Some of My Students Can’t Afford to Eat

But I must feed them knowledge, right?

I had been a teacher for about 4 years at the time. There, in my classroom, was a girl. Let’s call her Mariana. She seemed to be down. Then, one of her friends came to me.

“Teach, Mariana has a terrible headache. She was crying because of the pain.”

I went to Mariana and asked a stupid question:

“Hey, how are you feeling?”

“I’m ok. It’s just a little headache,” she said.

“You should go to the infirmary.”

“I did. The doctor gave me this pill,” came her reply.

(Mexican public schools have actual doctors in charge of the school infirmary)

“Well, why haven’t you taken it?” I asked.

She paused for a beat.

“He said I had to eat before, or my stomach would hurt too,” she said.

“Well, go eat something. It’s ok. I don’t want you to be here with a headache.”

She paused again.

“I’m not hungry,” she answered.

“What did you have for breakfast?” I asked

“I didn’t have breakfast,” she said.

I gave her a what’s wrong with you look.

“You know, maybe that’s the reason why you have a headache. Come on, go to the cafeteria. I’ll vouch for you,” I offered.

I felt so magnanimous. Here I was, being the cool teacher.

“I’m not hungry. It’s ok. I’ll eat when I get home,” she said.

I thought she was being stubborn, or wanting a bit of special attention. Then I remembered the sandwich in my lunch bag.

“Well, the doctor told you to take that pill, right?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Here, eat this and take the pill,” I said.

Mariana stared at me, grabbed the sandwich, devoured it, and took the pill.

“Thanks, Teach,” she said.

And then she gave me this look.

That’s when I got it: she hadn’t brought lunch today. And she didn’t have enough money to get something at the cafeteria.

Then lots of things made sense. Those times when she hadn’t shown up for a class because “she hadn’t been able to come.” You see, here in Mexico, we don’t have school buses. Students whose parents can’t bring them have to either walk or take a regular commercial bus. There are special fares for them, but still, it adds up.

I connected the dots: sometimes, she doesn’t even have enough money for the bus.

As the years went by, I would encounter more cases like this:

Students falling asleep in class because they had to work the night before. Others, missing keys tests because they couldn’t make it to school.

Students whose parents cannot make it to parent-teacher conferences because they are working the 8 pm-8 am shift at a factory.

Students who spend days without even seeing their parents because, by the time they get back home, they already went to bed. “We leave messages for each other in a notebook,” one student once told me. “I write them notes, and then they write back. But we usually see each other on Sunday.”

Every month, I have to turn in a series of reports, such as partial grades and overall attendance. Recently, Mexican teachers have also been asked to observe our students’ areas of proficiency.

At the end of the semester, I have to fill in a chart indicating if my students appropriately interact with their classmates, if they care about the environment, if they are can solve “problems”. I’m supposed to rate them on a scale from 1 to 4, 1 being bad, 4 being “good.”

Then, all of this data is shipped somewhere else, processed, and stored. We’ll repeat the same charade next semester. And the next one. And the next one. We have accumulated lots of charts that almost no one reads. Charts that no one cares about.

Why?

Because these charts tell us that we have a problem. But we have known that all along.

We know that our classrooms are filled with people who don’t want to be here. People who don’t see the point of all of this.

I’m supposed to tell them how important it is to know the proper way to use a comma. Or help them learn the rules for correctly using accent marks in Spanish.

But they don’t care about it.

Some of them don’t care because they think all of this is boring. But lots of them don’t care because there’s a whole lot of other stuff in their mind. They don’t know if they’ll see their parents this week. They don’t know if they’ll have enough cash to come to school tomorrow. Or if they’ll be able to eat before coming to school.

Have you heard of Bloom’s taxonomy?

Joe Young explains:

Bloom’s taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models — cognitive, affective, and sensory domains — used to classify learning objectives of complexity and specificity. The cognitive model is the one educators are most familiar with and is broken into six levels of objectives or levels of understanding: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation. Bloom’s taxonomy is definitely used as a teaching tool to help teachers and curriculum writers carefully plan their lessons, assignments, texts, and questions.

Basically, when you write a lesson plan, you have to be careful to use the correct verb: you have to respect Bloom’s taxonomy. They even give us copies of it every semester, to remind us that we must comply.

But there is also something called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It establishes that, before a person can even begin to think about self-actualization, there are a series of needs that must be satisfied first: physiological, safety, social, and esteem needs. Nowadays, this hierarchy is typically represented by a pyramid.

Why is Maslow’s hierarchy so important? As Joe Young explains: “We must Maslow before we Bloom.”

In other words, how can you ask a young person to worry about Math, Grammar, Geography…when they don’t even know if they are going to eat tomorrow?

There is a scene in Moonlight that clearly shows this. In case you haven’t watched the movie, here’s the script. Go to page 45.

Mr. Pierce, the teacher, is trying to get his students to understand the relevance of white blood cells. He claims this is critical information.

However, Chiron, our main character, just had a horrible confrontation with his mother, who is addicted to drugs. His teacher, of course, doesn’t know that. Worst: he couldn’t care less. To him, the people in front of him are nothing but vessels in which he must pour his knowledge. He has no interest in developing empathy towards the people in front of him.

So what? Are teachers supposed to let things go? No, we still have to teach. And we need to create an atmosphere of discipline in our classroom.

Still, we must always remember we are working with human beings. We have to work with compassion and empathy. Zero-tolerance policies and irrational demands for full compliance just won’t cut it.

Remember: “We must Maslow before we Bloom.”