How School Taught Me I Was Poor
Third grade was a bad year. Third grade was the year I
learned in school that I was poor.
by Jeff Sapp,
with professional development questions by Sonia Nieto
"You're poor, white trash," Danny hissed as he sashayed
by me on the dusty, pebble-filled playground at first recess. I started to cry,
and I remember that Phillip laughed and said, "He's crying like someone
just threw dirt in his eyes." And that's exactly what it felt like, being
told you're poor without being ready for it. I had no idea — absolutely no
inkling whatsoever — that I'd spent the last eight years in poverty.
I grew up in
THE "VORCE"
I remember in elementary school when Ricky walked passed me in the hallway and
hissed, "My mom says you're divorced and you don't have a father and that
you're poor, white trash." I didn't know what "the vorce" was, but it sounded bad to me.
You learn in fourth grade
Because of Ricky, I felt self-conscious about doing the family
tree assignment. Everyone else's tree had beautiful, perfectly symmetrical
limbs on it, a father limb and a mother limb. My fatherless tree only had a
mother limb on one side and it looked like those pine trees on top of
It wasn't until I got to seventh grade and had to take shop class
that I realized how important it was to have the prerequisite of a father. What
did I know of hammers and tools and woodworking? I grew timid and unsure of
myself in shop class. I made the smallest project you could choose, a little
kitchen matchbook holder. No sturdy shelves or benches for me. I still have it
to this very day, wrapped in my first-grade elf costume and tucked away in a
box full of memories of school and being poor.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
It seemed fun at first. We were all given the same
materials to make our Valentine's bags. White bags, pink and
red hearts, ribbons and streamers and, of course, the elementary staple,
glitter. After the giant globs of Elmer's Glue dried, all of the bags
looked pretty similar. I felt good about this holiday.
Mom bought me a pack of Valentines and I carefully read each one
to be sure that it went exactly to the right person. But the next day at school
the joy became pain when I saw the beautiful cards and candies that some of the
other classmates brought. It made me feel like Charlie Brown. Somehow everyone
else knows you're poor. How is that? You feel so different, alone, ashamed and
at a total loss of what to do about this "lack of."
Christmas was no better. I knew that our teacher would open her
gifts in front of everyone. How could my hand drawn picture of a snowman hold
up against
At Halloween I wore overalls and a red plaid shirt with hay coming
out of my shirt. A lifeless scarecrow of a child, I was no match for the
beautiful costumes purchased at local stores.
Over and over and over again, holidays seemed an endless
curriculum review of how I couldn't afford what the other children brought to
school. My worst school holiday memory by far, though, was Easter.
THE NOBEL PEACE EGG
"We're going to have an Easter egg decorating contest," declared my
teacher. "They'll be prizes awarded for the best decorated egg." Only
a third grader would think this the equivalent of The Nobel Peace Prize. I
begged my mother for the 99-cent Easter egg coloring materials. I pulled a
stool up to the stove and watched patiently as my egg boiled. You've got to be hardboiled
to win The Nobel Peace Prize.
I carefully studied my color options. It seemed to me that red,
white and blue were my best choices. Like the flag, patriotic. I mixed the
colors myself and then I measured and penciled two lines that split my egg into
thirds. I held the first third of the egg in the red dye with the little copper
wire holder myself for what seemed like hours. Next, I
held it until it dried. Then I turned the egg upside down and held a third of
it in blue dye. This took an entire evening.
My egg was spectacular and I was thrilled to carry it proudly into
school the next day. And that's when I saw the other eggs. Danny's egg was
dressed exactly like Abraham Lincoln. It had a top hat and a black jacket with
a white shirt and stiff paper collar. Its face was painted like a china doll
and it had real hair that had been liberated from a curly-haired sister for a
beard and moustache. It had its own little stand. It looked presidential.
I could feel my panic rising. Maybe I had misunderstood the assignment.
Even my third-grade mind could tell that parents had helped this
SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHS
The older you get, the worse it is. In high school the
Pences drove a beautiful little yellow Volkswagen to
school. They passed me as I walked to school. Both ways.
Going and coming. The teenage years are about the right clothes and fitting in
and I had hand-me-downs and felt awkward.
I remember wearing my older brother David's suit for my senior pictures.
It hung on me like a droopy Halloween king-sized ghost sheet. It was obvious
that it was a borrowed suit of clothing. The shirt collar hung around my neck
like a necklace. I felt like a seven-year-old, playing dress-up in the attic
with a box of clothes that had been my Dad's.
Even in the classroom, I couldn't get away from the sting of
high-school poverty. In History when we learned about the Great Depression and
the Dust Bowl, a rich student named David started calling me "Dust
Bowl" as a nickname. High school algebra taught me that some people are
"greater than" and others are "less than."
I didn't have the cultural capital to know where to take a date
for dinner before the senior prom. The only restaurant I'd ever been to was
McDonald's. In my small town, The Point of View was the fancy restaurant to go
to for senior prom. Up on a hill, it overlooked the Ohio River and historical
MORE IS CAUGHT THAN TAUGHT
Imagine my surprise one day to be standing in front of a classroom of students
as their teacher, returning to the scene of the crime. Over and over and over
again in school I had been cued both verbally and non-verbally that I was poor.
I wasn't good enough, I didn't have enough and what I had was the wrong thing.
School projects, holidays, extracurricular activities and field trips would
send a surge of panic through our house because they were yet another expense.
There are other curricula besides the one being verbalized. There
are the ones in the hallways with snide remarks from peers, on the playground
with put-downs learned from parents and in the celebration of holidays at
school that can completely panic a happy family. More is caught than is taught.
Making Students Feel Welcome
Professional development questions
by Sonia Nieto
Jeff Sapp's story reminds us that all children do not experience school in
the same way. Their social class (in the case described in this article), as
well as their race, gender, family make-up and other social differences
influence how they perceive school and may leave a negative and indelible mark
on their memories of school, not to mention their engagement with learning. The
following questions ask you to consider how, working both individually and
collaboratively with others, you can mitigate these differences.
Teaching Tolerance magazine
Number
35, Spring 2009