The Power of Transportation in the New Salem Educational Initiative

Among the features of the New Salem Educational Initiative that contribute to the success of students enrolled in the program is the provision of transportation. The fact that I pick each student up at her or his home before each session, and then deliver the student back home after the session, has several favorable effects.

Taking things chronologically, there is first of all the interaction that occurs as I show up at each door and generally am invited in to talk for a bit. Often from the very beginning of a student’s enrollment, I am able to strike an emotional cord with the presiding adult of the homestead. The family structures of most of my students typically have a mother as the key head of household, but often there are also grandmothers and aunties who have roles in the students’ lives that move across the continuum from supportive but secondary to dominant and primary. And then roughly 20% of the families that I serve do have a dependable male presence, including in a few cases a father matching the middle class ideal, a man who either shares or individually exercises primary authority. I always try right away to understand family dynamics and family roles, which are always key to understanding the lives of the child or adolescent. In time, I typically become something of an adjunct household and even family member, offering counsel, providing links to needed services, and just listening and conversing empathetically the way that good family members do.

Secondly, this sort of conversation continues in the car during transport, as students over time (and usually not all that long from the beginning of enrollment) begin to open up, share concerns, talk about ongoing struggles, and to relate successes in academics, athletics, and other arenas of life. Whether shared by a family member or by the student herself or himself, the information related is something that I treat with great care. If it is something such as an academic triumph (an “A” finally earned on a report card in math, successfully identifying acidity level in a chemical compound from a lab experiment), this is something that I in all likelihood can praise and reinforce as a notable accomplishment to the family. But if the matter involves, for example, a strained family relationship and talking to me is serving as a stress reliever or sounding board, then unless connoting a dangerous situation, I will keep this to myself until I am asked to become more directly involved. All such information, though, gets stored in my memory bank for understanding the student and the family’s life.

Thirdly in the typical chronological sequence, but most germane to the fundamental goals of the New Salem Educational Initiative, there is the tremendous amount that is learned academically while in transport. This runs the gamut from fundamental skill review and even first-time acquisition, to very substantive conversations in which subject area knowledge from across the liberal arts is transmitted. I have found the time in transport to be very valuable for review and acquisition of multiplication tables. On many days, this saves a significant amount of time that would have been devoted to the skill during the formal two hours of the academic session once in the classroom. Similarly, it is a great time to review and acquire vocabulary items, to create sentences using the words, to talk about homophones, homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms that relate to particular vocabulary items.

And as the conversation turns to more purely subject area knowledge, my students find themselves learning many things that they should have long-since learned in school but have not. En route, just to pick some of many, many topics that have come under discussion, my students have learned for the first time the original identities and the ideological evolution of Republicans and Democrats in United States political history. They have learned about the actual functions of the liver, kidneys, and pancreas. They have learned about the nutritive value of vegetables, including why I call carrots, broccoli, and spinach the “power vegetables.” They come of course to know of my great love of Shakespeare, but they also come to know that the greatest playwright of recent decades, August Wilson, was an African American who died just a few years ago having penned classics such as >Fences<, >Piano Lesson<, and >Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom<. And they get some sense of where human beings stand in the scientific scheme of things as they try to grasp a universe that big banged into being about 14 billion years ago, an earth that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and a creature known as homo sapiens who only about 100,000 years ago got on the evolutionary train that pulled out of Australopithecus station about 4.5 million years ago.

Fourthly in the chronology, with all of that personal matter discussed, skills reviewed, and knowledge transmitted, I drive my students home. I go to the door of each student, and I usually go back inside the home. I summarize what was learned and the progress that the student made. I listen to any further concerns, for the student, or pertinent to the family. And when I drive on to pick up other students, and especially when I drive back to my own home late in the evening, I am full of fresh reminders of the power of transportation in the New Salem Education Initiative.