Links between strategies of ELL students and poverty students

This past Friday my school district had a professional development day where we were fortune enough to have an amazing speaker come and give a presentation on poverty based off of Dr. Ruby Payne's book on Poverty. What an eye opener this presentation was! Right off the bat she was showing us graphs on the high increase in multicultural students and pointed out the percentage of poverty for each race. One of the stresses she then made was that we as educators have to do something about the high poverty rates, especially in our Latino students who have the highest of all. While she did not just focus on one particular race throughout her presentation, I found myself connecting many points she was bringing up to multicultural students. I have always known that students who live in poverty to do have the same advantages than others, in more ways than just money, but I never realized before how judgemental I actually was towards these students without even purposely doing so. I am talking about even the simplest things of being hard on them for not getting assignments turned in and not even taking into account the fact that all they were trying to do once they got home was simply survive. They were living in the present because they did not see themselves as having a future so to them, homework meant nothing. For myself though, I could not see that before because I did not come from where they do. I never had to worry about if there was food on the table when I got home, or if I had to take care of siblings because I had a single parent who was out trying to work a double shift. Now what I, and all educators, must remember to do is help these students build a future for themselves. Help them see that there is more out there for them than just working flipping burgers for the rest of their life.

It was that thought that immediately made me think of what Dr. Eugene Garcia said in his DVD presentation. He stated that "we as teachers have the power to crush the kids or let them fly." Working with ELL students is really not much different at all. We as teachers have to be aware that we are not coming from the same background as these children. They have not had the same opportunities than we probably had, and their idea for a future might not be the same as what we see and home for them. In Garcia's 5R's and T he expressed the importance of being reasonable and being aware of the theories that drive us. We cannot expect students to come into our classrooms knowing our language as we know it without losing a step. We have to be reasonable and understand that we are going to have to work to help them and teach them! I can honestly say now that I am going to be paying a lot more attention to the judgements and assumptions that I hold toward my students and my future students and make a constant effort to remind myself that these students did not come from what I did.

Magan