Payne

I won't pretend to have pored over Ruby Payne's "Framework for Understanding Poverty" with the level of detail that a meaningful review would require.  Times are tight, life is stressful, and I am an inherently weak and lazy person.  I will make my best effort and apologize in advane for the little that I am bringing to the table.

My initial response would be to complain that the book overgeneralizes about people in poverty, people in the middle class, and people with wealth, but thats essentially what sociology is: generalization.  Are there certain behaviors that appear significantly more often among poor people than among the middle class and the wealthy?  Yes. Is it still an oversimplification of any individual to use them as a case study to prove or disprove one of those larger trends?  Absolutely.  So, while I recognize some of the points that she makes about how poor children respond to certain things in comparison to more middle class children, I do not think that it would be fruitful to bring it back and apply it to the classroom.  Part of the challenge of teaching is to doggedly insist on seeing your students as unique individuals and not further instances of angry, poor children in a struggling school district.  I'm as soft and high-minded of a liberal as any one here, but as much as might want to or naturally try to apologize for and excuse the behavior of some of my students, its very easy at the end of the day to start to view them all as part of one big problem and respond to them as though they were all the same.  Now I'm sure with more attention to the book's findings I might have something of value to go back to class with to respond to some of those individuals, but I'm not interested in any catch-all "framework" for understanding poverty, when poverty is really, insofar as we are trying to understand it, a diverse group of people who are experiencing it.