Born on the other side of the tracks

I never gave that phrase a lot of attention when someone mentioned it to me but the more I observe some people and their upbringing and the comfortable and easy life we have led, the more the phrase makes sense to me. Just recently my mom asked me to help out this young girl she teaches in the evening with her math homework. I don't know how smart or dumb this kid is but she is in 6th std but was struggling with simple multiplication and division and my 6 yr old niece learnt multiplication in minutes when we explained her the basics while playing a game. 

I am not implying that my niece is smart and this kid is not. It is just because of exposure and influence. My cousin and her husband are college graduates. The entire family and schooling for my niece exposes her to a plethora of information, making her a lot smarter from the onset whereas this young girl who struggled to understand the english and then the math in one single problem is born to parents who do not know an iota of english so when she is trying to comprehend something, she has no help. It is not her fault that she is slow because she has never been exposed to all the information that the rest of us have or had at her age. 

When I look at her and some of the other kids back in the school I volunteer at in the US, I realize how fortunate I have been to be born to educated parents who pushed me to achieve the maximum and made my entire education a lot easier by being there as a helping hand, teaching me what I could not understand instead of guiding me to tuition teachers who could barely give an hour to me to understand my dilemmas with a particular problem or subject.