Annotated Bibliography

Moore, Mignon R. (2003) “Socially Isolated? How Parents and Neighbourhood Adults Influence Youth Behaviour in Disadvantaged Communities”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 26:6, 988-1005.

In this book, Mignon Moore proposes some interesting theories about the reasons for early sexual initiation among adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods.  His first theory has to do with societal structure.  According to him, disadvantaged neighborhoods have a relative lack of work, which throws the unemployment numbers out of whack, which causes a breakdown in the proper functioning of adult-adolescent relationships in society as a whole, leading youths to experiment with sexuality sooner.  His second argument has to do with family structure.  According to him, disadvantaged neighborhoods have higher incidences of family disruptions (be it single-parent households, divorce, forced relocation, what have you), which leads to breakdowns in the relationship between parent and child, which is a major factor in predicting early adolescent sexual activity.

Masters, N., Beadnell, B., Morrison, D., Hoppe, M., & Gillmore, M. (2008, June). The Opposite of Sex? Adolescents’ Thoughts About Abstinence and Sex, and Their Sexual Behavior. Perspectives on Sexual & Reproductive Health, 40(2), 87-93. 

This article I found particularly interesting.  It analyzes the relationships between adolescents’ intentions to stay abstinent or to have sex, and compares them with findings about the actual outcomes of those intentions.  The findings are particularly remarkable in that there does not seem to be a clear-cut mutually exclusive mechanism in youth’s minds about these two topics.  That is to say, intending to stay abstinent does not seem to have a very large influence on not having sex, in the context of this study.

Theo G M Sandfort,  Mark Orr,  Jennifer S Hirsch,  John Santelli. (2008). Long-Term Health Correlates of Timing of Sexual Debut: Results From a National US Study. American Journal of Public Health, 98(1), 155-61.  Retrieved December 11, 2008, from ABI/ INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 1408937661).

This Study presents some basic statistics about the health affects and risks that correlate with early sexual initiation.  Among those listed are greater likelihood of contraction of sexually transmitted infections, as well as an increase in the probability of having intercourse with a partner identified as risky, and a decrease in general health among males.  Also interesting is the greater likelihood of early sexually active adolescents in underestimating risks of HIV infection.

Lohman, Brenda J., Billings, Amanda. (2008). Protective and Risk Factors Associated with Adolescent Boys’ Early Sexual Debut and Risky Sexual Behaviors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 37(4), 723-735.

There are many findings and discussions in this study, but what I found particularly useful for my needs is the Application Section at the end.  The study points out that by late middle school, much of the window of opportunity for intervention has already passed, and so initiatives aimed at delaying adolescent sexual debut should focus on sixth and seventh grades and younger to be effective.  Also poignant was the proposal that effective intervention initiatives should involve both parents and schools in a coordinated effort to work on the multiple risk factors for early sex activity in adolescents.

Vincent Guilamo-Ramos,  James Jaccard,  Patricia Dittus,  Bernardo Gonzalez,  Alida Bouris. (2008). A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Risk and Problem Behaviors: The Case of Adolescent Sexual Behavior. Social Work Research, 32(1), 29-45. 

What I found fascinating about this article more than anything else was its dealing with factors that go through the mind of adolescents when deciding to have sex.  Particularly intriguing was the disconnect that was pointed out between the common focus of intervention techniques, such as raising awareness of the risks of pregnancy and STI transmission, and the reasons that adolescents decide to have sex (social and pleasure factors, mainly)  The study intelligently points out that to be truly effective, intervention approaches must address these social and pleasure factors, and put them in an appropriate context in relation to everything else with the hope that adolescents will then be better equipped to make wise decisions.

Urban Schools Public Will

I wanted to make at least a cursory mention of one of the books we sorta got to, sorta didn’t this semester.  Urban Schools, Public Will by Norm Fruchter is probably the most enjoyable book I’ve read this semester - and I have sort of like all of them.  I also happen to think that it is the densest of the reading materials that we’ve examined - I find it to be far-reaching in scope, and highly technical, but on subject matter that I find intriguing enough to make the book quite enjoyable (For a slow reader like me, however, it takes forever to get through a chapter).

I, however, wanted to critique one of his approaches to examining eliminating the Achievement Gap between white and minority students in this country.  He proposes to use schools run by the Department of Defense (DoD) that cater to mainly children of military personnel as an example of a school system that can successfully minimize the achievement gap.  But you’ll have to forgive me if I have a hard time accepting this as a valid comparison.  Sure, it’s interesting to see that there has been success made in this most critical of education challenges, but I cannot believe that the results can ever be anything more than interesting - I see relatively few application potentials.  You see, it would be my belief that much (in not all) of this success revolves around the unique position that DoD schools find themselves in.  The cater to children of parents that have all been instilled with a sense of great discipline and responsibility, with respect for the chain of command and authority in general.  Doubtless, many of these parents have instilled at least some modicum of this discipline and respect into their children, making testing results all that much better across the board.  Also at issue is the fact that many of the neighborhoods that these students come from because of the military presence should tend to be quite well-adjusted which also skews test results.  

Now I’m not against turning every school in the country into a military school, I’m really not, but I have a feeling that I would be in the minority on that vote, so I simply can’t see the value of this comparison.  Sorry if that sounds harsh, but my opinions are my own.

Grad School Reflections

Well, we come to the end of my first semester of grad school today, and it seemed appropriate that as I was finishing up the last of these blogs, I should take one to reflect on my experiences in grad school, positive and negative.  The first thing I have to say is that I swore I’d never go back to school again once I finished my Undergraduate degree in about 2 1/2 years longer than it should have taken.  Funny how free education to get a degree that I desperately wanted to pursue changes one’s mind, right?  So that being said, I had never investigated Grad Schools, and so I had absolutely no expectations coming in - I had no idea what it would be like.  I must say, I was quite pleasantly surprised.  The fact that there was only one meeting a week and late afternoon sold me right away.  Add that to the fact that the workload, while not easy, was certainly manageable, and the semester in some ways seemed like a breeze.  Sure, this last two weeks has been relatively hectic - but that is relative to the other 13 weeks of Grad School, and I needed only observe my fiancée as she finished up her penultimate undergrad semester to realize that I had nothing to complain about in the arena of workload.  Also a major bonus was the fact that there were no exams - I can totally dig that.

But what did I really learn?  Well, surprisingly, the classes were not fluff, as I thought it possible they might be.  I really enjoyed the readings, for the most part, and even the papers (while certainly not my idea of fun) I feel have assisted me in preparing for a transition to teaching.  A nice side benefit also was the fact that I can now relate better to my future students, since when I begin teaching, I will be like them in that I too am still in school.  So all in all, I think I have learned a lot this semester, and if the rest of my schooling is like this, who knows - maybe i just might go for my doctorate.............NOT!!!!!!!

Community Inquiry Project Topic

So what has been coming to my attention recently, and I acknowledge that sometimes I do seem to have my head stuck in the sand, has been what seems to be a growing trend of kids beginning sexual activity at increasingly young ages.  This came to my attention when I was mentoring a student in an urban Middle School, only an eighth grader, who was referencing losing his virginity as an event in the distant past.  What’s more, by his own admission, his mother didn’t seem to find anything wrong with this (or had resigned herself to the fact that she couldn’t prevent her 13 year old son from having sex), as evidenced by her telling her son that she didn’t care what he did, so long as he didn’t bring home grandchildren.  This blows my mind!  I’m old-fashioned (or naive) enough to believe that high school is too young to be able to make rational calculated decisions about sexuality, let alone middle school.  So I thought I would investigate this trend for my community inquiry project, to find out what the true stats are in this area.  I would also like to know whether or not the “experts” in the field of study believe this to be an epidemic, or simply an acceptable social and cultural shift in attitudes.  I gotta tell you, though, I can’t help but feel that no matter what I discover from this porject and beyond, it will probably be pretty depressing to me.  I just hope that it will at the same time better equip me to handle any such issues as they come up in the course of my teaching career. 

Analyzing Inquiry Project Data

The data that I collected for my Community Inquiry Project seems to agree on only the fact that extremely young (14 or younger) adolescent sexual initiation is associated with a plethora of developmental, social and health detriments to those adolescents, and that such sexual initiations are becoming more and more common.  After talking with middle school students and reading much literature on the subject, I feel that this is a trend worth fighting, and as a future middle or high school teacher, I feel that it is at least partially my job to be involved in this fight.  After all, educators are not just tasked with teaching subject matter to students, but also with assisting in advancing the well-being of their students.  That being established, I do not know how I, as an aspiring educator, can look at all of the evidence that points to increased risks of everything from pregnancy to substance abuse associated with early sexual initiation, and not try to do something to help.  While I will be teaching mathematics, and certainly it is true that math teachers are not traditionally those tasked with sex eduction classes, I also realize that simply by being a teacher, students will always be watching me., leaving me with at least some opportunity to be a positive influence.  I am also fairly confident that somehow, be it overhearing a student’s conversation or being asked direct questions, that sex will come up, even in a math class.  Simply by being aware of the information that I learned while doing this project, I believe that I will be better equipped to effectively assist my students to obtain accurate and complete information on the potential consequences of their sexual decisions.

Some of these findings have challenged the assumptions that I have carried with me since my own schooling days - namely, that sexual initiation might start in high school, but certainly no earlier than that.  I believe that knowing and accepting the fact that the environment in which I will be teaching is not the same as the one that I came from (or perhaps merely the one that I thought I came from), will greatly assist me in being able to serve students better as the opportunities present themselves.  As an urban educator, I need to have the information at my disposal that while sexual initiation age decreases nationwide, urban neighborhoods demonstrate this trend to a much larger degree, including the devastating trend of a much larger risk for STI transmission at younger ages (Romer et. al., 1993).  Knowledge, as they say, is power, and as a future educator, I welcome every bit of knowledge about the environment in which I will be teaching.

Also invaluable as a future educator is knowing the risk factors that make early sexual initiation more likely (behavior problems, lack of parent supervision, familial uncertainty, etc.).  I am not suggesting that any educator can compensate for all of these problems, but I feel that if I can recognize that certain students are at greater risks for problems such as the one we are discussing, then it will better prepare me to meet their particular needs.  I certainly cannot anticipate all of the ways that this will manifest itself, but I hope that throughout the process of this project, I have put myself in a better standing to continue to reflect on this issue and in the light of more experience, to begin to form some sort of cohesive strategy.

In analyzing the data from the mapping of my section of downtown Newark, it would suggest to me that the students of Science Park High are particularly fortunate at having such a nice area in which to attend school.  Based on the literature research I conducted, and based on the abundance of places of worship (that can act as agents to strengthen community ties, as well as some evidence that church affiliation decreases the likelihood of early sexual initiation) and the relatively low evidence of neighborhood instability, I would predict that the students that attend school here would be less likely than peers in more disadvantaged neighborhoods to experiment sexually at very young ages.

Personal Community Inquiry Project Data Methodology

My data for this project, besides the existing literature that I researched, comes primarily from informal interviews that I performed with 4 minority (Hispanic and African American) eighth grade males from a school in a large lower-income urban neighborhood.  The questions revolved primarily around current and recent sexual activity and future sexual intentions, as well as brief inquiries into the nature of peer pressure as a driving force in sexual activity.  As these were informal interviews, and especially given the delicate nature of the subject area and lines of questioning, no written notes were taken.  I was fairly acquainted with the students I interviewed (having visited with them on several previous occasions), and have fair reason to believe that their answers were for the most part truthful.  However, given again the delicate nature of the subject matter, no amount of certainty can be guaranteed as to the accuracy of the responses.  While I admit that this is far from a statistically significant group of adolescents, I was able to get a more personal perspective on what the literature on this topic spells out.  I was also gratified to find that several of the trends that are discussed in the literature, such as parental supervision, family makeup, and sexual initiation age were reflected through these students’ responses.

Honestly, while I am not thrilled with the limited amount of research that I was able to do personally in this area, I think that with my chosen topic, short of a full-blown research study, that is about the best that I can get from first-hand student accounts.    

Walking Newark

So I recently was completing one of the parts of my Community Inquiry project, which took me into the heart of downtown Newark and centered me around Science Park High School and the surrounding ten block radius.  First off, why did I choose Science Park?  Honestly, it is because my ignorance about Newark was almost total.  What I knew about Newark was that there was a big airport somewhere near there, and that there is a stigma associated with it, as with most inner cities (I know this because whenever I mention to people the fact that I am going to be working in Newark as a teacher, I get one of two answers: “good luck,” or “oh, combat pay”).  So I just picked one of the names of the public schools that I could remember has been thrown around all semester.  With my memory the way it is, that limited it to Shabazz, Science Park, and Arts High, and I’ve never had an affinity for arts, and the prof knows Shabazz way too well.  So I mapped the area.  I have a feeling that I probably picked one of the nicest areas in Newark to deal with, because even I was impressed.  Most of the houses around the school were almost pristine single family units, there were higher education facilities everywhere I looked, the area was generally clean and neat, and there was really no major evidence of major neighborhood issues.  Perhaps I’m naive, and perhaps other areas more closely resemble areas that warrant combat pay for their educators, but honestly, Newark doesn’t seem that bad to me at the moment.  I can’t wait to start teaching.

Concerted Cultivation Arrogance

Here’s something I’ve wanted to discuss for quite some time, but just never got around to it.  Thinking back to reading Annette Lareau’s book “Unequal Childhoods” I couldn’t help but be convicted of an unknown area of arrogance that I have been holding onto.  It has to do with Lareau’s distinction between Concerted Cultivation (the active, typically suburban involvement by parents in their children’s lives and activities, occasionally bordering on micromanagement) and the Accomplishment of Natural Growth (the typically working- and middle- class philosophy on child rearing that gives greater autonomy  to children).  Now, in my way of thinking, even as I began reading Lareau’s work, Concerted Cultivation was much more difficult and draining for parents, but it gave their children the best preparation for engaging with their world and authority structures later in life.  This is all true, but what struck me is that when I reflected on it, I realized that I had been considering alternate child rearing strategies as inferior and irrelevant.  I had failed to remember the rule that they taught us in Computer Science: there are pros and cons to EVERYTHING!  So I was kind of blown away when I realized that children raised in a natural growth framework tended to be more imaginative, better able to occupy themselves, and better able to socialize with their peers than did those raised under the concerted cultivation framework.  Well, I hereby stand corrected, natural growth is certainly an acceptable method of raising children.  That being said, I still fully plan on utilizing more of a concerted cultivation framework in raising my own children, but what can I say?  At the end of the day, it always seems to be that we do what we’re comfortable with, which tends to be the way that we were raised.  C’est la vie.

The Spectacular Way of Avoiding the Pedagogy of Poverty

I recently finished reading Brian Shultz’s interesting book “Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way,” during which two big things really jumped out at me.  The first is that Brian Shultz REALLY needs to learn that brevity truly is the soul of wit.  I think that his 157 page exposition could have been as fully fleshed out in about 70 pages.  Seriously, this man truly knows how to repeat himself and bore an audience.  The second thing that struck me was that this guy, as a new teacher, is one amazing educator.  Just looking at the hours that this man put in for his class, both in extra time before and after school, and in time invested at home during evenings and weekends, his dedication and drive is clearly evident.  And I honestly must confess that as a future educator, I can’t imagine undertaking a project anywhere near the scope of Project Citizen that Shultz  was willing to tackle with his class.  Allow me to correct myself and thereby move into what I would like to discuss here.  You see, it wasn’t really Shultz tackling Project Citizen with his students, it was really him giving the authority over to his students, and allowing them to tackle Project Citizen in the way that seemed best to them. This is truly a revolutionary (if not exactly new) teaching strategy, and I applaud the success that Shultz and his students had with it.  There is a caveat, however.  This sort of teaching takes a huge investment of time on the part of the educator to pull off, and a willingness to seemingly lose control, at which point actually losing control of the classroom seems a little more likely to occur.  What struck me is the great way that Shultz came up with an alternative to the Pedagogy of Poverty, as outlined by Martin Haberman.  Haberman speaks of the model for education in poor areas as very authoritative, giving information, collecting it back at some point in the future, while telling students what to do and how to do it.  Nothing could be further from the way that Shultz organized his classroom.  He allowed his students to guide their own learning, and when he wanted to steer them in certain directions, as often as not he made suggestions instead of demands.  I respect Shultz much for his novel approach.  That being said, I am not sure that I can match such an approach with his level of success, but he can certainly stand in my mind as inspiration.

Collaging is Fun!!

I Reflecting back on collaging (which, fyi, Pages in iWork does not think is a valid verb - silly Pages....)- ok, so it’s been a few weeks, but better late than never, right?  I’ve been trying to figure out what lessons I can take from this assignment and the ensuing discussion over the following weeks, and it’s a bit hard for me.  Personally, I always hated school projects growing up - they always seemed like a lot of work to me, and usually pointless work at that.  In my mindset, why do I need to go through the effort of creating a physical object when I can just have a test on whatever was supposed to be learned, and do just fine on said test? (I can’t honestly remember having more than a dozen or two difficult tests in all my schooling until I got to college, where they got so hard the word test just wasn’t sufficient any more.)  Projects were just always sooo hard for me.  So one thing I learned in this assignment is that 6th grade work (collaging, in my mind, fits in this category) is a heck of a lot easier in 18th or 19th grade.  I mean, let’s go back to vocabulary tests every friday and geometry quizzes, and life would just be a whole lot easier.  But seriously, how do I apply what I’ve taken away from this to my teaching?  I think for one thing, I can realize that everyone has an intricate set of life experiences that shape who and what they are in this moment.  Somehow, taking the time to appreciate this fact, be it with a future student or coworker, or anyone for that matter, seems to allow me to appreciate that person more, even if I can’t relate to any of their particular disparate life experiences.  Another thing that strikes me is that this project was pretty easy to do because it dealt with just about all of the things that I am interested in.  I know it doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary, but one of the things that I’ll be working on is trying to figure out how to make math seem interesting and/or important to my students.  Another thing I might try - although I’m not certain about this yet, as I haven’t yet been in a classroom - is to get my students to share a little about themselves (probably not to the extent of our project, but something) with the hope that learning about one another will build a bond of mutual respect or appreciation, and maybe this can translate in caring about class?  I don’t know, it’s a stretch, but maybe worth a try.  This is all for now.

Another Blog Entry

Here’s a thought that just occurred to me - I’ll throw it out there to see what you think.  I just got back from work - I had a short 3-hour day before I came back home with an unusual amount of free time with which to do homework before I have to get ready to go to class tonight. (That is, about 2 1/2 hours)  Well, here I am, blogging, trying to get caught up from all of those days when I finished work with no time left to take care of school work (this honestly seems like every working day) and I’m reflecting on how easy I actually have it.  By this I mean to say that, while my job is by no means always easy mentally or physically, I can survive with my one job.  An 8- or 10- hour day may for me, four to six days a week assures that I won’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from or how I will make rent this month.  I have never in my life had to take a night shift job to supplement my income from my day shift employment.  I am extremely lucky.  So I sit here and remember a conversation we had a few months ago about educators who judge some of their students’ parents who don’t seem very involved in their children’s academic lives.  Why?  Because they don’t show up to things like parent-teacher conferences.  But while I might otherwise have been one of those educators out of ignorance, I know that I will never be one now.  How could I, who finds it so hard to find time to do my own schoolwork right now, while working no more than 50 hours a week and taking only two classes, ever be so arrogant as to pass judgement on parents, most of whom are doing the very best they can - some of which will be working 12-hour days or even as many as 16 hours, to make ends meet.  I guarantee you my school production would be seriously inhibited under these circumstances, and if I had children, I can’t imagine that I’d be able to make it to rigidly- timed conferences during work hours or immediately after.  (We’ll leave out for the moment some of the other issues mentioned in class about lack of transportation et. al.)  Maybe knowing some of these hardships, I can now try to take steps to try to involve parents who would like to know how their children are doing, but cannot adjust to my school’s schedule.  Sometimes I feel like half our job as urban educators will simply be thinking creatively outside the box.

The Pedegogy of Procrastination

Greetings, fellow future-teacher procrastinators!  So I was just here reflecting about how, like the good college student that I was, and now the good grad student that I am, I have picked up and perfected the art of “putting off for tomorrow what should be done today,” of squeezing every last second out of a loose deadline, so long as I got the work in before an automatic F would result from turning it in later.  I then started thinking about how, going into teaching, at least in my experience, not much will change.  Come on, we can all remember teachers we’ve had throughout the years who put off deadlines, handed assignments and other materials late, and took 2 extra weeks getting those tests and papers back to us (for some of us, this was torture, for others, a blessing in disguise).  So relax, sit back, and keep procrastinating, because our fellow teachers 2 years from now will be doing the same things, right?  Well, maybe.  But something about this seems wrong to me.  How will we, as educators, expect homework to be turned in, papers to be written, projects to be presented and exams to be studied for in a timely manner, if we ourselves aren’t performing our educational administrative duties in a timely manner?  If there’s one thing I know about kids, it’s that they can absolutely smell hypocrisy from a mile away.  “Do as I say, not as I do” never works well for anyone, let alone young students.  So I propose we (or maybe just me, if I am honestly the only one) get our acts together, and start training to lead by example in the punctuality department.  I think this might just be one of our most important demonstrative jobs as educators.

To Ramble or Not to Ramble (honestly, tell me, I can't tell)

So yeah, I just read the the NJ Real Cost of Living Index (NJRCL).  Forgive me, but somehow I didn’t make it to the endnotes - oops.  But that was fun, in a really sobering, unfun sort of way.  And as I was keeping this in mind, while reflecting on some of the poor and working class families from Annette Lareau’s book “Unequal Childhoods,” I think it might have hit me a little more just the sheer impact that poverty has on people, and families in particular.  I mean, honestly, the closest i’ve ever come to poverty is a couple year stretch when my brother and I were living with our dad in a small apartment, and sometimes no idea where the money was going to come from for rent or food.  But even so, I don’t think we ever approached even as low as 200-300% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL), which, by the way, if you’d like my opinion, and that of any other intelligent being on the planet, needs to be scrapped, and now.  Honestly, when you have state government agencies in New Jersey (such as WIC (Women, Infants, and Children), Food Stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program), the list goes on) defining who can participate in these poverty-assistance programs based on multiples of the FPL - 200, 300, even 350% FPL, I think that it’s time that maybe the Federal Poverty Level could MAYBE be updated to, oh, I don’t know, actually reflect the level below which a person can be considered to be living in poverty in this country.  As it is, I think it maybe might be accurate to measure the poverty level of like Somolia or some other third-world country.

But I digress.  So I was trying to think of families encountered in Lareau’s book that were either working class or in poverty - the families of Tyrec Taylor, Katie Brindle, Harold McAllister, Wendy Driver, and Billy Yanelli.  And so while I was reading the book, for the most part, I was able to maintain a sense of clinical detachment.  Not to say that I didn’t sympathize with the plight of some of these families, but I must admit that sometimes, I am just dense, and it takes a while for things to fully sink in.  When I then perused (ok, so I perused the charts - skimmed was more what I did with some of the redundant text) the NJRCL, however, it sorta clicked for me.  Especially when I consider the single-parent (or at least adult) families (the Taylors & Brindles) that we have read about, I can only imagine how they could manage to skimp by in a place like Essex county, New Jersey, where with only 2 children, an annual income of about $40,000 is needed just to reach self-sufficiency status.  The Taylor household includes three children.  These families are not bringing in anywhere near that number with a single parent supporting the family.  Granted, there is some semblance of child support for these families, but still, there is absolutely no way for families such as these to survive without public support in the regions around us.  Indeed, many of these families are, as the NJRCL points out, living at a mere fraction of a self-sufficiency wage.  Those poor and working class families with two working adults are obviously going to be better off, but then they run the risk, as in the Driver household, of no longer qualifying for public assistance despite not earning quite enough for self-sufficiency.  The NJRCL actually points out that at a certain income level, a family actually makes less of the fraction of a living wage than does a family with less income coming in.  This is due to the fact that many public assistance programs have a distinct cutoff point, where assistance simply stops.  This is, of course, retarded.

This leads me to LSNJ's reports Not Enough to Live On and A Desperate and Widening Divide, the latter of which suggests that these public assistance programs are very harmful in that respect, and instead should be such that these benefits are provided in a tapering off manner, such that assistance decreases, but does not completely drop off a cliff as family income rises.  This makes good sense to me, because, if you think about it, with the current system, what incentive is there for adult workers making the top amount possible to still be eligible for state and federal assistance to try to move up the pay scale only to be actually hurt for making an extra dollar an hour?  Not Enough to Live On also points out that inequality and discrimination in employment is still alive and well.  Specifically, for our families from Lareau who are headed by single women (that is, Taylor & Brindle again) would be even further hurt economically than would their single father counterparts. (for those of you wondering if such a thing actually exists, I assure you that there are single fathers raising children alone - they are just few and far between)  So these women tend to make less money for doing the same jobs simply because of their gender.  Likewise, minorities also make less than their white counterparts.  If this is news to anyone, I applaud you for having found a rock that large to hide under all these years.  But my point is that this double-standard is just one more thing to make the lives of working class and poor families that much harder.  Furthermore, for the whole of our lower income families from Lareau, looking at the Widening Divide report, had these families had the misfortune to live in Essex County, NJ, they’d be even worse off, because about half - that’s 50% - of those living in poverty in NJ are living in extreme poverty.  So the moral of the story I guess is that if you’re going to be poor, don’t be poor in New Jersey, with an extremely high cost of living and an incredible amount of severe poverty.

So bringing this all back home, what does this mean for me?  As a future urban educator, I know that a good portion of my future students will be coming from poorer families, and with New Jersey’s high cost of living, I think I’ll need to be cognizant of that fact.  I need to realize that, according to Lareau, many of these students will know full well that there are financial pressures at home, and so very likely they will be bringing some of these stresses with them into the classroom, whether this is obvious or not.  I need to keep in mind as I assign things that some of my students will be from families that struggle to buy groceries, so I need to make sure that I am not assigning things that require the students to buy supplies that they might not be able to afford.  And more than anything, I think that I will need to file these sort of economic issues away in my brain, and add them to my lens through which I see the school world.  This so that I will be able to effectively and sympathetically deal with those situations that I cannot even foresee at this moment.  Oh well, I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Is Entitlement Really Wrong?

So i'm not going to argue that it exists.  I'll assume that it does and work from there.  I'm referring, of course, to the sense of entitlement that Annette Lareau describes as being a part of "middle class" existence. (We'll leave out the part where she uses the term middle class loosely enough to include some obviously upper class families - unless someone can tell me how $200k household income can even possibly be considered to be average...)  Moving right along - this sense of entitlement is held by middle class working people and passed on to their kids as just another part of the child-rearing process.  It looks something like this: I exist, therefore i have the right to be listened to, i have the right to expect a good education, i have the right to challenge authority when i see fit - basically, i have the right to be catered to by society, and i have the right to be outraged when that doesn't happen.  So my question to you: is this a bad thing?  It sounds wrong, sure - maybe a little conceited.  But....i mean, what's the big deal?  I'm trying to wrap my head around this and i come up with the thought that, well, if it works, why change it.  I'm sure i'm showing my Suburban roots right now, because some of you might be saying that it doesn't work in the projects, it doesn't work in the hood.  Fair enough, i conceid that my experience does not allow me to speak to that point.  But it does work where i come from, and let me tell you - sometimes having that sort of attitude allows you to go a lot further than by just having what Lareau calls a "sense of constraint" exhibited by lower and working class inhabitants, characterized by more of a do-as-your-told, complain-about-yet-feel- powerless-to-change-things attitudes when it comes to big organizations.  Maybe having an i-can-do-anything attitude is a real positive thing, that can stem directly from an i-deserve-anything attitude.  I don't know, maybe i'm just trying to be contrarian.  Maybe what's really wrong with society is entitlement.  I shall ponder this further and let you know what i decide.

Urban Education: Hope or Despair

So hi, I'm a future high school teacher of America, and I already know that I will be teaching in an urban setting.  So naturally, that means that I have this great sense of hope for urban schools, that they are not so bad, that they do good things with bad circumstances, or that they can be changed for the better if only....something. (that something in my mind usually being good, caring, dedicated teachers continue to be present in ever-growing numbers)  And this is all true of me - usually.  But I must confess, I don't always think like that.  As a suburban white boy growing up in New York, and a particularly white part of New York at that, my experience with urban schools came from various tv depictions and the occassional movie - The Substitute and the like provided the negativity, Stand and Deliver & Dangerous Minds, etc for the positive side.  The sum of my personal experience with urban youth comes from a semester spent as a youth mentor of sorts in an urban middle school during my last semester of undergrad work in college.  The racial difference between my own public schools and this one were pronounced, but for me not a big deal at all.  I really could care less that eventually (and probably pretty soon, as Harold Hodgkinson points out in his article "Educational Demographics: What Every Educator Should Know") white students will be the minority in this country.  At the moment I am colorblind, which he suggests as a weakness, in deference to "cultural fairness" - I'll work on it.  Anyway, the kids were good enough in and of themselves, but there were also HUGE differences that made me, who was a good 10 years older than any of the eighth graders, a bit uncomfortable at times.  Allow me to relate one such topic of discomfort - well, you see, call me old-fashioned or just plain ign'ant, but i really didn't expect to be conversing with eighth graders - 13 year olds, mind you, about their sex lives, and certainly about their SEVERAL (if not many) exploits.  Granted, I understand that peer pressure being what it is, some of what I heard was probably just for show, but based on private heartfelt conversations I had with my mentee, I know that all of it wasn't, and in particular, I am convinced that one of his friends was having weekly orgy parties.  My mentee saw nothing unusual about the fact that his mother had told him at the age of 12 that she didn't care that he had sex, she just didn't want any grandkids.  Some of these things are foreign concepts to me - even the raciest of comments in my middle school didn't approach this level of... I don't even know what.

So, what is my point in saying all this??  Well, to be quite honest, sometimes when i think about some of the problems that urban schools have to deal with at least to more of an extent than suburban ones, I just feel like the whole thing is hopeless and that there's nothing I can possibly do except to try to make a positive difference, knowing that in the process I will utterly fail and burn out will soon follow.  Luckily, I only feel this way sometimes.  Then there are articles such as "The Promise of Urban Schools" by the Senior Fellows in Urban Education, who address some of the urban schooling issues with hope and determined optimism. (Despite the fact that they refuse to write a single sentence without breaking out their thesauri - honestly, there are perfectly good words that mean the same thing with fewer than 17 syllables...gosh, and don't even get me talking about the word pedagogy - it's so obnoxious....)  But I digress.  In this particular piece, they outline some very good broad aspects of good urban education such as allowing both students and teachers to examine teaching and knowledge critically, which encourages thinking and also makes knowledge gaining a deeply personal and therefor profound experience.  They also discuss social justice and an "opportunity to learn" standard of education that should really be focused on more than it is.  Overall, while a bit abstract, it certainly was encouraging in an "all-is-not-lost" sort of way.  To be honest, this is the way I prefer to think about urban schools, and urban teaching.  Despair is for sissies.  Look, I know it's going to be hard - I know it'll be harder than I can imagine, and there will be student issues that arise that I, as a guy who comes from a very blessed and very rich background, couldn't even begin to anticipate, but that's where creativity and sympathy (if not empathy) comes in.  That's where my perseverance gets to play its part, and where my deep belief in true hope for every student will be tested through the fire - and hopefully I'll live up to the challenge, and be what these kids need from me - in the end, that will be the rubric I will use for myself as a teacher.

-Rufus