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Life And Education In Alex Kotlowitz's In There Are No Children Here

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The life and education of poor children in Alex Kotlowitz's book is mostly different from what I have experienced. However, that is not to say that I do not see similarities between Pharaoh and Lafayette's experience with education and my own. I attended school for about eight years in Nepal. Although my parents are not extremely wealthy, they could afford to send me to a school where English was taught side by side with Nepali while many others attended public schools which did not teach English until the fourth grade. To add onto my privilege, my mother's uncle owned the school. I did not have to fear corporal punishment and suspension. More than that, I had more freedom than all of my peers. The freedom that I got directly contributed my …show more content…

They attend a public school that fails to provide grief counseling and proper instruction which I believed to be normal in schools in America. Ignoring the problem of violence that plagues Horner, the causes for dropping out of school mirror those of Nepal, a third world country. According to the study Primary School Repetition and Dropout in Nepal: A search for Solutions published by the USAID Project some of the causes are high student to teacher ratio, lack of facilities, children supporting households, parents not being able to support school or child's learning, etc. In the book, Ms. Barron has to educate thirty four children by herself with extremely limited resources. Kotlowitz uses imagery to show the longing for education the children feel when she comes back to work after a strike. The students "fluttered around her like baby robins angling for a worm". He uses diction to describe the school itself is described as "unimposing" and "more utilitarian than esthetic". Kotlowitz writes that the school board actively discouraged parental involvement but not listing the school's phone number on a phonebook. LaJoe is so overwhelmed taking care of the triplets that she has no time to supervise Lafayette and Pharaoh's education. Lafayette has to step up to the plate every time there is need for a dependable adult in their life because there is no one else, which jeopardizes his education tremendously by causing him to miss

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Melinda ignoring school and the problems that come with it mirrors her internal struggles of acknowledging her trauma. One of the times Melinda is skipping school, she decides to go to the hospital. She goes to the maternity ward where the nurses query about her life, but decides she doesn’t like it because “If I wanted people to ask me questions, I would have gone to school” (Anderson 112). Many people ask Melinda questions: her parents, her peers, her teachers. At school it’s usually about school issues, however at the hospital it’s about Melinda and her life.

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Now we are able to go to school without the worries that something might happen to us.

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How could impoverished city residents not having proper access to resources in their communities and school systems impact children and even teachers in school? In the novel, There Are No Children Here, the author, Alex Kotlowitz, retells stories of the residents of Henry Horner public housing who are shown to have inadequate support from the Chicago Public School System and community around them. Considering that these students and teachers did not have enough support from the school and community, it’s evident that the Chicago Public School System could not effectively meet their needs. It’s clear that the Chicago Public Schools system is severely underfunded. A great example of this is a situation in which Pharoah and Lafayette’s elementary

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Breger brings up the fact that one of the factors that affect student achievement is attendance(210). As presented before, families living in poverty have busy irregular schedules making it more difficult to attend school and school-related events on a regular basis. As a consequence of students needing to financially support themselves and their families, schooling will need to come second. School counselors need to address this topic in the school system and with the teachers. Many of the staff don’t understand the struggle of living in poverty and think that these students are not going to school just to ditch.

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“... we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing and us sitting there for four or more hours…”(Bradbury 27). They have classes such as, TV class, sports, transcription history, and than more sports. The schools are very nonsocial and run the kids out so much they only have energy left for sleep or bullying others. “They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around…” (Bradbury 27).

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There was a great deal of balance in this school. Then Mr. Clark had quit and the whole school and everyone in it went downhill. A lot of the students within the school were dealing drugs as well as doing drugs, and a lot of people within the school have also started forgetting about their education and saw school as merely a place to

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Unequal Childhoods is an ethnography outlining the study done by Annette Lareau which researched how socioeconomic classes impact parenting among both white and African American families. She used both participant observation and interviewing. 12 families participated in this study where she came to conclusions on whether they displayed parenting styles of concerted cultivation or natural growth based of their socioeconomic status. Concerted cultivation is a parenting style where the parent(s) are fully invested in creating as much opportunity for their child as possible, but results in a child with a sense of entitlement. An example of this would be a parent who places their children in a wide array of extracurricular activities and/or actively speaks to educators about the accommodations their child needs to effectively learn.

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This is an example of the lack of transportation for young adults to their school, but we can also see their willingness to go to school by walking in an unsafe environment. Schools seem to be far from the colonias. Students have to walk long distances in order to get to their school, a male of age 14 was interviewed by Chahin who told him “A bridge that goes over the arroyo would be ice so that when it rains, cars can drive over it instead of through it.” We can see here that sometimes school buses or other kind of transportation cannot make it to the colonias due to the infrastructure of the roads. Yet, even though the transportation is bad most of the kids seek a refuge in their own school, they forget about their colonia problems and poverty in school (“The Forgotten

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Greenfield's use of word choice make the writing come alive by using words to make you feel the way the author is expressing himself. According to Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir, "They were all filling out applications, hoping to be one of the 274 families chosen. " This shows the author gave a big number of families to try to make the readers feel they have a chance to win anything. The author also makes this writing come to life by his word choice by striving for what you want. Childtimes: A Three-Generation Memoir also states, " She and her husband also applied for a place in the new project, and during the months that it was being bult, Lillie and Mama would sometimes walk fifteen blocks just to stand and watch the workmen digging

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Occasionally, there would be days as no one is around at home to wake the children up for school, the children will also miss attending school a few times in a month. The frequency of missing school in a month had resulted in poor attendance rate, not able to catch up with school work and not able to understand what the teachers are saying in

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