So I am sitting here reading the NY Times, WSJ, ESPN and the blogosphere in search of interesting thoughts. Since PlansForUs rarely leaves my thoughts I locked on to this particular article, The Class Consciousness Raiser, and its description of how teachers occupy a unique position in our society. Teachers are in one of the few professions where different economic classes mix. Now according to Ruby Payne, the main character of this article, there are different ways to understand the personalities of different economic classes. I’m not so sure that Ruby has got this one right, but her body of experience is  more extensive than mine, so I will just keep this one in the back of my mind and form a more complete opinion.
So here is the meat of the post and a thought on how PlansForUs could play a role for teachers facing issues with class distinctions in their classroom. I’ll set it up with this quote from the article:

At the Jekyll Island seminar, I met Steve Kipp, a science teacher at Brunswick High with a ponytail and a jumpy, eager energy…In 10th grade at Brunswick High, Kipp told me later, the advanced students usually take chemistry, and the other students, the ones who are more likely to wind up in technical college, take Kipp’s class, which is called General Physical Science. And each year it’s the same, Kipp said: the rich and middle-class kids are tracked into chemistry, and he gets the kids from poverty. Kipp grew up in the middle class, and in the past, he said, before he read Payne’s book, he would get frustrated by his poor students. They seemed unwilling or unable to learn; they laughed when he tried to mete out discipline. And so he found it hard to keep exerting himself. What was the point in teaching them, he thought, if they weren’t going to make an effort?

But after he immersed himself in Payne’s work, about five years ago, Kipp’s ideas changed. “I realized, these kids aren’t dumb,” he said. “They just haven’t had the enriching experiences that I had growing up.

So Mr. Kipp came to a realization that he could teach better with a more refined understanding of how socioeconomics played a role in his students learning experiences.  Our goal is that PlansForUs will be a facilitator of connections that can lead to these insights, so that teachers can spend their money on their classrooms and themselves.

by Tyler, CEO