A friend who is a community organizer in Charlotte, NC, twittered this article link to me. We as a cohort have discussed in various aspects of the MAT in ECED program how everyone in society plays a roll in developing a child. The article talks about how the recession is affecting children. The misfortune of parents' financial and job situations are putting children in positions that they may have never been exposed to before. The recession and all that correlates with it is another outside factor that can affect the classroom. If the home value of home life is decreasing because of these uncontrollable factors, how can a child focus on obtaining classroom knowledge?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/opinion/21herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
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2 comments:
I think that this is a great teaching time for children. We have to focus on the resilient factors that we have been reading about in psych class. All children will have to face adversity of some kind. We can take the stress of these financial times, stress the child's positive coping factors, and then plunge them forward toward the tasks of learning. These changes just bring new challenges for everyone.
I agree with Cindy that as teachers, we should use our time in the classroom with the children to encourage them as much as possible. Our classrooms should be havens for these children. Hopefully, teachers will be able to take the nervous energy that students and transform that energy to focus students on classroom activities.
But what happens when the children go home? What happens if they don't have a home to go to, or food to eat, or a doctor to visit? Anita is certainly correct in saying that such facotrs will indeed affect student performance.
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