I listened to the podcast BAM radio through the World Forum Foundation. The title of the podcast is The Challenges of Teaching Students in Poverty. Tom Whitby is the host and he was joined by Nancy Blair and Rafranz Davis. In the podcast they talked about the bias that people in poverty and how people think that people who are in poverty are responsible for being in poverty. The research that I have read this week, tells me that just isn’t true. Most people are just not making enough money to earn a living. Tom Whitby from the pod cast said that the average person working in the fast food industry is 34 years old and only making minimum wage. Rafranz Davis mentioned that children are not worried about their school work or seem uninterested in school because when they go home they are not getting enough sleep, they don’t know if they are gonna get enough to eat and their are afraid of their neighborhoods. This also means that the teachers are not understanding what children are going home to. It was also mentioned in the pod cast that a lot of high schoolers drop out of school to get jobs to help support their families.
I also researched through the Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre’s page, I was transfered to the http://www.huffingtonpost.com to read the article It's Time For a 'New Deal' on Education for Syrian Refugee Children. This article caught my attention because this is such a big topic in the news today. I never really thought that all those children are not being educated now and their whole life has been uplifted, and moved around. “The crisis in Syria has placed future of a whole generation of refugee children is in jeopardy. Yet aid donors have systematically failed to respond to the education crisis” (Watkins, 2014). So not only have these children been forced to leave their homes, now the chance that they will be living in poverty forced by the issues in Syria are even great. Especially because of government aid not realizing that their education is at risk. “Such an outcome would be a travesty. Syria's refugee children have suffered enough. They should not be punished twice over, with displacement compounded by a loss of education” (Watkins, 2014).
Reading this article makes me realize that more needs to be done for children in war torn countries that are missing out on an education as little as it might be. They are also more likely to get sick with being displaced and not having appropriate health care provided. They also are more than likely having to stay in a shelter or a home with a lot of other people who have been displaced as well, so they are probably not getting enough sleep or enough food to help. I never thought about any of this when I heard about the conflicts in Syria, but I think more people as well as myself need to be educated on what children are going through over there.
Whitby, T., Blair, N. and Davis, R. The Challenges of Teaching Students in Poverty. Retrieved from http://www.bamradionetwork.com on January 25, 2014.
Watkins, K. It's Time For a 'New Deal' on Education for Syrian Refugee Children. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ on January 25, 2014.
