According to one of Ruby Payne’s books, a simplistic description of the three socioeconomic classes can be made regarding food.

Poor people ask if you had enough, because often there is not enough. So portions are the big thing in poverty.

Middle class people ask if you like it, because there is always enough. So the subjective response to it is the big thing in the middle class.

Rich people expect their food to be beautifully plated, because there is always enough and if you don’t like it you can have something else. So presentation is the main focus in the upper class.

This particularly resonates with me because I did grow up poor, even though I don’t feel like I grew up in a culture of poverty. And that situation has effected my family’s life ever since.

When I was growing up poor…

We often did not have enough food to eat to feel full. When we would sit down together to eat (usually at night), my father would save his food. If we finished and wanted more, he would give us his dinner. Since we were young, we did not know he was hungry too. Instead we assumed he didn’t want his food. And we gladly raced through our meal to get his or part of his, too.

I do remember that we sometimes had odd foods in the house. I remember eating spoonfuls of brown sugar because that was all that was in the house and I was hungry. I was ten or eleven at the time. We often had ketchup sandwiches for lunch. Back then condiments and luncheon meats were very cheap. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we would have mac & cheese with fried baloney.

Long term impact

Long term that has meant that my family tends to make too much. Two days ago I fixed my husband a plate of food and he said, “Hey, that’s a normal sized meal.” We’ve been married twenty years and it is the first time (or at least one of the few) that I have recognized a regular portion size.

My family often didn’t have enough food, so we usually make far more than necessary when we eat. Even my baby sister who was four does this to some extent, even though she is now in the upper class and was at least upper middle class from age eight to eighteen.

This is a video, fairly short, which illustrates how low SES students function in college. That’s not what is supposed to be about, but it is incredibly relevant.

Exactly how should we teach ‘digital natives’?

A Sociologist says Students Aren’t so Web-wise After All

I think the assumption is that if it [computer usage] was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.
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There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.

WSJ article on how hard it is for low SES students to get into college

But what stands between disadvantaged kids and college is not mere money. It is orderliness, attentive mentoring and simple organizational guidance. Public schools used to be the great equalizer in America — the institutions that allowed the children of immigrants and the descendants of slaves to become fluent in the English language and prepare them for careers. In too many urban areas, they don’t perform such basic educational functions. But they don’t offer structured environments, either, for the few students who are trying to lift themselves up and get a better educational experience at college.

School turnaround built on teaching students how to behave. This article is about an elementary school, but the same issues work in college. If the student does not know how a college student should behave, they will not behave that way. Low SES students are especially disadvantaged in this way. Ruby Payne’s work is particularly applicable to this issue and I will be writing on it tomorrow.

Something that might be relevant is Internet culture spells doom for strait-laced orthographers.

A related joke to the article above goes like this:
Why is there such bad spelling on the internet?
Because it is powered by 100,000 English teachers rolling over in their graves.

A Closer Look at Why People Blog

Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technology’s Untapped Potential to Enrich Higher Education

Weblogs in the Writing Classroom, published 2008

If you are wondering what other people are doing, a good source to look at is CCCC’s Survey of Multimodal Pedagogies in Writing Programs. I especially was interested in question thirty. “What role should the production of non-textual compositions play in the writing class?” It at least tells what people are thinking about the issue.

Dynamic Subspace is not too impressed with the idea of a multimodal classroom.

I love technology, and it’s an integral part of my life, including two World of Warcraft accounts, a 30″ Apple Cinema Display and Mac Book Pro, iPhone, building a Media Center PC, blogging, and keeping my girlfriend’s ailing Sony Vaio alive while she studies for her comps, but I strongly insist on keeping that separate from my goal of enriching the lives of my students by challenging them to think deeply, imagine new possibilities, and effectively communicate through writing before moving up to multimodal composition practices.

Computers and Composition Online: Theory Into Practice has some good articles on teaching multimodal classrooms.