1 - Start ~4 mins
A number can tell you how common hardship is. It cannot tell you what a Tuesday feels like, or what somebody is already trying. Today you read two people in their own words: one in Ireland, one in another country.
Your job is not to feel sorry for them. It is to notice what shapes their days, what they are already doing, and what would still have to change.
2 - Examine ~5 mins
A poverty statistic answers questions like how many and how often. A personal account answers different ones: what does a day look like, what trade-offs get made, and what is this person already doing.
Neither replaces the other. A figure without a person can feel abstract. A story without any sense of scale can feel like one unlucky case. Good civic thinking uses both, and knows which question each can answer.
To make that concrete, hold one line in mind: "Some weeks I choose between the electricity top-up and the full list for school." A national rate cannot tell you that trade-off. An account can.
You are about to read two short first-person accounts written for this lesson. Treat them as evidence. Quote the text. Do not invent details that are not there.
3 - Read Two Accounts ~20 mins
Two accounts, read closely
4 - Make Sense of It ~8 mins
Talk these through as a class. Nothing on this card moves and there is nothing to type.
Take one minute in pairs first, then share.
- What did these accounts tell you that a single poverty figure could not?
- What was similar in how Niamh and Kofi are trying to change things, and what still sits outside each person's control?
Hold onto the idea that an informed view of poverty needs both kinds of evidence: scale and lived detail.
5 - What You Covered ~3 mins
You can now:
- tell apart what a poverty statistic shows and what a personal account shows
- read a first-person account for what shapes a day, what the person is already doing, and what still has to change
- compare two accounts from different places without turning either into a simple moral story
That careful reading is the skill behind examining poverty and inequality in more than one context (LO 2.5).
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