Often conditions of poverty are confused with conditions of neglect… Gaining insight into those struggles also provides insight into the well-being of their children—our students. — It is empowering for them to see us, their teachers, social workers, and other adults who reject the deficit discourse and debilitating racialized, gendered stereotypes about them, their parents, and marginalized communities, to see us as educators and allies who will teach them, as Makeba’s lawyer and Elena’s principal did, to advocate for themselves and stand up for their rights. -Goodman, p. 108 & 126

The first question I ask myself is: How can you tell?

It’s not so easy to tell the difference between poverty and neglect and we are almost trained as educators to only ever see neglect regardless of the community we are in. But then I revisit my question and I realize that it’s not rhetorical. The answer is pretty straightforward: care enough to find out.

I feel that this can be understood as one of the ways to tell between a teacher that is involved in the community they teach at and those that are not. In order to become an ally for a student and show them that you care, you have to actually care about who they are as a person, not just who they are in the context of a classroom. Recognition initially that a student is a whole human being that experiences all of life can be the first step towards a more empathetic way of approaching students. Interacting with students and getting to know them better also is a great way to gauge what their experiences outside of the classroom might be like. In addition to that, not assuming things about their life but actually communicating with them and getting more information makes all the difference. 

The big question now becomes: How do I do this for all of my students?

It can seem so manageable to keep track of one student if you’re an elementary school teacher that sees roughly 30 kids throughout the day, but what happens when you’re a middle or high school teacher and we double or triple that number of students? When we add the bodily changes they go through? When we add the hormonal changes they go through? When we add the individual and personalized attention and need of every student? It’s easy for a few students to slip through the cracks. It’s difficult to embrace a job that “ends” at 2:20 but is actually 24/7. Reaching our students and empowering them is an amazing goal and feat to achieve but nonetheless a difficult end we strive, but also sometimes struggle, to attain with our students.

Becoming a true ally to our students doesn’t happen overnight and it’s definitely not an easy job, but then again, I would also like to believe that we all didn’t choose to be teachers because we thought it would be a quick and easy job.

The foster care system seeks to protect children from neglect and abuse from their families. However, the system itself is flawed for a number of reasons that continues to prevent children from saving them from abusive circumstances. Many children, like Makeba, as one of the cases, mentioned by Goodman, have suffered moving from home to home with foster parents that didn’t make them feel safe and abused their weak emotional state. It’s crucial that as teachers do the best we can not to undermine students’ potential just because they are part of the foster care system. Beside understanding their different types of housing arrangements students may have, we need to help students express themselves in different ways, if needed, to overcome and work with their own personal traumas. At the same time, I think that breaking families apart is also heartbreaking when parents really want to work things out. Because of this, they cannot support their children and families are broken apart. This type of neglect experienced by children isn’t done on purpose. There needs to be systems in place to protect the family unit when the parents really want the best for their children and cannot provide enough socioeconomic and emotional support.

“Moreover, a supportive, collaborative environment leads to collective efficacy among teachers, which has been shown to lower the level of stress that teachers experience in response to students’ challenging behaviors…We argue that in a system where the caring feel cared for, exhibiting strength and positive attitudes in the face of stressful conditions becomes the norm.” (Weston et al., 2018, p.117)

It is no doubt that being a teacher means being there for our students. Our job is to help students succeed academically, but we also have a responsibility to ensure that they are thriving socially. Of course, although we may be considered an “expert” in math or ELA, we are definitely not an expert on what each individual student needs separate from an academic context. Our students all struggle with different things, and it is our job to pay attention to our students to notice if there is any “off” behavior. Continue reading Feeling Supported in Order to Give Support →

“According to Kraft and Grace (2016), the structural transformations in the economy are increasingly compelling education systems to ‘prepare students with a broader and more complex set of fundamental skills than the traditional domains of reading writing and arithmetic.'”(Weston 2018).

The “fundamental skills”, outside of the three Rs (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic), that the Weston article believes schools should help students to develop, are categorized as either intrapersonal and interpersonal. Intrapersonal skills have to do with “behavior and emotional management”, and interpersonal skills have to do with “communicating and collaborating with other individuals”.To that effect, schools are increasingly taking on the responsibilities of modern psychotherapists, many of whom treat patients with a style of therapy known as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on teaching the patient to manage their psychological issues with proven behavioral strategies. These strategies generally involve developing the patient’s intrapersonal and interpersonal skills up to the point that these skills can compensate for the mental health issues that the patient is suffering. We can conclude that modern school teachers and modern psychotherapists have a similar responsibility to explicitly teach students/patients the inter/intrapersonal skills necessary for them to thrive. Continue reading The “Feelings” Class →