There are students I still dream about. Not because they were the brightest or the loudest or the most troubled—but because they disappeared. One day, they were in my classroom. Then a few days absent. Then a voicemail box that was full. Then nothing. They slipped beneath the cracks of a system already full of cracks. When I look at Maynard Dixon’s Forgotten Man, I don’t see a stranger—I see years of students, each one a different version of the same silence.
Dixon painted this during the Great Depression, but the curbside could be any American street. The man’s face is turned downward, his clothes rumpled, his posture surrendered. Behind him, the legs of passersby blur past in a flurry of motion and disinterest. No one stops. No one looks. It’s not just that he’s poor—it’s that he’s become invisible. And in that invisibility, I see the students I’ve taught: the ones who slept on friends’ couches, who hoarded lunch leftovers, who carried their trauma in silence because speaking it wouldn’t change anything. The ones who never made it to graduation. Or worse, the ones who did, and still slipped away.
What Dixon captured in oil, Ruby Payne captured in language. In her research on the culture of poverty, Payne describes how the values, resources, and even speech patterns of generational poverty differ from those of the middle class. It’s not just about money—it’s about mindset, relationships, language, and the tools for survival. In the middle class, the future is something to plan for. In poverty, the present is something to survive. When a student in poverty doesn’t do their homework, it’s not always laziness. It’s often logistics. No internet. No stable housing. No safe space. No pencil.
I’ve seen these differences play out not just in students, but in the institutions meant to help them. Our schools often reflect middle-class norms: we prize delayed gratification, written communication, hierarchical authority, and achievement for its own sake. But a student in survival mode is operating with a different rulebook. In Payne’s terms, they are fluent in relationships, resilience, and resourcefulness, not resumes and rubrics. And when these values clash, students don’t always fail the system—the system fails them.
Yet teaching at-risk students isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about changing the shape of support. I’ve learned to ask better questions. To listen for what isn’t said. To understand that a student who lashes out may not be defiant, but desperate. That the kid who falls asleep in class might be working night shifts to keep their family afloat. That trust is currency. And that showing up—every day, relentlessly—is the most radical form of teaching there is.
Sometimes, that’s not enough. I’ve lost students. I’ve watched them leave, watched them disappear into the very background Dixon paints so vividly. I’ve felt the helplessness of seeing a face in the hall on Monday and hearing about an arrest or overdose by Friday. These aren’t isolated tragedies. They are systemic outcomes. We talk about dropout rates and graduation numbers, but behind every data point is a story—a story of need unmet, potential unrecognized, a human being passed by.
And yet, there’s hope. Not the kind you paint on walls in motivational posters, but the stubborn, daily kind. The kind you carry with you when you drive a student home because their ride bailed. The kind you use to advocate for a pair of shoes or a meal voucher. The kind you summon when you call the third guardian on the emergency contact list, just to say, “They’re not alone.”
When I return to Forgotten Man, I see not just one man on a curb, but the cumulative weight of every youth we’ve failed to see. The system may move on. The crowd may pass. But I have to believe that noticing matters. That teaching—the kind that meets students where they are, with honesty and humanity—is a form of resistance.
Because to be forgotten is not just to be poor. It’s to be unseen. And every day in my classroom, I try to remember: to look, to listen, to hold space—for the ones still here, and the ones already gone.