Word: norton
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...many children of the urban poor so uncomfortable in school? One explanation comes from University of Chicago Professor Dolores Norton, who is conducting a unique study of the intellectual development of children in poor families. Her conclusion: growing up in an unstructured home environment, they do not develop a sense of time that enables them to adapt well to school. "When they come to school, these children enter a world that was not created for them," says Norton, who teaches at the university's School of Social Service Administration. "Imagine yourself in a classroom with adults who speak your language...
...Norton's insights come from first-hand research. For the past six years, she has been regularly videotaping, from infancy, about 40 children born to young mothers living in the most blighted, impoverished pockets of Chicago. She lets her camera roll for up to four hours at a time, capturing the ordinary rhythms and interactions of a child's life at home. Reviewing thousands of hours of ) tapes, Norton found that references to time were rare. Most parents hardly ever provided instructions like "Finish lunch so you can see your favorite TV program at 1:30," or even sequential statements...
Children from these homes may be able to read a clock, but that does not mean they understand time. Norton found that most of her young subjects scored lower than average on seriation tests, which measured their abilities to understand sequences of events. The less a mother had talked to her child about time over the years, the worse the youngster performed on the tests...
Other child-development experts concur with Norton's findings. Many poor children, they note, are mystified by the "time-slotted" school environment, where crayons are often taken away before the picture is finished because it is juice time. Says clinical psychologist Jeree Pawl, director of the Infant- Parent Program at San Francisco General Hospital: "The structured situation makes them feel powerless. It feels arbitrary, senseless and imposed because at home there is no predictability and rigidity." Confused youngsters may withdraw or rebel, prompting some teachers to peg these children as troublemakers or slow learners...
...Norton; 190 pages...