The Great Unknown (or it is the great ignored?)

Stephanie Bradshaw

Blog 3

The Great Unknown (or is it the great ignored?)

            I listened to the Harper High School radio programs early in the week before heading to St. Louis to visit my oldest brother and his family.  What struck me when I was listening to the two program pieces was the incredible similarity between the hardships they described dealing with each and every day and what Jonathan Kozol writes about.  Both are inner-city, predominantly minority, extreme poverty, high crime settings.  The students who attend Harper High or live in the New York “projects” Kozol writes about are trying to survive every day.  They learn skills not taught in schools because they have to in order to live. 

            I consider myself to have led a very sheltered, lower-middle class life growing up in Houston, Texas.  We had a house, dad worked two jobs, mom stayed home with the kids and then worked some evening jobs or school hour jobs once we were in school.  Once we were in high school, we were expected to get a job if we wanted to have spending money or gas or insurance money to drive.  It wasn’t until I went to college in Philadelphia that my eyes were opened to the differences in cultures within our country.  I had to learn very quickly that there were many other religions, many other ways of life. 

            I became aware of the income disparities between different neighborhoods in Philadelphia as I started to live off-campus.  There were certain cross streets that I knew I shouldn’t go beyond if I wanted to stay safe.  I also observed different “tough” neighborhoods riding the city bus to one of my student teaching placements in an inner-city elementary school.  As the bus drove by boarded up houses, I thought at the time that it was sad that so many places were unlivable.  Yet there were still people around the neighborhood.  Now that my eyes have once again been opened, I realize that these are the types of neighborhoods that people DO still live in that have to probably face similar hardships the students of Harper High or in Kozol’s books face.

            What shocks me is that it seems so “hidden” from so much of society.  There are so many people struggling to have food to eat each day or a safe place to raise their kids away from drugs, gangs, and violence.  It is not just in the big cities that these hardships are faced, however.  Even in my own classroom I can identify at least two students last school year that came to school hungry, dirty, and usually very tired.  Their life at home was not the same life I grew up with.  Their priorities are not to get all A’s (4s now), behave appropriately so the teacher and other students will like them, and eventually go to the best college they can like my priorities were in elementary school.  They have so much stress in their everyday lives that they have to deal with that it precludes their learning.  To what extent, I don’t know, but it definitely has an impact on them. 

            The question I ask myself now is why has it taken me so long to become aware of how much of a problem this is in our country?  Is it truly something most people just don’t know about or is it something that is known but ignored?  We have humanity groups in our country that send money, food, health care services, etc. to places in other countries, Africa for example.  That is certainly an admirable thing to help others, but we have so many people right here in our own country who could use the same kind of assistance.  Harper High has been getting millions of dollars in help which sounds like it has been beneficial to a certain extent.  Kids are still getting shot and killed every year though.  Now that aid is going to end before the problems have truly been addressed.  We seem content to try putting Band-Aids on gushing wounds and then say, “We tried.”

There has to be a better way.