A Teacher-Approach to Reaching Students Living in Poverty in Urban Schools .
As future teachers, we are truly on the cusp of understanding what teaching is all about. We have heard time and time again from our professors that we will really understand our profession only by getting in schools and actually teaching. This is certainly true. Our role now as we prepare for that day is to begin to understand the abundance of issues that certainly are pivotal in the realm of education. Poverty in our schools is such a large controversial issue that really is ignored by a large majority of both future and current teachers. In this paper, I am not suggesting that I will come up with an ultimate solution to this problem in our society. Rather, I feel this will create an awareness of the problem that in fact calls us all to continue to learn about this issue and the role teachers need to play. .
I am just exploring poverty in urban settings, but poverty is also an issue in rural districts. It is noted that twenty-four percent of school-age children who live in central cities within large metropolitan areas live in poverty. (Freeman and Snyder, 2003) These students who are living in poverty have the same needs any child around the world has; they just need to be met in a customized way that promotes their personal health as well as the role they play in the classroom. When we see that people are living in poverty, it is all too easy to "blame the victim- in order to lighten the responsibility of our society. In doing so we ignore the unbalanced power structure of policies and practices our society unfairly utilizes in jobs, housing, and schools that continue to promote White society, putting any person of color at a supreme disadvantage. (Farmer-Hinton, 2002) We seem to think by seeing a few successful people who are a minority and/or living below the poverty line, everything is okay.
