Poverty and Education

 

(This is a picture of my wonderful in-laws, one of my sons and my "partner in crime," Daniel)

(Some of this post is in all caps, and it's not because I'm trying to add emphasis.  I just can't figure out how to change that!!)  
 
One of my best friends is a Kindergarten teacher, she’s been teaching for nine years and she’s on the brink of quitting.  At this point, the only thing keeping her in the classroom is that there’s nothing else she wants to do.  I can relate.  I would be in the same boat if I decided not to have children. 

So we talk about how to make it better, our ideas go around and around in circles as if they were right in front of us, and we try to see them clearly, try to see what connects them all, what would actually have an impact on the lives of the children in her care and on her life spent caring for them.  What we inevitably (and with increasing anger) circle back to is poverty.  There is only so much a teacher can do in the walls of their classroom, and with all the testing mandates and lack of support for teachers within her school she feels trapped, useless in helping her kindergartners grow.  This isn’t an issue of a few children that have passed through her classroom, this is widespread. 

            Some “education” issues that can be attributed mostly to poverty are low attendance, tardiness, inattention, low test scores, low grades, hard to reach parents and violence within the school.   So far, policy makers have been dealing with these issues as if they were the “meat and bones” in and of themselves, when they are really symptoms of other problems with deep roots.  It is too much to expect school alone to solve these problems at this scale.  It’s a lot like trying to make your fruit tree yield more fruit, but only addressing the part of the tree that you can see above the soil.

When people decide that these issues don’t reflect a deeper problem and are the whole of the problem, they also must take the view that it is entirely the fault of the families allowing low attendance, tardiness, inattention, low test scores, low grades, being hard to reach and simply being “bad” influences on their children.  So these people become “less than.”  I used to be one of those people who thought it was a poor person’s fault for coming to be that way.  Now that I have children, and we live below the poverty line, I realize how difficult it is.  But we have help, a lot of help from both his parents and mine, who were able to retire comfortably, meaning they have time to babysit our kids when we need it.  We also know, in the back of our minds, if we ever need help financially our parents are able to help.  If we had grown up in poverty we wouldn’t have that help.  We wouldn’t have been able to buy our home, and I might not even consider homeschooling, knowing how important that second income would be for us. 

Minimum wage is not a livable wage, especially because the whole system seems geared to keep the poor where they are.  If the minimum wage was raised to reflect the needs of the people working for that money, then maybe a household could be supported by one earner.  This potentially frees up the other parent or head of household to do things like cook meals at home – almost always cheaper than eating prepared food, and almost always healthier.  The people who think education can be “fixed” by implementing new curriculum and tests, are blind to the effects of poverty.  The disadvantages of growing up in poverty can seem small when looked at individually, but they stack tall and circle around so there seems to be a never ending vortex keeping the poor from being anything else. 

We can only seem to come up with the same impossible seeming solutions to these issues: Raise the minimum wage to something livable, make health care a right afforded to everyone, and hire more teachers to allow for smaller class sizes.  These are just the basics, but they still seem unimaginable right now.  In a perfect world teachers would be seen as professionals on the same level as doctors and lawyers, and it would be just as difficult to become a teacher as it is to become a doctor.  And why not?  Teachers are caring for the future doctors of the world. 

Why should we worry about poverty in general?  Desperate people do desperate things.  I’ve wondered so many times why this doesn’t bother the people who would like to keep minimum wage at a “minimum” and keep health care as a privilege for a select few.  If people can’t take care of themselves legally, a lot of them (especially the more industrious, entrepreneurial, “go getter” types) will disregard the law and take matters into their own hands. 

Learning Through Playing!

Julian and Oliver are pretending to be poisonous worms that are covered in a

poisonous slime, which their bodies make because they mostly eat a plant that is
poisonous to everyone else. The worms are camouflaged with rock color, until
they sense danger, then they flip over to show their red bellies to warn predators
they are poisonous. I played the bird trying to eat the worms, only to find they
taste disgusting and are poisonous. They are special worms with complete faces –
eyes, nose, mouth, ears. The worms love marshmallows and s’mores, they
discovered them when some campers left them behind after packing up to go
home. They offered some marshmallows to me and my babies after we became
friends when I discovered I couldn't eat them. They like to eat the excess
poisonous slime on their bodies. This recycles the poison, so they don’t have to
completely rely on the one specific plant for the poisonous slime.


This narrative is a game to them; they are fully invested in being worms
and talk freely about themselves as worms. For this story to take place the children - or
at least Julian, who was the instigator - had to know a great deal about the natural world and the animals in it. He had to know that some animals use camouflage for protection, some use bright colors to warn off predators, some can eat plants that are poisonous to other animals and take on those poisonous properties, some can eat their own bodily secretions and reuse them, worms don’t normally have “faces,” and they even had to have some knowledge of the effects that humans can have on animals and their habitats.



There is a lot of understanding going on in one story! I realize I don’t have any


proof of where they learned all of these facts about animals and the natural world. Many times when I ask them where they learned something, they just look past me blankly, then say, “Um, I don’t know.” As if to say, “isn’t it common knowledge what a worm looks like? Haven’t you ever looked at one?”

Nevada Abandons Public Scools

Here's a link to a HuffPost article talking about Nevada's decision to switch The WHOLE STATE to a voucher system. WTF?

Cooking Class For Families!?

Daniel had an idea last night that I thought was brilliant and would love to figure out how to implement: a cooking class for the whole family! I don't know how it would work logistically to have more than one family in a room learning recipes together. I imagine parents attempting to scold or bribe their children into participating, and that would put a damper on my fun. So maybe it's really for the parents, but kids are encouraged to join. 

I also imagine kids rolling their eyes, and leaning their dead weight against their parents saying, "I'm boooorrrrrred."  And at the end they would refuse to eat the food their parents just spent an hour making. Maybe this isn't such a brilliant idea. The kids would probably look like this:

Thanks for nothing, Daniel! 

BTW, I have exercised, read and written today. 

Yes, it's 7:30 AM and I've done all of those things, plus had breakfast. 

I know what you're thinking, "Is she some sort of super human?!" 

Maybe.

Or maybe Daniel got up early to ride his bike and woke me up with a mug of coffee before he left. 

Ok, thanks for coffee, Daniel.

 



Ok, so I'm trying to take better care of myself.  Not that I've been a complete mess up 'till now, but I'm not in school, so I have a little more time on my hands.  Hopefully this time will be spent on the betterment of my physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.  So I'm trying to do at least one of these four things every day: write, read, exercise and meditate.  

If I do one a day I will have been successful, if I do more than one, then I'm doing fantastic!  My standards are also low in regards to how much time I spend doing any one of these things.  If I do 50 jumping jacks, I exercised.  If I sit quietly, being present in the moment for five minutes, I meditated.  I just wrote a blog post about my self improvement journey.  Excuse me while I draw a check mark in the "Write" box.  Yay, me!

How do your kids learn math?

I get asked a lot of questions about homeschooling and unschooling.  One question I've been getting more recently is, "How do your kids learn math?"  And, "What about things like algebra and calculus?"  Honestly, I have no idea about algebra and calculus.  I never took calculus and algebra never seemed like a big deal - it was a different way to figure things out in the world, but it didn't seem especially difficult.

As far as math in general is concerned, that's hard to describe.  I could describe things we do that are math, or require some figuring, but we obviously don't follow a linear curriculum.  I would consider the picture above to be about math - Julian was inventing different bugs that lived in an underground world (much like a particular Minecraft mod).  When Julian and Oliver organized their stuffed animals in piles of big, medium and small - that was sorting, and that's math.  The patterns that Oliver is always making on paper, with Legos, with K'nex, in his head, with the hose water on the side of the house, those things are all math because patterns are math.  When my kids listen to music, they are, in a way, listening to math.  You can't learn how to read music without also learning patterns, fractions, and probably more that I can't think of right now.
Of course, there's also the regular counting of things to make sure they both got the same amount, or figuring out how to divide things up so they get both get an equal share, or figuring out how many of what chores they'll have to do to earn enough money to buy their next "Mixel."
This all happens "naturally," but it doesn't just happen.  As an unschooling parent, one has to see life as learning - it's all learning, there is no summer break, and no cramming for finals (unless you decide to go to school).  You are learning all the time.  So when my kids ask a question, a lot of times I don't just give an answer and leave it at that.  Most of the time I try to show them the answer, walk them through my thinking processes to illustrate how I got there.  Unless I see their eyes starting to glaze over, in that case I quickly shut up and give them the answer.  There's no point, I know they'll get it when they actually want or need to know it.  I know this because this has happened over and over again.
At this point maybe I should be asking people, "How would my kids not learn math?"

Whoa! We bought a house!

So, we bought a house about a week and a half ago, and it's been fun. Busy and confusing and tiring and even emotional, but also fun. Amid the mental chaos that accompanied the processes of buying and moving into our house I kind of forgot to go running or ride my bike for a few weeks. Or I was exhausted from thinking about buying a house, wondering what some of the piles of papers were that  I just signed, even though they made perfect sense at the time.
What happens when I forget to run or ride my bike? A dullness takes over my body and mind. Does that even make sense? A dullness? It's more like all the cells in my body feel heavier and slower and sadder and angrier. But it creeps up on me, so I don't notice it right away, until one day I'm wondering why everything is so hard and why I don't like my life anymore.
So I'm running again.  It's hard because I don't want to at first, but then again I don't want to do anything, so why not do what I know will help me feel better?