Going to School Poor
So I’m browsing Facebook, as one does on a Sunday night when they have nothing else to do (read: when I have no more spoons to do anything), and I see that my cousin’s girlfriend has shared an a blog post from the website Teachers Pay Teachers. His girlfriend is a teacher, so this only makes sense. The article (linked here for your convenience) is only two paragraphs long, and in two paragraphs I’m frustrated and a little upset.
If you read the article, you will see that it talks about one teacher’s solution to ‘forgotten pencils’, and encourages other teachers to use it because her middle schoolers seem to enjoy her solution.
This solution is to have the teachers buy a pack of their own pencils and then trick (because really, that’s what this is) the child who forgot (or something else, but I’ll get to that in a minute) into thinking that they’re getting the new pencil, but instead give that pencil to someone else and then pass on that person’s ratty pencil to the child who forgot.
Or, in my case and many other children's cases, couldn’t afford to bring.
The solution isn’t really a solution, it’s a punishment, and kind of cruel. More often than not, I found that when I was a kid, the children who said that they had forgotten their pencil, pen, ruler, eraser or even calculator were saying they forgot it because they couldn’t afford to replace the one they had lost, broken or had stolen and didn’t want to go through the embarrassment of saying just that: that they were poor and couldn’t afford even the most basic of school necessities.
She talks about how she used to fuss at the children for forgetting, but this solution made it easier. Neither thing is good. It’s still embarrassing for the child, and it’s rewarding another child for… well, nothing. They get a new pencil (no wonder her middle schoolers are on board — free stuff!)! The Poor Kid (likely, there are obviously other cases) gets a ratty, used, worn-down pencil that probably has bite marks in it and who knows what kind of hand-germs all over it, just because they forgot/couldn’t bring one. Not to mention the fact that the other child is giving away a perfectly good pencil (one hopes, unless it’s worn down to the nub) that their parents or guardians actually spent money on.
We tend to forget one thing when it comes to children, and it’s that they’re not fully developed. Especially not in middle school, when most are just barely hitting puberty. They’re going to lie and cover up their embarrassments because it would be easier than outright saying, “I couldn’t/can’t afford to buy a new pencil.”
They think that they would get into trouble for this, and I wouldn’t blame them: the reactions I got for being poor when I was a child were absolutely horrendous. In high school, I got new uniforms once, not including my Year 12 jersey and my Letterman jacket. In primary school, I had the same sports shirt for almost the entire 7 years I was in school, barring, of course, when I had to change sizes because I was no longer six years old. It wasn’t until year 6 that my mother finally caved and bought myself and my brother new shirts and the only reason we got them was because our old ones were faded and had holes. Other kids made fun of me for it. Parents, even teachers, looked down on me because I couldn’t afford to get the new, shiny uniforms. Kids around me who couldn’t get new supplies were called out/yelled at in front of the class because they never had them — because they ‘forgot’. Because the teachers were frustrated that they had to keep giving out pencils or sharpeners.
They never spared a thought for the child. They just said that it’s “their — the child’s — responsibility”.
And I wouldn’t be the first person to say that this sort of reaction is what leads children to have self-esteem issues, and to hide the fact that they’re having problems.
Because no one stopped to asked the child who kept repeatedly forgetting their pencil if they were forgetting, or if something else was wrong.
Because no one ever does.
