Poverty: More Than You'll Ever Know

After reading the Intro and chapters 1 and 2 of the Poverty book, I was somewhat overwhelmed. I am grateful that I have not experienced poverty. However, I struggle to understand how I can help students that are dealing with poverty. The stories in chapter 1 were heartbreaking. And for people to understand the many other types of poverty besides financial makes it even worse. There's another problem. A student is not going to come up to me and say, "Hey, Teach. I want to let you know that my family's broke and I spend 6 hours a night taking care of my siblings and the house because my mom works evenings and my dad left us when I was 2." I don't think this stuff is going to be on an IEP. So how do we help our students when we don't know what's going on? As for Ch. 2, I have no real understanding of the casual-register style of storytelling. How am I supposed to work with both casual and formal registers when discussing my class readings? How does that affect student writing? Obviously, this is uncharted territory for me and I will have to do more reading and observing.