Teaching childrenin poverty

Her hair was always frazzled. Her little face always smudged. She alternated between a dingy white T-shirt and a pink and yellow striped one. One pair of shoes.

I remember Kierra to be uncomfortably quiet. She seemed always frightened, with a fixed look of fear on her face. I can picture her clearly in my mind’s eye.

I had little Kierra in my first grade class almost 20 years ago during my first year of teaching. I had no idea she would leave such an impact on me professionally, but she has.

I was so young then — such an immature teacher right out of teacher school. Nowhere in my courseload was I taught how to deal with the challenges of teaching kids coming to my classroom from their real lives, with their very real problems. But I’m quite sure no textbook could teach you how to deal with a Kierra.

She made me squirm in discomfort, if truth be told. Her timidity overwhelmed me, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why a first grader would never ever smile. She perplexed me, which made me uncomfortable.

Then, Kierra just vanished.

No dingy white T-shirt. No smudged face. No tousled hair. She just disappeared.

After several days I finally went to the front office in search of answers, and I was referred to the school nurse.

Kierra had been sent home with lice.

I’ll be honest. I was taken aback. Again, nowhere in my teacher prep classes was I taught how to deal with lice. Only months before I had to deal with ringworm on my forearm, so this lice thing was sending me over the edge. My immature professionalism revolted.

I walked out of the clinic itchy and squirmy, but thankful, at least, that the situation was caught and being handled.

I went about my business. Kierra’s absence spilled into the following week, then the next. Finally I made another visit to the nurse.

That’s when I received a real education.

Nurse Knox asked me what I knew about lice. I knew nothing. “What do you know about real poverty?” she asked. Again, I knew nothing. So, I was given a hard lesson in both.

Kierra lived in a single-wide trailer with occasional electricity and water, a leaky roof, holes in the floor, and seven other people vying for food, clothing, warmth and everything else. Kierra was the smallest, the weakest in this survival of the fittest home life.

Lice becomes an infestation in an environment such as Kierra’s home. According to Nurse Knox, in such desolate conditions everything needed washing and fumigating. That just wasn’t going to happen for little Kierra. The little girl tried on three separate occasions to return to school but was turned away for the same problem.

She was gone for almost two months.

I was changed for an entire career.

See, often it’s not about tests and data and curriculum for teachers. Sometimes it’s more about meeting basic human needs first and foremost. How can teachers even begin to teach a little girl to add and subtract when she gets the scraps from the table because she’s the smallest? Or misses school because her parents can’t afford to rid the single-wide of an infestation the majority of us know nothing about? For Kierra, performing on a standardized test means nothing.

Teachers don’t learn how to deal with these issues while we’re pursing our education degrees. We may read a book on teaching kids in poverty or attend a lecture from a recognized expert. We have roundtable discussions with professors who try to make us aware. But our best education is out in the field. We learn as we go. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t, but every time we do the very best we can.

So maybe cut us some slack. As you watch society around you seem to slip into chaos or slide into economic devastation, imagine trying to teach kids these days how to find the area of a rectangle or the importance of subject-verb agreement. It’s a difficult job, and only a handful of us are willing to do it.

As for Kierra, I hope she made it out of the single-wide. I pray her belly is full, her closet is full, and her hair is clean.

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 6:11 PM with the headline "Teaching childrenin poverty."