• As someone in this experience, tell your story.  Describe your experience. Tell us about the highs and the lows.  What were your major takeaways? What did you learn? How did you like it?  Be sure to explain your answers.   

• I was a sanitation engineer. I was in charge of keeping the classroom spic and span.        I had a lot of bumps. I had hypertension and diabetes which made it really difficult to pay for the medication. The fact that my job only gave me 210 dollars didn’t help my situation.  A high was that my job was very interactive, unlike other people’s jobs. I actually had to do something. A major takeaway would be that life isn’t fair. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and they do go wrong all the time. You have to learn off the bumps so you can avoid them later.             

• How did your character’s role/situation in the game affect your ability to take care of yourself? Think about your income, job, rent, the amount of money you had, any loans you took out, and your health situation. It made it very difficult. I didn’t make a lot of money and because I didn’t make money I gave myself hypertension because I wanted a raise so badly. I really wanted to get past college but the GED test had an extremely low success rate. Also, I had a lot of fines which made it very hard to care for myself.

• What aspects of your character’s life encouraged success?  What aspects of your character’s life brought about failure?  Explain how that process worked. 

 I thought of it like this. I need money to pay bills. How do I get the money? By working and being noticed for my hard work getting a raise and then making a lot of money to spend on rent and other bills. A lot of stuff made my character stink. One, I didn’t have a good education. Which to be honest we didn’t touch on that very much. Two, I made the third-lowest amount in the class.

• What attempts did you make to improve your character’s life?  How successful were these attempts? How difficult were those attempts and why? 

• 1. I tried asking for a raise and I applied for a few jobs but I wasn’t as worried as I should have been because our teacher likes to throw a lot of curveballs. They weren’t very difficult but I had trouble thinking ahead.  

• In bullet points, write a list of what you learned about poverty from this activity.  Be sure to include a brief description next to each item about what you learned, explaining your learning/thinking. 

• The poverty line, we learned what the poverty line is. 
• Income vs. Rent meaning we learned that the government takes a large portion of your money+rent so you have less money.
• Poverty in Israel. We had an activity that showed us what poverty in Israel was like. 
• Eviction and bills. We learned about being evicted via the book Evicted and we learned about water bills electrical bills and other bills. 
• Diseases. We learned how and why you get diseases like diabetes.
• Different eviction methods. We learned about ways to be evicted like curb or storage and how curb is the usual option

Unfairness. We learned that our world is very unfair. For example, in the book Evicted a person got evicted because some guy broke down her door.

Yesterday we learned about minimal wage. We were given an article for homework. We also had to organize our P and L spreadsheet.