Poverty, Part I

A huge part of my job is figuring out to how understand, interpret, educate, respond to, not condescend, and empathize with individuals who possess the psychological and cultural effects of poverty.

We measure poverty in schools by students' ability to afford lunch, and 70% of my students can't. It's "free or reduced" for them, a phrase I've heard in schools since I was five years old, a phrase that conjures images of plasticy cheese, mini-cartons of Darigold chocolate milk, and grubby little fingernails. Everyday I stand in front of and sit across from kids who live in trailers by the airport; kids who have attended school while living in a shelter; kids whose parents work hard and ceaselessly for $8.50 an hour at or around the airport; kids whose parents are completely fucked up; kids whose parents strongly (dis)believe in upward mobility in America; kids whose parents are in fact brothers, grandmas, aunties; kids whose measure of success in life is a paycheck, a car with nice wheels, the ability to play video games, have cable, and have one's own place while doing a job one obviously isn't going to like.

My students are good kids. Visitors--almost always white and middle class--often come into my room and into our school and are awed by the ethnic, religious, ability, and philosophical diversity of our students and additionally awed by the fact that everyone is nice and working and not punching each other and snapping gum and being antisocial, and the visitors often ask with wide eyes, "How did you do this?" as if it's a miracle, as if all the lip-service we give in this country about the beauty of diversity is in fact lip-service. To see all these different kids work together well: unbelievable.

I don't imagine my students as future rapists, criminals, delinquents, and/or Wall Street execs, though when I tell people I'm a teacher, they often seem to envision my students as those in Dangerous Minds or some other completely false and frustrating film about teaching. We've created a school kids attend to learn and feel loved. That's why the societal crushing that looms for many of them disheartens me profoundly: if they don't move up in the hierarchy of American life, it won't even be because they screw-up. It will be just plain and simple because of who they are. They are, amongst dozen of other modes of identification that will invisibly hold them back, poor.

But let me not seem zealously gravitated to the cause of the Poor. I'm not Mother Teresa or MLK. Poor Americans frequently freak me the fuck out. If we are going to categorize people (and I'm going to tonight), I can handle, easily, affably, almost anyone else if they are often a certain social class: immigrants, teenagers, homosexuals, women, people of color, frat boys, people from different coasts, artists, people on drugs, the elderly. But I struggle with poor Americans. I struggle with understanding WWE, rims, buying cellphones other than the iPhone, valuing above all else tangible material, considering payday loans an option, permitting your life to get irreparably fucked up through the drama of family and friends, strongly disliking the police, having a very real sense that prison is out there looming in possibility, Monster energy drinks, hunting and ATVs, ignoring transfats, listening to KUBE for a lifetime, having kids when you're nowhere near ready, patience for buses, finding peace & beauty in a poorly made apartment in the suburbs south of the city, thinking of the Army as a viable, honorable option. It's all hard for me to understand, and it's hard for me to not get all up in arms and huffy and ask questions like, "Well, why don't you just make better decisions?!"

If I sound snooty, that's my point. You, my Committed reader, are likely similar to me. You have easy access to internet; you have time to read this little blog! The challenge of mine is the human challenge: to admit difference, but not judge. To critique, but to do so, always, with love. To open one's self enough to learn from and about another. To find compassion in the Kundera sense.

I have become much more open-minded and sympathetic and loving since my first year as a teacher, and I've concluded that you must or you won't last. Or even worse, you'll do a shitty job that wastes taxpayer's money and damages kids. The teachers who continue to view the Poor as the Other and can never really see the world from their point of view can never get it to click. I credit several things to the expanding of my mind around the effects and culture of poverty: students who challenge me; The Wire; professional development at work; Crime and Punishment; experiencing proud poverty in Nicaragua; visiting the homes of my students (something I want to think more about in a future entry); Chris Rock and his skit about Careers vs. Jobs.

If you don't know this skit, 1) it's hilarious and 2) this is the premise: If you have a Career there's not enough time in the day. You need more time to finish the paper, have meetings, work on your idea, etc. If you have a Job, there's too much time in the day. You're always counting down the hours before you're free of washing these dishes, entering in this data.

Whenever I get frustrated with my job or with my students, I think about his skit and I do this: I imagine working at Taco del Mar for a lifetime. I imagine working security at the airport for a lifetime. I imagine being one of the 60% of Americans who make under $15 an hour. I imagine just absolutely not giving a shit about my job... for my whole life. I imagine worrying about money for a lifetime. I imagine there not being enough hours in the day for me to work and pay the bills, enough hours to make enough money to wrap a security blanket of savings around my family. I don't think about refutations; I don't think about societal structures. I imagine counting down the hours of my life on a daily basis.

When I think like this, I start to get a hint of the violent desolate lonely apathetic emotions that ferment in one's self or one's family when this is reality. It's under such circumstances that perceptions of reality begin, perceptions and realities vastly different than mine. And when I can begin to truly feel compassion (Kundera has an amazing explanation of compassion), I begin to sense the depth and importance of my challenge as an educator.

While I drive the 15 miles from my home to work everyday in my little Honda whose tank I can always fill; while I pay my electric bill on time and without concern; while I walk the comely aisles of PCC evaluating the ingredients of organic salsa; while I better myself with guitar and tennis lessons and enjoy my leisurely evenings with board games and books; while I debate friends about the importance of architecture and religion before we go to a concert and buy $6 drinks; while I eat a delicious dinner with my girlfriend, looking out in almost a spiritual way at the Cascades; while I enjoy the benefits of my hard work and my privilege; while I do all of this there lingers this almost guilty feeling of how good I've got it, how lucky I am, how all I have comes at an expense, and thus how vital is my duty.