An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
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Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#2The Gene Marks article is breathtakingly out of touch. He really ought to get to know some seriously poor people. Perhaps live among them for a time.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#3To be honest, I don't know that this article is HN material (but I didn't flag it). That said, thank you for posting this. Poverty is not just something you can "The Secret" your way out of.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#4At least this kid tried to gain some perspective before writing about it - http://scratchbeginnings.com/
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#5"How best to prioritize learning to read rigorously over scheming to get home and be the man of the house in the stead of the father who left? How best to find joy in school with so much hate and embitterment poisoning the rest of your life?"
How can we fix this? The problem is that no matter how much our teachers may push students to do better and work harder in school, their home life may work against it.
It's one of the side-effects of freedom. To some degree, there will never be a way to fix it. Unless we can control what happens when they get home.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#6"How best to prioritize learning to read rigorously over scheming to get home and be the man of the house in the stead of the father who left? How best to find joy in school with so much hate and embitterment poisoning the rest of your life?" How can we fix this? The problem is that no matter how much our teachers may push students to do better and work harder in school, their home life may work against it. It's one…
This is why I think KIPP works (and why it has been criticized as a cult by some). It creates an intense school environment ("work hard, be nice") in school and then keeps kids in the school environment for as long as possible, while making work mandatory for parents as well.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#7To be honest, I don't know that this article is HN material (but I didn't flag it). That said, thank you for posting this. Poverty is not just something you can "The Secret" your way out of.
There's a hazy line, but it gratifies my intellectual curiosity (as someone who is relatively ignorant of the subject) so I submitted it.
From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#8Fantastic read.
Being an aspiring entrepreneur, I tend to look to others that have made it, and see what I can learn from them. I became fascinated with biographies autobiographies of everyone from Richard Branson and Steve Jobs to Lance Armstrong to Anthony Kedis (red hot chili peppers). The single best one of them I've read is "From Pieces to Weight" by 50 cent. It written so well that you don't just understand why he made the decisions he did (becoming a drug dealer) you understand that you would have very likely make the same decisions, should you have been in his shoes. It really opens up another perspective on an individuals behavior, and has made me that much less quick to judge.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#9"How best to prioritize learning to read rigorously over scheming to get home and be the man of the house in the stead of the father who left? How best to find joy in school with so much hate and embitterment poisoning the rest of your life?" How can we fix this? The problem is that no matter how much our teachers may push students to do better and work harder in school, their home life may work against it. It's one…
You are bringing up the argument for Welfare, Universal Healthcare, etc., that there is nothing that the schools can do. The problems that these kids are facing stems from the fact that they live in poverty. This leads to issues such as the one mentioned by the author. The only way to solve the problem would be to try to figure out a decent Social Benefits system for the poor, to where poor parents do not feel the need to resort to prostitution, drugs, drinking, etc.
Re: An Ode to a 'Poor Black Kid' I Never Knew: How Forbes Gets Poverty Wrong
#10Although I agree that the original post was naive, I do not think that the misleading vividness and hasty generalization employed by Jefferson addresses the issue to which the OP was referring. There is massive hardship across all low income families but the use an outlier scenario does not negate the valid argument that having goals and knowing that there is a prize to win at the end of the race, is a strong motivator.
I inferred that a lack of hope and knowledge of an achievable future, is one of the primary causes of lower performing low income students.