Poverty Blog

In reading A Framework For Understanding Poverty, a few key issues really hit home with me because of how they related to my experiences with my children these first few weeks. First of all, the idea of the circular narrative pattern and value placed on the "storyteller." A few weeks ago, I had the students do a compare/contrast essay based on two autobiographies we had read, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Slave Narrative of Frederick Douglass. The biggest problem I had was organization, because my students wanted to discuss their lives as summary instead of the format I asked, where they actually compared and contrasted several aspects of the two men's lives. In particular, I had one student who turned in an essay something along the lines of the following:
"Well, ol' Freddie had it rough. And I mean real rough. He had to take those beatings from mean ol' Mr. Covey day after day, and you know it wasn't going to take but one more time to set him off." She actually referred to Franklin and Douglass as "Bennie" and "Freddie." The story was completely entertaining, but absolutely off topic. In another example, I was having problems getting my two Honors sections of 11th grade to take home a copy of The Great Gatsby and read it for a test. Now these are the students whose parents I saw on parent-teacher conference day (well, probably about 60% of the 55 Honors III students I have). I have one other English III class that is not Honors (composed of juniors, seniors who failed last year, and sophomores who passed English II but failed the state test); I saw probably 10% of this class's parents. Anyways, when I gave in to the fact that I was going to have to give the students a synopsis of the novel instead of having them read the book, my regular English III class was hanging on my every word. Drinking, spousal abuse, affairs, mistresses being run over by wives -- they loved it. I gave away 20 books in that one class so they could take it home and read the entire novel in one weekend. And THEY requested to take the books, I didn't initially offer. I think in part, it can be contributed to the fact that the story (which took me 45 minutes to get through because they were constantly guessing at what happened next and interjecting their own comments) was, to them, extremely entertaining (granted, I highlighted the more juicy parts).
Also, the section in this book that discusses the matriarchal figure as unquestioned head of the household really made me think too. I was surprised that I have students that myself, the administration, the coaches, the friends, etc. cannot get to do work; however, the mother can get them to do almost anything. Some of these students are 18 and 19, have 3 and 4 year old children of their own, are into God knows what outside of school, but are still controlled by their mother, who may only be 14 years older than they are. Wow.