Educational Issue Reflection: Poverty

I really loved team two’s presentation on poverty, for a lot of different reasons. I learned so much from their presentation and thought that it was an extremely informative and insightful look at poverty and how poverty affects students. Through the different activities that we did, we got to know, even if it was only for a couple minutes, what it was like to live on a poverty budget and what kind of sacrifices people who live in poverty make. This was a really fascinating activity and I feel like through that activity alone, I learned more about living in poverty than I ever had before. I also really enjoyed the speed dating activity, while learning about different possible solutions to problems is really interesting, getting to talk with our classmates and get different kind of ideas and insights from others about the topic was really interesting, and gave me even further insight into this issue. One of the major things I took away from this presentation was how much stress students living in poverty are living under, a lot of them don’t know whether or not they’ll have power that night when they go home, or have enough food, we as teachers, can never be too sure of what our students go through outside the classroom. This is why, as teachers it’s important to make our classroom a safe place where students can escape the stress of the outside world, even if it is only for a couple of hours.