The Educator's Obligation to Understand Student Familial Situations

We'll call these two students Martina and Andrea. They live in an apartment close to East Lake Street in the most violent zone of South Minneapolis. Their mother is single, their fathers are different, and both of the latter have never been around as Martina and Andrea have grown from young children into their middle school years. Martina is a thirteen year-old Grade 7 student. Andrea is eleven years old and in Grade 5.

The mother, whom we'll call Melinda, of Martina and Andrea is highly intelligent but ill-educated and stuck in a menial part-time job. Melinda is very articulate in conversation and desperately wants a better life for her daughters. Melinda is very supportive of my efforts on a week by week basis, listening carefully to my reports of the progress that Martina and Andrea have made during each weekly academic session that the girls have as students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. But I have had a harder time than in some cases getting the message through to Melinda that my commitment to my students is enduring, and that my goals for Martina and Andrea range far beyond merely helping them to get acceptable grades in school. Every once in a while Melinda will indicate that with the girls' academic performance rising in school, their need for tutoring has abated. Each time I have successfully countered with the vision of collegiate success that I have for my students, urging her to look beyond acceptable grades in school toward the kind of success that students in the Initiative have with multi-year participation. Melinda seems genuinely touched by this expressed concern on my part and has thus far kept her children in the program for three academic years.

Melinda is also capable of erratic judgment in the ordinary affairs of life. She seemed to have come to the realization that two children were enough, especially without the commitment of a male presence. But 21 months ago she discovered that she was pregnant again; she gave birth about a year ago at this writing, so that the baby was born in spring 2010.

Martina and Andrea love their brother and are sweet in their interactions with him, but they resent the fact that their mother had another child at this stage in their lives. They do not always have proper food at the apartment, and while Martina manages to see that the girls do have decent clothes appropriate to the changing seasons of Minnesota, other material goods are in short supply. I once gave the girls a dollar each while I was visiting the family at their apartment when it became apparent that Melinda did not at the moment have enough change around to give her daughters money for a bus transfer.

Martina and Andrea have a familial life in which numerous family members show up to ask for temporary lodging, crowding them out of their own bedroom and onto the rundown living room couch or floor. Their erratic sleep patterns and the numerous interruptions and intrusions into their lives tend to leave the girls disgruntled and irritable when they pack themselves into my car for the ride to our weekly academic session.

I often spend fifteen minutes or so at the beginning of the given academic session working to get each of these two sisters into the proper mental framework to proceed to the next item in the academic sequence that I have designated for them. I communicate to them that I understand why they may be tired on a certain day, that I know they are working through various familial issues, and that their stomachs may be grumbling or upset because of their insubstantial diets. Granola bars and juice help with the latter problem, and my patience in hearing and attempting to understand their complaints eventually wins them over for the bulk of another two-hour session.

Accordingly, fractions, decimals, percentages, proportions, probabilities, and geometric formulas are learned and applied in mathematical operations; rich new vocabulary items are acquired and put to work in challenging reading selections. Martina has ascended to grade level perfromance in both math and reading during her three years of attendance in the Initiative. Andrea has struggled on through occasionally poor performance on report cards and teacher complaints that she does not always apply herself to achieve grade level performance in math and to manifest reading skill that is actually one grade level above that of school enrollment.

When it comes to properly serving the academic needs of the inner city child from impoverished and challenged home environments, the educator has an obligation to understand the student's familial situation. Patience and persistence become all the more necessary, and the vision for academic excellence should be held high. The teacher should listen to and express a proper degree of concern as excuses are made and resistance demonstratated. But the teacher must find a way to capture the student's attention, direct that attention to the academic task at hand, and keep the student moving through the necessary steps to master grade level academic material and beyond.

We can never accept the excuse from the educator's perspective that a student brings familial and social problems that are not of the teacher's making. It is a given that numerous inner city children face the many and varied problems associated with poverty and familial stress. But this is the student population that teachers in the inner city serve, so it is incumbent upon the educator to show genuine empathy and concern, to help the student work through prevailing problems, then to look beyond familial and community challlenges to the pursuit of academic success.

A teacher is only as successful as the achievement levels of the most challenged students in her or his classroom. Middle class children are relatively easy to educate. Poor children pose significant challenges. Only when we rise to the task of educating the latter do we offer an education worthy of a democracy.