Jack Canfield's Teaching With Poverty In Mind

“I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.” (brainyquote). Jack Canfield, an American author and award winning speaker, started his teaching career at an inner city school in Chicago where he discovered his claim to fame trying to find ways to motivate his students. Canfield isn’t the only person who has said that inner city students aren’t motivated, many teacher have to deal with this on a daily basis and they have to do it for the rest of their working lives because they have no other option. From poor graduation rates to constant exposure to violence inner city school students have a more difficult experience when it comes to their education. Students who attend

“Inner-city students, unlike private school or suburban peers, are given the task of filtering out the distractions and focusing on learning, when learning

Eric Jensen, author of Teaching with Poverty in Mind, focused one of the chapters of his book on how poverty affects behavior as well as academic performance. Jensen gives factors which create problems when it comes to social and academic success; these include emotional and social challenges, acute and chronic stressors, cognitive lags, and health and safety issues. Emotional problems begin when the children are young due to the lack affection toward the young child which then causes social problems in the child's future. Children raised in poverty are more likely to act-out, be impatient and impulsive, be rude, etc. Later in life these children are often absent in school, don’t have a large attention span, are less creative, few social skills, little motivation, and often depressed. Poverty is one of the major reasons that inner-city schools do so poorly because often times students lack the fundamental skills to be academically