Understanding Poverty

So, here's the deal. I am sitting at my desk, and just finished eating a soggy tuna sandwich. I arrived at 6:45 am, as I always do, reset the copier, added paper, changed the lunch menu for the morning show, turned on all 30 computers, ran the morning show, sat through awards ceremony and took photos for the school slideshow, ran to the office to mix a printer snafu, came back to the media center to run my ongoing book fair. In the process I tried making two different cups of coffee (unsuccessfully finishing before both went cold). There has been no time for breakfast or even a water break, so by the time I was able to consume my very soggy sandwich (at 12:45) it didn't matter how it tasted, because I was quite honestly starving! I was able to finally check email during my sandwich time, and thank goodness nothing pressing was missed.

In the middle of my day, in between all else, I soothed ruffled teacher feathers, added water to the coffee maker, took candy from 5th graders (today is the day after Halloween, and despite the mandate there is no candy, there has been candy everywhere.) That is life, in a nutshell, when one works at an elementary school. What is easy about any of that? And seriously, what has any of that to do with my actual Master's Degree in Library and Information Science? My degree and none of my education prepared me for any of these things. Life prepared me; living life, learning to empathize, learning to problem solve, troubleshoot, learning to be a nurturer. But all those things were not taught in higher education. They were learned because of who my parents were, where I grew up, the influences in my life, both good and bad. It takes a village - it took a true village to teach me so much of that.

As a staff we are doing a book study on Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty. I did not understand the gulf before this book. I am not sure I even now understand it. But here is the thing. We are teaching kids from a middle class point-of-view, and they are coming to us from a generationally impoverished environment. We don't always speak the same language, even if we all speak English. So add all of that questioning to my above morning, and it is no wonder our public education system is in the uproar it is. I certainly do not know the answers. But I know this - what we are doing now is not working. When someone like me with an incredible wealth and passion of knowledge and books, with the compassion I have inside of me - with the education I have paid for has a morning like I had today; and nearly every day has a similar path and schedule, with similar results. When that happens, it is time to truly rethink what it is I do, why I do it. And to consider what next I want to do. Because none of those things satisfy that urge inside of me to continue to blindly share what I know without seeing some connected end result. It becomes harder and harder to give of myself, and continually give. That is where educational burn-out occurs. There is something truly wrong with this whole scenario. I wish I knew the answers.