Poverty Affects Student Education

Catrina Smith

COMM/215

August 4, 2010
Dr. Spann
Poverty Affects Student Education

What is poverty and how can we limit it in student’s educational success? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “more than 11 million kids in the US live below the poverty line and do not have the basic supplies that they need to succeed.” Students all around the world are faced with many problems in their life at some point or another. Teenagers, sometimes have the difficulty learning and adapting to certain situations. This can lead to the problem with poverty and the ways in which the students have struggling efforts in the progression towards his or her education. “People in poverty face challenges …show more content…

For example, if you do not understand how something relates to your goals, you will not care about that thing. In comparison, if an adult cannot see the relevance of the material covered in a meeting, and has no desire to score political points, he or she will tune out of the meeting. Which is the same as if a child does not understand how knowing the elements of a periodic table will help to address the concerns of his or her life for future references, and he or she is not particularly interested in pleasing the teacher; therefore, the student will also do the same by dropping out of the course. Because we do not want children to be motivated solely by a desire to please the teacher, what parents or the adults in the child’s life need to address is how to make the content of the curriculum fit into the concerns of the child. This will better the child’s ability to learn and possibly produce better scores from these students. Additionally, many of the students who attend high school have dealt with the problem of poverty. The high school that my daughter attends is made up of predominately African American students, who were in middle class or below the poverty line and were thrown into the school because most of the other higher standing schools did not accept these students based on the history of their educational level. Generally, students in poverty attend school each day, not particularly