So, today is a special day, it's a day when thousands of bloggers across the world combine to post about a single subject - this year the theme is poverty

I find it strangely ironic to write about poverty when I teach at a private school in the 13th richest country in the world. Most of the kids in the school think being poor is only having 1 bathroom in your house or Mummy doing the cleaning herself instead of paying a cleaner :roll:

We are trying to do our best to educate these kids who have pretty much everything about those who have pretty much nothing. Several times a year we organise collections of things like spare clothes to go to impoverished families in Eastern Europe. Last year we got enough clothes to fill an HGV trailer which was fantastic.

Watching the kids watching a Powerpoint presentation of photos of the kids who were going to receive the clothing was reassuring, I could see their shock, their empathy and their determination to do something to help the children living in squalid conditions with absolutely nothing to call their own.

We can only do so much as teachers to educate the children, we also need to educate some of the parents! Whenever I think about what's wrong with the private education system, I remember something that a 7-year-old said to me in my first year of teaching (at a private school in the UK)

"Some children go to schools where their Mummies and Daddies don't pay, those schools are bad schools."

Heaven help us if kids are taught to think like that at such a young age. What hope do they have of understanding the wider world, the world where millions of children don't go to school at all, if they can't see beyond the world of their Lexus-driving, multi-bathroom-owning, cleaner-hiring parents?