Rachel and Her Children the

Rachel and Her Children The book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America by Jonathan Kozol was published in 1988, twenty-one years ago. The author catalogues and analyzes the life and times of those unfortunate souls in America who were down on their luck, without jobs, struggling to make ends meet, and for most, they were lacking in the luxury of a home to call their own.

So much has changed in America during the twenty-one years since Kozol published this book; clearly the statistics and factual representations offered by Kozol are completely out of date. Here in 2009, so many more families are homeless in America, and so many more children will have to struggle to get the nutritionally valuable food they need to grow properly. That said, so many middle class and lower middle class families have lost their homes in recent months due to the dramatic economic downturn.

In short, things are much worse now than they were in the 1980s, albeit times were rough back then as well. Teacher Resource Ideas: Meantime, how can a teacher best use the information presented by Kozol? Certainly there are references that are valuable in the sense of historical context. Teaching the concept of juxtaposition -- which goes beyond simple "contrast and compare" -- could be used as a lesson plan with reference to this book.

For example what seemed pretty bleak for families and wage earners in the early and mid-1980s is starkly more serious in 2009. To wit, on page 5 there is a quote from the Milwaukee Journal about the loss of jobs in Michigan in 1982; the Michigan governor declared a "state of human emergency" that "other governors may be forced to contemplate by 1988 (Kozol p. 5). But wait. Fast-forward to 2009.

Any student conducting a simple Google research effort will find that because of the almost total collapse of the auto industry, tens of thousands of employees are lining up for unemployment, hoping to have enough money to meet the mortgage and keep food on the table for their families. Michigan is perilously close to a human disaster, but so are many other states.

And while the factual data in Kozol's book may be less than contemporary, the stories that are told of families and individuals that suffered through existence in homeless shelters, in cheap hotels and on the streets, are timeless. A teacher could present some of the book's very well written human tales of homelessness to students and ask them to change the names and reverse the outcomes for these unfortunate people.

The woman with children on pages 69-71 is struggling with a moral conundrum: she detests the idea of selling her body on the street to keep food in the house: "I will solicit. I will prostitute if it will feed them," she explains. And she describes standing out on the street corner in the bitter cold and being picked up by a man who takes her to a hotel room. "He had a lot of money so he rented a deluxe," she explains.

"After he done…whatever he did…I told him I had to leave" (p. 70). After all, she has kids at home and couldn't stay the whole night with him, even though he wanted her to. He put a knife to her throat and her thoughts are very dark: "If I be dead at least my kids won't ever have to say that I betrayed them" (earlier in the book she admitted the social service authorities might actually take her children away from her because she couldn't care for them properly).

"When things pile up on you…" you start thinking "I'm better if I'm dead" (p. 71). In the book, this poor struggling woman receives $20 from the man who had sex with her; with that money she buys Pampers, bologna with a loaf of bread. In 2009, it is doubtful that $20 would buy those three items.

But a student could take Kozol's story and perhaps have the man who picked her up off the street be a kind, thoughtful person, who takes her to his home where he and his wife provide temporary shelter for her family, and even locate a job for her the next day. On page 143 Elizabeth relates a story about a friend who invited her to come and visit.

Take bus number 23, he says, but he cannot tell her where to get off or what the street is named because he cannot read. "The world is words," says Elizabeth. "If you cannot read, you do not know" (p. 143). A student could take that story and create an entirely different ending. The woman who has the friend who can't read takes library books to her friend and reads to him every afternoon.

Then she locates flash cards in the library and begins to teach him the simplest words first, and as the weeks to by more difficult words. Then she works with sentences. Finally, she coaxes him out of his little flat and into the library where the children's books are kept. He enjoys relating the pictures with the words, and after a few months, he can read. By now his whole outlook on the world has changed.

He begins to write letters to family back in Mississippi; they are simple letters but it makes him burst with pride to have accomplished basic literacy. On pages 52-54 the author locates two women who are pregnant; Terry is 28, has three children and is pregnant with a fourth. Wanda has four children and is pregnant again buts she plans to have an.