Week 7

I found the section on family poverty very interesting. In the book it mentions that there is a strong correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status. Kids that come from a lower socioeconomic status tend to producer shorter sentences, have simpler vocabulary and simpler grammar. The reason for this is because of inadequate prenatal care, exposure to lead, no breakfast, overcrowded households, few books to read and most having young parents (Berger, p. 331). The book blames this all on parents who do not have a college education and are unable to provide the child with ever necessity. I personally came from an upper-middle class family and so I cannot relate directly to any of these findings but I can reflect on what I saw with students that did come from lower-SES families. I feel like I do not agree with a lot of this. I mean there were a lot of kids that were in my high school that fall under all these categories. Many of the kids that I knew that were poor and did not do well in school was due to the fact that they were never taught that education was important. This comes from their parents and most of them never saw education as being important either. I also saw a lot of the opposite. There were a lot of kids that were very poor and were among the smartest in my class as well. This was because they did not have the money to go out on the weekends and party or do fun things. Instead they stayed in and studied a lot because that's all they had to do. So I do not completely agree with everything the book says. In some cases I also saw kids that were very wealthy and did very poorly in school because they were so worried about going out and doing other things rather than studying. In every aspect of studies there is always people on the opposing sides so I guess this can all be expected, but the book says that anyone who comes from lower-SES will have lower grades. That is what I disagree with.