In article <IaadnWYH_49taRXVnZ2dnUVZ_uadnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
"Donna Metler" <dmmetler@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> When a bunch of businesses
> donated a lot of surplus office supplies, teachers waited hours in 100
> degree heat, outside, for the chance to fill a shopping bag, because
ther
> were never enough school supplies.
Er... nobody thought of taking a truck??
> Yet, usually it wasn't that there wasn't
> enough provided, but that the students would waste, abuse, damage, and
> outright steal from the class. I'm not sure what a given child thought
he'd
> do with a dozen boxes of crayons, but, yes, we had incidents of theft of
> crayons, pencils, glue and the like.
This can be prevented, though. My teacher friend used to hand out
protractors
with the price still on -- if it didn't come back, the kid had to pay for
it.
But this was high school.
> Charity groups provided Christmas gifts to our students, and many of our
> kids came in talking about getting gifts from Salvation Army Angel tree
and
> other sources as well. Based on what these kids claimed to get for
> Christmas, many of them got more than many of our teachers could afford
to
> get their own kids.
Except for the love and care at home.
> I admit that at times it made me sick. Not that the kids didn't deserve
all
> the extras, but that, in so many cases, there was no awareness that
these
> were things that someone, somewhere had worked and paid for, and there
> wasn't just an infinite supply. The children had a right to go to
school,
> and somewhere along the way, it had morphed into "if you're low enough
> income to live in this neighborhood, you have a right to all this other
> stuff, too".
Donna, if you looked at the families, you probably would find that the
idea of
"work" was quite unfamiliar! If nobody in the family has worked for
generations, then the attitude to money is quite different to the
middle-class
one.
> I recently read a news article about the possibility of setting up dorms
for
> homeless students or students "At risk" of homelessness in order to keep
> them in school. I'm sure that if we'd had a dorm, we'd have had a lot of
> parents applying to get their child in there.
We've actually had a serious suggestion recently from the elders of a
well-known Aboriginal community (except there is hardly any community left
any
more) about that:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/remove-children-plea-at-aurukun/2008/03/
13/1205126111240.html
--
Chookie -- Sydney, Australia
(Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)
http://chookiesbackyard.blogspot.com/
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