Class Matters (Ch. 4): Social Conventions

Here's a brief profile of the person featured in my chapter. Della Mae Justice grew up in a poor, rural part of Kentucky. Her dad was physically and verbally abusive to her mom to the point where Della was placed in foster care for her protection. With family being a core part people's lives in the area, it was shameful to have relatives in foster care. Della's uncle, a well-off lawyer 150 miles away, decided to take Della into his home. She spent her time in a more urban, middle class environment. She went to law school, married, and had a few kids. Things changed when she heard that her niece and nephew in her hometown were put into foster care. She then moved back and took care of her relatives. Things turned full circle.

The take-away from the article was the frequent concern and uneasiness that Justice had. She grew up low class and struggled to adjust to middle class life. Dozens of social conventions that she knew nothing about made her feel inadequate and awkward. When she went to a restaurant (a rare occasion), she ordered a sandwich. When the plate arrived at her table, she didn't eat a crumb. Why? She didn't know how to eat it with the toothpick! She didn't know she simply needed to remove the toothpick and eat the sandwich! How tragic. Even after being in the middle class and going back home, she still didn't know "how to act." She asked people if she was making sense when she talked. Knowing the right thing to wear at a specific event brought stress. She described the middle class as always being in a state of ease. She was the exact opposite.

Now how to relate this to our 21C classrooms? I would suggest we observe the social conventions in literature. For example, we can look at the social classes in Macbeth. How does the royalty speak to one another? How do they speak to their servants and commoners? Vice versa? We can talk about things such as occupation, income, housing, class, diet, education, entertainment, speech, vocabulary etc. And we should connect it to our students' experiences. If we have urban, rural, poor, lower class majorities at our school, what field trips or events can we create that would open their eyes to how other Americans live, but also, how they would act/speak/relate to those in different classes/environments? Can we prepare them in a way that they won't have to ask, as Justice did, "Am I making sense?" We all know that we talk differently to our professors than we do our friends, parents, or younger siblings. And that is okay. In our 21C world, the chances of working or communicating with someone who is from a different country/culture/society are high. We should equip our students to identify, analyze, evaluate, and adapt to many "social conventions." I know that's not going to appear on a bubble test, but it is a necessary skill for our students to have when they go out into the real world.