shesus

I am a teacher in an inner-city school. I am obtaining my Master's and in order to graduate I have to complete an action research project (ARP). My topic is conflict in the school. At first I thought that it was home life and structure. However, as I conducted research, I stumbled across hidden rules for economic classes. I had read these before in undergrad, but had since forgotten them.
The main hidden rules I am fighting to solve the problem of conflict in my school is that violence is the only way to solve a problem and earn respect. I am wondering if anyone knows if hidden rules can be taught. Schools are based on middle class hidden rules. The thing about hidden rules is that they are not taught through words, but implied. Is it possible to live in generational poverty and follow middle class rules?

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roadkill

Yes, I believe that people can follow a middle class set of rules even if they are in extreme poverty. However the question is should they? And can the average person do so, in extreme circumstance? To those I feel that they shoulden't have to live up to someone elses rules they have rules from the government and from their social standings they need to follow, if they want to try to live to a higher/richer standard they can try but they shoulden't be foced to do that even if they can they shoulden't be forced into it. Also if the person can't live up to middle class standards then they be allowed to live above or below it.

irateplatypus

but it's kind of a chicken or egg question...

are these socially implied rules the result of poverty or a cause of its perpetuation? if you cannot rule out the latter i think it's your duty to effect change on the situation.

__________________
If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

zen_tom

I wouldn't be surprised if the hidden rules you are looking for come from 'home life and structure' - Which takes you back to your initial APR topic. Tricky one that.

shesus

That is what is so frustrating about being a teacher. I only have the students for nine months. I would like to think that I am making a difference, but it is hard to tell. I mean, I barely remember my teachers at all. Sometimes, it is depressing to think that these children could possibly stay in the situations they were born in. I guess I have a slight 'save the world' feeling. It just upsets me that they would rather beat someone up instead of talking it over and moving on. I see that the parents are having problems helping their child with long division and it kills me. They send in excuses for absences and can't even spell common words right. Then today, a parent said that her child already knows all she needs to know. The child is only in third grade. This is such a huge problem, that I don't know where to begin. Unfortunately, as you said it is a vicious circle, that probably does not have a solution.

__________________
Whatever did happen to your soul?
I heard you sold it

Choose Heaven for the weather and Hell for the company

zen_tom

I wish there was a way to solve these problems - I personally think that the way to do it is to artificially raise the standards of living by providing stimulation that is new, exciting and different - and most of all, free.

Kids in inner cities have it bad three times over, first, they are often from poorer, less educated families with a high incidence of drunkenness, violent behaviours etc. Second, they have nowhere to play except in the streets - which means that they rapidly merge with the adult world, and all the booze, drugs etc that that contains, and finally, they are sold flashy dreams on the TV where in exchange for cash they get to recieve a pair of trainers that will allow them to emulate their favorite sporting heros.

I think taking them out of the city somehow would help - I heard about some gardening projects where kids helped renovate a corner of an inner city street. They all could see the changes they made, and it sparked an interest in mayn of them.

But I don't know either - I'd be banging my head against the wall by now if I were in your situation - My Mum is in the same business, and all she can do is try her best - and try and make a difference. Every now and then, one of her children from years and years ago will send her a thankyou - and she says that even if she only ever helped one person, that would always make things worthwhile.

WillyPete

what I know of violence as a means of earning respect is that it's usually done by those wanting to earn the respect of the group they are with and not the person they have fought.

How about assigning tasks for class credit or reducing homework?
Set the tasks so that they encourage either independent action for higher points or even higher for points gained in association with a kid not doing so well in class.

The end reslut is that kids wanting higher grades will end up seeking out less capable/motivated students and helping them with small research tasks for their own selfish reasons.
Set a large and varied number of tasks that they can do, some with different levels of point assignments based on difficulty.
Points/number of students working on the problem = total personal points per task.
Throw in a rating of 1-4 (1 =hi, 4 =lo)where the kids are placed according to current task grade. Make it so that the more lo graded kids are in a task group, the higher their individual points will be. A Lower graded kid can also get more points than normal for higher graded tasks if they do them alone. encouraging independence and personal achievement.

The more frequently they do them, you'll notice that the kids that needed help will move up the 'ladder' and the top kids will make the obvious choice to work alongside those that have moved lower.

You'll be generating a kind of 'aid' economy where kids will tend to group to get ahead and reduce their class workload. If the emphasis is on assisting those lower down, then you will also build up a general class respect for those seeing and resolving the problems for the kids with grade troubles.
Everyone wins and it should help bond the students. They can also strike out and do tasks on their own, but the points are less than if they drag others into the task presentation.
It also encourages students to ask for help.

If it's voluntary, then students either have to do all the class work to get a good grade or supplement it with these tasks to make up that A.
If you make the points supplementary to any coursework, but not exceeding 1/3 of the semester's total, then kids can quite easily get full points for the course by helping lower graded kids.

Any thoughts?

roachboy

what grade level are you teaching?
what did you mean by the "hidden rules of economics classes" exactly?
what is the relation between these and the patterns for conflict that you then outline?
what makes you think that institutional spaces do not shape people's responses to what happens inside them? what enables you think think that you (or anyone) can simply able to map what you are talking about back onto family.
how do you start thinking about class divisions simply in terms of social rules that can be switched about, manipulated?
what enables you to imagine that you are not yourself in a strange position relative to what you are seeing/asking about? simply by virtue of being a teacher, endowed, whether you like it or not, with assumptions about authority? if you occupy a particular, highly circumscribed relation to what you are seeing, would that not entail that what you are seeing is partial, that a significant subset of the "rules" would be hidden from you?

i have been thinking about this kind of question quite a bit: let me know about the above and i'll see if what i have been thinking can be of any help to you.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Yakk

Willy, I'd've grabbed some low-achieving students for my group, and do the work myself, given that model.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

shesus

I teach a 4/5 split. I have 14 fourth graders and 11 fifth graders.

While conducting research I found a site http://homepages.wmich.edu/~ljohnson/Payne.pdf that explains how to teach people in poverty. Mainly, the driving force of people in generational poverty are entertainment, relationships, and survival. The vocabulary is low (400 - 500 words), so non-verbal assists are used to communicate (talk to the hand, pushing, punching, etc.).

I am assuming you are asking how this affects my job. Basically, I have difficulty teaching concepts because of the conflict. This is not always violent, but can escalate. The students will have outbursts that take attention away from instruction. At any given moment, I typically hear, "She said she was going to kick my butt!" -or- "Get him, before I hurt him!"

I am not saying that I am perfect, however, I place expectations on my students and they are better than most in the school. My class is often getting congratulated by the principal for how they act in the hall. However, my class is still having many problems. When I talk to other teachers, they say that it is the culture and nothing can be done about it. Therefore, I think that the school is fostering this behavior in a way. I have some parents who are involved and their children are typically the best. When asking about some of my worse behavior problems, I hear horror stories about physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Therefore, although it may not be all on the family, that is a huge factor to consider. Violence breeds violence. If the student is not seeing anything except unhealthy relationships, then that is what they will view as normal. Hence, the reason they say that they like me, but treat me with so much disrespect.

I am not going to quote the rest of your post, but I will address it. I do feel as if I am in another world when I go to work. I feel very out of place and I guess that is probably how they feel being forced to follow middle-class standards. I guess I could quit the fight, accept their culture, and work around it. However, it is very difficult. My job is to teach the students subjects and how to survive in the world. With the attitudes and beliefs that they hold, they are going to have difficulty surviving. They say that they will beat up a manager if they do not get a job when they get older. I can't even imagine thinking this. When someone accidently bumps into them, they are ready to bash their face in. These thoughts and actions are not going to benefit them in the future.

I think I rambled that last part and I apologize. I am getting so deep into this, that it seems I am never going to reach the bottom. I think *aha* that is it. Then something else comes into the light that seems to have more of an impact.

If you have any other thoughts, I would love to hear them. It always helps to get an outside view of things.

__________________
Whatever did happen to your soul?
I heard you sold it

Choose Heaven for the weather and Hell for the company

WillyPete

But could they have participated in a presentation and answered questions?
You sort out that loophole with the judging of the task results. Maybe even have the class judge it.

roachboy

ohh_shesus:
yikes, this is complex.
first i would seperate your recognition of the scope of these rules/socal games from your ability to impact on them--in other words i would try not to let your analytic observations twist themselves into normative ones: it is perhaps as important that you understand something of the social routines/patterns that you encounter in order to situate conflict as it is that you do something about it, particularly in the short term.

secondly: conflict seems a terribly difficult phenomenon to use as a point of access to these social norms because--well--how do you think about it exactly? for example: is conflict a breakdown in rules or is it as much hierarchy adjustment within them? is it inside or outside the game? or both? neither? how do you assign meanings to conflict?

third: i am interested in the generality in your characterization of (if you like--it is early and i cant think of a better way to say this) the input and output ends of this school/situation: "the family" "the culture" "the inner city" on one end--"the real world" on the other. within this seems to float a second ambiguity--whether you understand yourself as in a de facto sociologist role (which is not in itself a bad place to be) who is looking at this particular school as an analytic object (and who is finding that this object is not self-contained) or if you are in a position of something of a political militant, who is interested in a more general understanding of the situation with the idea of introducing change.

it seems to me that you are running into a rather brutal lesson in the effects of class stratification in the united states.
it seems to me that something in your programme encourages you to treat these effects as if they were a form of social deviance the causes for which can be traced back to misshapen rules (relative to what?) transmitted by broken families (relative to what)--a view that is perhaps not wrong in itself, but is certainly not adequate as either an understanding or as a point of departure for action---because the problem you may be hitting is how to look at class stratification as a process, and what evaluative criteria to bring to the matter--if you naturalize class stratification, then the situation you are encountering might look deviant: if you understand class stratification as a politics, and as a problem, then what you are seeing might be understood as adaptive in a strange way.

either way, welcome to the reality of social reproduction in america.
to maintain this particular type of hierarchical society, it seems necessary that a significant number of people be encouraged to neutralize themselves.
welcome to what hegemony means--you dont need direct physical domination if you can figure ways to encourage teh dominated to internalilze and act out/through their own domination.
and welcome to the world of ideology as it impacts on trying to understand what is going on around you--the exclusion of economic conditions, of the social correlates of these conditions as they unfold through the system of social reproduction is of a piece with the naturalization of the economic order.

what to do? first, i should tell you that i teach at the university level. and so here i cross the line between what i understand analytically and how i act politically myself--which is also a crossing of boundaries that might make what follows irrelevant for you--but an outline of my experience on this kind of question follows anyway:

well, for what its worth, i tend to see class stratification as the consequences of particular political choices. so my inclination would be to expose the process to the students, bit by bit, and hope by doing that to give them ways to situate how the are/what their options are etc.
here is the system of stratification
here is where this school fits into it
here are the kind of patterns of interaction i have been able to assemble through observation at this school
here is an idea of how i see the more general patterns
here is the outcome: you are in a system that works to normalize the trashing of possibilities for entire classes of people in the states--you are from a poor background, you are expendable--if you obey the social rules you encounter here, you internalize the assumption that you are expendable, redundant in the bigger (capitalist) scheme of things---at the limit, you reproduce the notion that your life if worth less than those of middle class kids by treating yourself and those around you as if their lives were worth less....you perform your own exclusion....something like this...because one conclusion i have come to is that i cannot necessarily change the entire system of social reproduction as a single teacher--but i can try to bring an idea of the situation to the students, presented in as calm and complete a manner as i can manage, in order to try to put them in a position to choose at least whether they are going to continue to perform themselves through sets of rules designed to keep them seperate and powerless.

dunno if this is helpful--like i said at the outset, this is a terribly complex cluster of questions you are bumping into.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

EULA

John Gatto is an interesting educational writer and wrote a book about the hidden curriculum in schools, but I can't remember specifically what it talked about. You can read a book he wrote about the history of schooling on his website. He spent about 30 years teaching, and spent most of his career in inner city schools.

Something related to poverty and education:
[forum]Over the last decade, a series of neuroscience breakthroughs and educational research findings have led to an entirely new understanding of how the human brain learns to read. Millions of dollars and thousands of research papers later, the most important thing we have learned is that the process of learning to read effects the cognitive and emotional development of children much more fundamentally than ever before imagined.[/quote]

chickentribs

First - these 13 posts exhibit what is extraordinary about the people on TFP. Thoughtful, philisophical and analytical (!) discussion driven by the chance we can help Shesus make a difference for even one of these kids. In my city too. Cool.

I grew up in an inner-city school system just like you mention Shesus. I lived in a neighborhood that the few dads still around were drinking beer watching us walk to school at 8am, yelling from the porches at us. (I was also the lone white kid on the street, so maybe it was just me that got shouted at? )

Are there hidden rules? I don't know that they are hidden, but there are definately a different set of rules they live with than suburban schools. When nobody has money, clothes, or a big house to develop cliques with, the only currecy they have is respect - and it gets traded around a lot. A lot of times the quick way to grab some is through fighting as I am sure you have seen with the grade level your teaching. But you also play with the game God gave you and the smaller kids get pretty good at puffing up the chest for a good show when they need to.

You can't change this. No matter what you say or do, after school they are left in that neighborhood, and that is just reality. What you can do is understand ego is important, especially when the child is a little slower than the rest. I would just reccommend trying to talk to them like adults, especially if you have to discipline them or tell them to do something embarrassing in front of others. When you most want to scold or talk down is when you shouldn't. They pick up on your respect showed quickly and you will develop credibility back, a bit anyway. (I know this is easier said than done.)

Also, if you keep a box of protien bars in your desk it may help the kids who are being especially moody. They may not have eaten for a day or two. Just give it to them on the sly and as a reward for something, anything. Don't ask them if they are hungry, just assume it. They would never admit to friends or you if that is the real problem. The ones complaining about being hungry you don't have to worry about!

Lastly, try to pick one kid each day to pull aside, not in front of the other students, and look him or her in the eye and compliment them on something legitimate. It doesn't have to be school related, but tie it back to them being smart. "Jeffrey, you sure know how to make people laugh in class - did you know that most comedians are very smart people? Oh yeah, you have to learn a lot so you can come up with lots of jokes. Chris Rock reads a lot because he can't tell the same stale joke every day!" It's not bullshitting them, because we are all smart, it's just that nobody's told most of them yet. Who knows, that little bit of confidence in themselves at that age, anything can happen... I graduated from a high school with 370 kids, some of them were the smartest, most personable people I have ever met. Only 6 of us went on to college.

Make a difference and thank you for the work you do and caring enough to post the question.

I would enjoy reading posts about your experiences this year sometime - I am sure it is a year you will never forget!

__________________
Oft expectation fails...
and most oft there Where most it promises
- Shakespeare, W.

pennywise121

Perhaps it is just me, but it would seem that we are collectively missing the heart of the problem, although chickentribs and roachboy are definitely seeing it, if not expressing it.

Inner city children will never obey middle class rules so long as they are in the inner-city. this is for one very simple reason: THEY ARE NOT MIDDLE CLASS.
This is not inherently a problem, however. If we are to look at proximate causes of their "misbehavior," we come up with nothing but the faults of their parents and blame the lifestyle. In order to truly UNDERSTAND this issue, we have to look at the structural injustices that have brought about the situation they live in.

For this next part, I am sure to be labeled a pinko-commie bastard or some such

Given that you are teaching in an inner-city school, it seems a safe assumption that there is a prevalence of minority students, particularly African American. What has trapped minorities in the inner city is primarily the moving on of the vast majority of the jobs. Those who could get out, did. What is left is what William Julius Wilson refers to as the "truly disadvantaged." when the jobs left, so did much of the positive influence on the children. Taking the viewpoint of Dahrendorf and his intersecting lines of conflict, these children have consistently gotten the shit end of the stick, and as a result need to have some form of control over their lives. we all want to be respected, and the middle class ideal of "he who dies with the most toys..." simply does not apply.

Sad to say, but ultimately nothing we do on a micro level will fix the situation for all of these children. Until we fix larger issues in our society, there will always be an underclass, and almost assuredly of minorities. There are two things we can do, however, to help individuals.
1. Stop trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. That is to say, let's not try to apply Mcwasp ideals in situations where they do not fit. some would say this is a lowering of expectations, but this is not the case; it is rather an alteration of viewpoint to include realistic expectations.
2. Roachboy's method of instruction can give better results in terms of will to succeed. by creating a non-confrontational line of conflict, the students may see each other as quite a bit more similar than previously thought. with respect gained based on helping the class and getting points, there may be less physical violence.

One thing is certain: no one ever said this is going to be easy, but i commend you for sticking with it and doing something that so many other teachers do not- caring.

sorry for the longwinded ramble, but there you go.... my two cents.