Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [231]
CHAPTER 10: LETTING EDUCATORS LEAD THE WAY
1. Wendy was nine when the visits began but turned ten during the course of the study.
2. When we began observing the family, Ms. Driver and Mr. Fallon and the children had been living together for just under a year. They eventually married (Valerie was about two years old at the time).
3. When their father died, Wendy and Willie became eligible for Social Security benefits, which they now receive.
4. See Maria Kefalas, Working-Class Heroes, for a discussion of a comparable neighborhood in Chicago.
5. Field-workers noted that during a typical two-hour visit to the Driver family, they would hear more than twenty-five references to kin.
6. Moreover, as we observed in all the families, regardless of social class, much more attention is paid to Wendy’s physical appearance than to Willie’s. The adults, and Wendy herself, focus repeatedly on her clothes, hairstyle, shoe size, and overall creation as a present and future object of beauty.
7. Willie expressed an interest in joining a hockey team, but the combined costs of the equipment and the activity fee were prohibitively expensive. Ms. Driver wished that there were programs “where kids could just go and play for nothing.”
8. In an exit interview, Ms. Driver complained that Willie had acted differently during the visits, often “pushing it” and “not taking ‘no’ for an answer.” She noted, however, that he seemed to have begun testing the limits in other situations as well.
9. In the end, the teachers recommended that Wendy repeat fourth grade, and the principal approved their decision. On the last day of school, however, Mr. Tier learned that a higher district official would not permit the retention (for reasons not made clear to Mr. Tier). Instead, in fifth grade Wendy went into an intensive special education program at Lower Richmond, in a classroom with only thirteen children. Mr. Tier was mollified because he felt Wendy “would be getting the attention she needs.”
10. Mr. Johnson’s explanation was different. He said, “We had one little problem. I yelled at her one time and she stopped coming. . . . I had given her an assignment, and she came in and she told me her mother didn’t know how to do the assignment.” The assignment, for Black history month, was to match names to occupations. Mr. Johnson thought Wendy was making up an excuse for not doing her work: “I mean, it just didn’t make sense to me. So I got a little perturbed and I told her, ‘You can’t tell me, if your mother completed high school [she] couldn’t do this.’ I mean, you just say that you didn’t do it. . . . If you didn’t do something, you just didn’t do it. I can accept that more so than you telling me that your mother—so that upset her.” Her classroom teacher, Mr. Tier (who did not have a good relationship with Mr. Johnson) presumed that Mr. Johnson’s schedule had changed and that Wendy would resume at some point.
11. I wrote in my field notes, “I am flabbergasted by this.” Still, since the aim of the study was to learn as much as possible about how families interact with institutions, I did not correct her.
12. Several people in Mr. Fallon’s family believe in hitting. His sister, Sar, for example, told Wendy one afternoon when she picked her up from school and Wendy complained about another child hurting her, “You’ve got to learn to fight!”
13. We did not observe this visit. Overall, it was very difficult to go along on medical visits, unless the trips were for appointments made well in advance, such as a wellness checkup or a camp physical.
CHAPTER 11: BEATING WITH A BELT, FEARING THE SCHOOL
1. He worked “off the books” for many years but recently changed jobs, taking a pay cut, so that he could pay taxes and begin to qualify for Social Security benefits.
2. A