Straight Cash, Homie

So today my lesson totally imploded on me when I realized that I had brought the wrong video tape from home. I would have just shown the tape that I brought except for the fact that it was a blank tape. Strangely enough, most of my classes wanted to watch the blank tape anyway...Whatever. So, I began class sans lesson and just began to talk. Halfway through my ramblings, I realized that I had better start thinking about my poverty blog assignment. I decided to turn Spanish class into a Sociology experiment and proposed a hypothetical situation to my students in which the washing machine in their house broke and they needed a new one. They had two choices: go to the Rent-to-Own place and pick one up, or use the laundromat for 6 months while they saved up the cash to buy one outright. Invariably, the responses were mixed, but there was a clear pattern as to which students would make which choice. I wasn't really expecting this, but I should have. The students who come from a better home situation and less entrenched in the poverty cycle were more apt to decide to save the money while the students that struggle academically and are more likely to perpetuate the poverty cycle were more likely to just go straight for the "instant gratification" and get one from the Rent-a-Center. The logic behind their decisions was nothing short of scary. One student, Brandon, actually said that he would never go to the laundromat because he didn't want anybody to see his clothes...despite the fact that everyone sees his clothes everyday...when he wears them. Many of the students had no concept of the fact that the RTO's are out there to screw people out of money. They blindly and naively believed that the guy at the RTO is there to help them because they don't have the means to get what they need from a "real" store...Unbelievable.

From there, we talked about check cashing "businesses" and got much the same result. The students that either are not impoverished or those with the best chance of breaking the cycle understood that these legalized loan sharks are not the good guy, but are out there looking to be the 21st century slave-owners of the lower class.

This ties into the book "A Framework For Understanding Poverty" in that the students that would make the decision to go to the laundromat were incapable of understanding the ramifications of their decisions, especially financially, and that they did not understand the unwritten rules of the middle class. In the lower class, things are free and there is always someone or something there in case you fall, whether it be welfare, or free school lunch, or even crazy checks. However for those of us in the middle class, we are aware of those that are trying to take advantage of us and we realize that not everybody is there to help.