Poverty in America

Poverty is a killer in these United States. I have seen a couple of documentaries about poverty in America and they each one shocks me more and more. I was watching one on MTV today called "I'm Dead Broke" and there was another that I saw recently called "Hardscrabble Childhood" that really spoke to me. Sometimes we take for granted the things we have without thinking twice. There are people who have to hustle up a dime so they can find places to live or so they can eat. These people are the parents of the children that walk into classrooms everyday and we can't ignore the reality of this. There is such a thing as Third World living in a First World Country, ask the people who had to suffer the ills of Katrina and those who live below the poverty line in many rural and urban areas in the United States. What can educators do? We can be empathetic towards all of our students, even without knowing who's who. Notice that I said empathetic, not sympathetic because sympathy often renders itself in unwelcomed forms. We need not isolate a child and offer him/her financial support or clothing to make the child feel stronger. We simply need to continue to make the child feel valued, worthy, important, and capable of achieving his/her goals. Empathy requires that we constantly reflect on our own lives and our practices as educators so that we could make the classroom experiences of students more empowering. Sometimes a simple daily smile can help change a child's life, if even for a few hours. To learn more about how poverty affects children in the United States, check out Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children, Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, and The Shame of the Nation, Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed or Anne Lareau's Unequal Childhoods.