How much do students know?
By Nadine Dolby (Purdue)
I decided to call the panel “Listening to Parents.” As I began the organizing process last November, I was sure that “parents” was the important word in the title. After more than 20 years in teacher education, I had become frustrated and saddened by the attitudes of our undergraduate students toward parents. Although they were only 19- or 20-year-old freshmen or sophomores, our undergraduates already felt that they knew more about children and learning than the parents of their prospective students. They saw parents as annoying obstacles who contributed little to nothing to their children’s education.
As a teacher educator who focuses on multicultural issues, I also realized that the attitudes of our mostly white, female, Christian middle-class students toward parents from backgrounds different from their own was even more troubling. Continue reading “There’s No Learning When Nobody’s Listening”
Ten years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book called Nickel and Dimed. She brought home in stark detail how hard it is for a family to break out of poverty. I recall one story about something as common as gathering the funds needed to put down a security deposit on an apartment while working a minimum wage job. First month, last month and a deposit on a $500 a month apartment while taking home $5 an hour. Do the math. One would have to save every cent you earned for 300 hours of work — seven and one-half weeks of work — to accumulate sufficient funds. Let’s go crazy and suggest your job is paying you twice that rate. It would take only a month of work while you spent absolutely no money on food, clothes or rent. Hallelujah. God forbid any one in your family needs health care, which your employer does not provide. I think Nickel and Dimed is in something like its tenth printing. It’s not a long book and it’s absolutely worth the read. 
My husband’s theory is that if he does not have money in his pocket, he can’t spend it. My counter theory is that if I don’t have money in my pocket, I have to make more frequent trips to the cash station. After checking our account balance and in deference to my husband’s cheapskate attitude (or frugality as he prefers to call it) I withdrew only one crisp $20 bill on a recent trip to the cash station. I knew that was all I needed for the next few days, as long as I didn’t do anything too indulgent—like give in to a desire for obscenely overpriced coffee drinks for instance. 
Questions for Colleges 