps should lose the kids as they're not doing a heck of a lot of active or healthy parenting, but I digress). Homes without heat, where the baby's formula freezes solid when you set it down for a half hour. Immigrant families who don't speak much English and are hoping for something to improve for their children. Hard working, underpaid families surviving through the food bank and thrift stores and pawn shops and food stamps and unemployment (for as long as it lasts) and the free clothes closet at the school and Operation School Bell. Dustboard furniture and chipped plates and dollar store barbies and no time or energy for checking the kids' homework folders or reading a bedtime story.

And local legislators are planning to vote against tax adjustments on the wealthiest that would not improve the schools' budgets but would just maintain them at their current too-low levels. Disgusting.

Sometimes hugs aren't enough

A few days ago I was monkeying around with this blog and I added the phrase "Phonics, counting, singing, and hugs in a Title I school" to the sidebar. I had hugs on the list because little people are all the time running up with waist-height hugs. It's sweet, and it's a perk of teaching primary grades. Yesterday I really had to put my hugging skills to the test, though. My little guy who was just moved to a second foster home broke down at the end of the day. It's been a couple of weeks since the move, and he's mostly been just a slightly bouncier version of his normal 5 year old self, but as we were preparing to leave school for the day I noticed him sitting with his chin on his desk, all red in the face. I sort of told the class to talk amongst themselves (they're quite good at that) and called him over. Before I knew it, he was curled up in my lap, sobbing that he missed his sisters (one was moved with him, two stayed behind). All I could do was hold him and whisper to him that it will be OK, that lots of people are on his side and making sure he's taken good care of, and so on. I hugged him like I hug my own daughters when they're sad: a real, solid, I'm not letting go kind of hug. Granted, my kids get upset about things like a skinned knee or a squabble over a toy or frustration over learning subtraction. This little guy has the world on his itty bitty shoulders. The irony is, all his sisters are in our school. It's just hard to pull them out of class to get them together. I'll track down their teachers today and see if we can do something. In the meantime, I'm a good hugger. And I've gotten good (thanks in large part to my husband's influence) at being consistent and reasonably strict with rules. I hope that can help the little guy, as well as the many many others in my class who are in stressful situations. We're a Title I school, and with high poverty tends to come a high level of stress for a lot of people. Sometimes it's heartbreaking, but I'm grateful for the chance to be a spark of positivity (and source of necessary skills and knowledge!) for so many kids.

In other news, I think for Thanksgiving I'll just do a kindergarten version of a Gratitude Tree that my mentor teacher did last year with 6th graders. I'll make some sort of tree image to go on the wall and the kids will give me quotes about things they're grateful for that I'll put on leaves. There. That's done!

focusing on poverty issues in education

I've been researching the effects of poverty on young children in terms of their experiences in school, academic achievement, and the correlations between low socioeconomic status and low achievement/graduation rates overall. This issue is of great importance to me because my community is not a wealthy one, and my children attend one of the region's highest poverty schools. That said, a warm, inclusive, and intellectually rigorous and stimulating atmosphere exists at that school; that's why we send our girls there.

As a soon-to-be teacher, I'm very interested in finding ways to address the needs of children from low income (and perhaps high stress) homes. There are as many reasons for the lack of intellectual stimulation and overabundance of stress that we commonly see in impoverished populations as there are families living below the poverty line in our country. This is not a blame game; this is about acknowledging difficulties in our own communities and identifying the tools needed to address them.

Recent brain research suggests that best practices in education, including as much family involvement and communication as possible, can stimulate young brains in productive ways to compensate for early years in which children may not have been read to or talked with as much as is needed for optimal neurological growth and development. Dramatic play, plentiful access to books, and ample opportunities for verbal self expression in the classroom can begin to rewire the brain; these are obviously conducive to enhanced further learning. In other words, we as teachers can somewhat make up for some of the deficits with which our neediest students come to us.

I can't do much of anything about a family's financial situation. I can, however,positively impact the mental and emotional resources of my students. I can offer them a positive relationship with a nurturing and productive adult. And I can help them learn the implicit rules, basically middle class values, that too often go unspoken and yet to which students are held accountable: rules about volume and violence and mental focus and taking turns, for example.

I really want to offer a rich environment to the children living in poverty in my community. I want my classroom and my techniques to stimulate their brains while establishing foundations of knowledge and skill upon which they will then build more and more understanding of their worlds. Because the tools exist to do so, and because educators can make up for an understimulating environment at home, I have a duty to use those tools and do that work. And it will be a joy to do so.