Understanding Poverty

I thought the book A Framework for Understanding Poverty was average. Some facts that Ruby Payne discussed in the book were true about my students. My students do take forever to get to the point of something and they really love to entertain. They do feel the need to communicate with each other, even when they are not supposed to be. I was a little frustrated with all of the statistics in the book. I felt her point without all of the overbearing numbers. Sometimes the numbers distracted me from the actual point she was making about the book. I learned different things like the parent voice. I’ve noticed that I have used that tone of voice with my students at some points in time. I feel that you have to use it when the time is necessary. My younger students respond very well to that voice, while my older, high school students, do not respond well to that voice.

There are some ideas that I liked from the book. I like Ruby’s behavior analysis idea so much that I modified my writing assignments to a behavior analysis. I feel that this method would best benefit my students better than my assignments. So far they have been a little receptive to my analysis. I hope that it really curbs behavior problems or at least gets them to think about their actions.