In the course of the last several weeks, as I have written a number of opinion pieces for the Star Tribune and become ever more active in efforts to overhaul k-12 education, more and more people have become interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative and inquired as to its origins and as to the day to day functioning of the program. Many blog articles back, I posted a program summary and funding request, and all of my articles give a strong idea as to the principles, love, and dedication that undergird the Initiative. Since several years or so have passed, though, since I last gave an overall summary, herein lies a description of the history, principles, and day to day life of the program. And before I get to the program itself, I give a brief description of my own background and life as a teacher in K-12 education.
Personal Background, Training, and Life as a Teacher
I attended Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, from the autumn of 1969 through the spring of 1973. Prior to entering SMU, I had already become intensely interested in the social revolutions (feminist, civil rights) that were taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s; my interest quickened and my activism expanded during my years at SMU. I did not march for causes very much; although I have never shied away from confrontation, I have always wanted any confrontations that I initiate to have a very specific impact, and my ongoing commitment has been and continues to be to practical action meant to advance the common good.
By the spring (1971) of my sophomore year, I had decided to be a teacher. I became active in SMU Volunteer Services and soon took on the position of coordinator for services rendered at institutions for the mentally challenged and in the Dallas Independent School District (DISD). I majored in political science and had near-majors in history and psychology. I took math through calculus and pursued a broad and deep liberal arts education. I also endured the excruciatingly terrible education courses to gain certification in the teaching fields of government and history; in time, in Minnesota, that certification would come to include all of those subjects considered part of social studies.
During my junior year, I served a semester internship at L. G. Pinkston High School in West Dallas, a heavily African American ghetto. This experience solidified my dedication to the education of urban youth. I did my student teaching at another inner city school but returned to Pinkston for my first two academic years (1973-1974 and 1974-1975) as a regular classroom teacher.
During the years from 1976 through 2003, I traveled throughout the United States and most of East, Southeast, and East Asia; got an M. A. (University of Iowa, 1979) and Ph. D. (University of Minnesota, 1993) in Chinese and Taiwanese history; lived in Taiwan for a total of three and a half years, becoming fluent in Mandarin Chinese and acquiring some Taiwanese (the Minnan dialect similar to that of Fujian Province on the Chinese mainland); and teaching in almost every type of situation: English as a Second Language (Taiwan); prison (Missouri Eastern Correctional Center); college/ university setting (two years as a T. A. at the University of Iowa; instructor at the University of Minnesota for two years teaching courses in East Asian history in the late 1980s as I pursued my doctorate; a semester teaching a course in modern Japanese history at St. Olaf College); a rural high school, a suburban alternative high school, and two different alternative high schools in Minneapolis.
This is to say, too, that my wife, Barbara Reed, and I moved to Minnesota in the late summer of 1982 as she took a position at St. Olaf College in Northfield, where she still is a professor of Asian religions with dual appointments in the Department of Religion and the Department of Asian Studies. Our son, Ryan Davison-Reed, was born in 1989 in Taipei (Taibei), Taiwan, during one of our stints (1988-1990) doing research and living in Taiwan.
I have been active in K-12 education in North Minneapolis since 1991, became a member of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in 1993, and for 20 years have coordinated and taught in the New Salem Tuesday Night Tutoring Program, which currently includes five tutors in addition to myself. Over the years from 1988 forward, I have written eight books, including a co-written book with Barbara. I researched and wrote two books for the Minneapolis Urban League (The State of African Americans in Minnesota, 2004 and 2008 editions). From the very beginning of my academic career, I have always wanted to be a K-12 teacher who trained like a university scholar.
In addition to continuing to run the New Salem Tuesday Tutoring Program, for the last ten years I have coordinated the New Salem Educational Initiative, which incorporates the Tuesday night program but also includes a seven-day-a-week small-group program, my written output of articles on K-12 education, and activist efforts to overhaul K-12 education.
The Day to Day Functioning of the New Salem Educational Initiative
Through the Tuesday night program, the small-group program, individual studies, and continued mentorship once students start matriculating at colleges and universities, I now have 125 students in my New Salem Educational Initiative network. My most time-consuming efforts go to serving the 65 students in the seven-day-a-week small-group academic sessions.
Students now typically enter the small-group program of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Grade K (kindergarten), following older family members who have been in the program. I perform all functions in the service of these students. I generate the curriculum and compile the materials for study, do the initial enrollment, attend to all office details, write grants and raise funds. Most importantly, I talk with and counsel family members of students, transport students to and from each academic session, and teach each two-hour session personally.
The relationships that I form with students are permanent. Once students are enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative, they remain under my academic instruction and personal mentorship forever. Students who enter after a few years in school typically are functioning below grade level in math and reading when they enroll in the New Salem Educational Initiative. My first effort, then, goes toward bringing a student up to grade level in these two key skill areas. This generally happens within an academic year or two. Once a student attains grade level competency in math and reading, she or he moves on to a college track course of study, reading and hearing about subjects across the liberal arts curriculum. Reading at that point becomes not so much a skill as a portal for advanced learning.
Students in the New Salem Educational Initiative acquire full grasp of mathematics skills pertinent to the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), fractions, decimals, percentages, graphs, tables, proportions, and ratios; and they learn all skills necessary for algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.
Students also acquire strong verbal skills, learning how to write cogent essays and to read complex material with acquisition of advanced vocabulary and ever ascending levels of college preparatory reading comprehension. They read a generous number of selections from the Core Knowledge books edited by E. D. Hirsch, and they move in logical sequence through additional material chosen to impart strong knowledge sets across the liberal arts curriculum (math, natural science, history, economics, psychology, fiction and poetry, and the fine arts). Students use this strong liberal arts background in reading material from newspapers and journals, in both hard copy and online. Middle school and high school students read Shakespearean plays such as Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, and Twelfth Night.
Students enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative all come from low-income families with multiple challenges. Currently, all of my students are African American and Hispanic. In the early years, students tended to enroll after having spent a number of years at the Grade K-5, Grade 6-8, and even the Grade 9-12 level in the Minneapolis Public Schools--- and had to make up significant and often severe academic deficits. Now, with so many younger students following older family members into the program, they tend to enroll at the Grade K (kindergarten level), and thus are always advanced for their grade levels. Either way, the economically challenged students of the New Salem Educational Initiative end up on a college track course of study far more typical for students at the middle and upper economic levels.
Principles Undergirding the New Salem Educational Initiative
Implicit in the above and more explicitly stated here, the principles undergirding the New Salem Educational Initiative, in accord with my views on K-12 education, are as follows:
For the United States to claim full democracy, all students should receive high quality education across the core subjects of the liberal arts curriculum. This is the same kind of education envisioned for good citizenship and high quality life by Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, who wrote of “common schools” for all. The abiding assumption in the New Salem Educational Initiative is that the logical acquisition of strong skill and knowledge sets promotes rich intellectual and cultural life, creates good citizens, and prepares the way for high professional and life satisfaction.
Students in the New Salem Educational Initiative come alive in the world of knowledge. They don’t think twice about whether they can achieve at a high level. They can tell that I have full confidence in their academic abilities. They move through challenging material in logical sequence. They work on a task until mastery is achieved, and then they move on to the next, higher skill. They witness their own success and they want more of the same. Just a few days into their participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, students see themselves as successful learners, and they take off toward ascending heights of skill and knowledge. Whatever challenges of material poverty they bring into the program, students gain a wealth of knowledge and they do not see poverty of any sort in their futures.
Students know that I will never go away. They see me week after week. They feel my love. Their families feel my love. I feel the love of these wonderful people in return. We all understand that we have entered into relationships that are permanent, that endure beyond the K-12 stage, that continue through attendance at excellent colleges and universities, that will endure into the stage of adulthood.
Students in the New Salem Educational Initiative succeed, because they have all of the ability to do so, and because I will have it no other way. I care about my students as if they were my own, and in the manner of excellent parents and teachers, I do anything necessary to assure that my students, my children, are successful. Mainly, I teach up a storm. I exert heavy-duty effort, in the application of what my West Texas pappy called “elbow grease.” The parents of students in the New Salem Educational Initiative care deeply, as all parents do, either in manifest expression or latent potential. I guide them either productively to apply the former or to tap and activate the latter.
The overhaul of K-12 education constitutes the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement. High quality K-12 public education will end cycles of poverty and turn societal liabilities into economic and cultural assets. Through my conducting of 17 two-hour academic sessions for groups of three to five students each, I ensure that my students will become productive and happy citizens.
From 6:00 AM until midnight on most days, I am working at tasks relevant to advancing the academic talent of my students or overhauling K-12 education. Through my writing, speaking, and activism, I am fully dedicated to inducing the Minneapolis Public Schools to become a model for how centralized public school systems can do the same.
Aug 26, 2013
Aug 20, 2013
Part One: Another illustrative Case to Consider in Observing the Principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Motion
Interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson, Melinda Parks, and Family on
19 August 2013
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part One: Introductory Comments
Recently I recorded the highly notable events pertinent to my interaction with Damon Preston and family on 13 August 2013, offering both an account with actual names for those of you with strong interest and connection to the New Salem Educational Initiative; and another version using data privacy pseudonyms for posting on my blog.
At the beginning of that account, I emphasized that each interaction with a student enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative offers enough compelling material to fill a book, and mentioned that a number of such encounters have been recorded in my compact book, Just Another Day at the Office/ A Day in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative: The Remarkably Unremarkable Events of September 29, 2012.
On 19 August 2013, just a week after that interaction with Damon and his family, there occurred another exchange of word, knowledge, and emotion that struck me as bearing particularly on the essence of the program that is the New Salem Educational Initiative. In this case, the familial residence had been stable, and there were more caring adults rallying around the young person, Ezekiel Jefferson, than was and is the case for Damon Preston.
The specifics of familial circumstances differ in certain notable ways but in each case, that centered on my interaction with Damon Preston, and that centered on my experiences with Ezekiel Jefferson, those involved are battling poverty and elements of familial dysfunction, even as they demonstrate a magnificent will to endure, survive, and seek a better life for their precious off spring.
As you read this account you will note certain key features of the New Salem Educational Initiative at work in a particular case, on a given day, and against the background of many previous days. You will note the permanence of my relationships with the students and family, the multiple roles necessary in providing a panoply of functions, the willingness to transport or travel as often and far as the moment requires, the love and respect that pervades the communications that flow between all of those residing in the family and myself.
So it is that in another five-part series I give another account of interactions that seemed especially salient in illustrating the principles that undergird the Initiative: those that unfolded on 19 August 2013 with a visit to the home of Ezekiel Jefferson, and his family, including little sister Anna Parks, mom Rolanda Jefferson, and grandmother Rebecca Jefferson.
Part Two gives the background to the interaction on that day, provided by the experiences that I had been fortunate to have with Ezekiel and his family over a four-year period.
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part One: Introductory Comments
Recently I recorded the highly notable events pertinent to my interaction with Damon Preston and family on 13 August 2013, offering both an account with actual names for those of you with strong interest and connection to the New Salem Educational Initiative; and another version using data privacy pseudonyms for posting on my blog.
At the beginning of that account, I emphasized that each interaction with a student enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative offers enough compelling material to fill a book, and mentioned that a number of such encounters have been recorded in my compact book, Just Another Day at the Office/ A Day in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative: The Remarkably Unremarkable Events of September 29, 2012.
On 19 August 2013, just a week after that interaction with Damon and his family, there occurred another exchange of word, knowledge, and emotion that struck me as bearing particularly on the essence of the program that is the New Salem Educational Initiative. In this case, the familial residence had been stable, and there were more caring adults rallying around the young person, Ezekiel Jefferson, than was and is the case for Damon Preston.
The specifics of familial circumstances differ in certain notable ways but in each case, that centered on my interaction with Damon Preston, and that centered on my experiences with Ezekiel Jefferson, those involved are battling poverty and elements of familial dysfunction, even as they demonstrate a magnificent will to endure, survive, and seek a better life for their precious off spring.
As you read this account you will note certain key features of the New Salem Educational Initiative at work in a particular case, on a given day, and against the background of many previous days. You will note the permanence of my relationships with the students and family, the multiple roles necessary in providing a panoply of functions, the willingness to transport or travel as often and far as the moment requires, the love and respect that pervades the communications that flow between all of those residing in the family and myself.
So it is that in another five-part series I give another account of interactions that seemed especially salient in illustrating the principles that undergird the Initiative: those that unfolded on 19 August 2013 with a visit to the home of Ezekiel Jefferson, and his family, including little sister Anna Parks, mom Rolanda Jefferson, and grandmother Rebecca Jefferson.
Part Two gives the background to the interaction on that day, provided by the experiences that I had been fortunate to have with Ezekiel and his family over a four-year period.
Part Two: Another Illustrative Case to Consider in Observng the Principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Motion
Interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson, Melinda Parks, and Family on
19 August 2013
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Two: Background of Ezekiel Jefferson’s Participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative
During Grades 2 through 4. Ezekiel Jefferson first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative during his Grade 2 year in school (the 2009-2010 academic year). Ezekiel quickly became one of my most enthusiastic students, waiting with a big smile on his face at the door of his home when I would arrive to pick him up late on Wednesday afternoon each week for his two-hour academic session.
Ezekiel showed himself to be precocious in learning most of his multiplication tables at an early age, and reading with great fluency and comprehension at grade level and above.
Ezekiel would occasionally have behavioral incidents at school in the course of his Grade 2 and Grade 3 academic years, but these were generally resolved to the satisfaction of school officials, Ezekiel’s family, and the other student or students involved. Also, teachers would sometimes indicate dissatisfaction with Ezekiel’s degree of diligence in turning in homework assignments, and this sort of dissatisfaction would occasionally lead teachers to underestimate Ezekiel’s actual ability in math and reading.
Rolanda and Rebecca would record such incidents and expressions of teacher concern, we would work through them, and as we moved forward everyone at school and home could see that
Ezekiel’s progress in his sessions with me indeed showed academic precociousness, with display of ability that placed him at grade level for all tasks and above grade level for some.
Ezekiel’s behavioral struggles became more serious in Grade 4 (academic year 2011-2012), his third year of enrollment in the New Salem Educational initiative. In the course of that period, Ezekiel’s biological father tried to become a factor in his life, after many years of neglecting any role connected to fatherhood. But the effort was egocentric on this man’s part, tending to come in the form of alcohol-fueled telephone calls that left Ezekiel confused and edgy.
Luckily, Ezekiel’s Grade 4 teacher, Linda Hubbard, is masterful at her craft, both pedagogically and emotionally. She had a strong sense of how to guide Ezekiel toward productive learning experiences and out of his discordant moods. She and I communicated frequently. She was always aware that I would be working with Ezekiel on Wednesdays, she appreciated the progress in math and reading that Ezekiel achieved under my direction, and she gave him assignments knowing that his work with me would maximize his mathematical understanding and reading comprehension.
Ezekiel was not so fortunate in Grade 5, and his life challenges became more serious. His teacher, Marsha Keller, evidenced a personal sweetness but none of the pedagogical flare or elevated empathic qualities of Linda Hubbard. She and I got along well enough personally, but this was not a case of two master teachers coalescing around the varied needs of a child the way that Linda Hubbard and I had done. From a practical standpoint, Ezekiel’s weekly acquisition of new math and reading skills occurred only in his academic sessions with me.
The turbulent period that was Ezekiel’s Grade 5 academic year (2012-2013) is given essential rendering in Part Three.
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Two: Background of Ezekiel Jefferson’s Participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative
During Grades 2 through 4. Ezekiel Jefferson first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative during his Grade 2 year in school (the 2009-2010 academic year). Ezekiel quickly became one of my most enthusiastic students, waiting with a big smile on his face at the door of his home when I would arrive to pick him up late on Wednesday afternoon each week for his two-hour academic session.
Ezekiel showed himself to be precocious in learning most of his multiplication tables at an early age, and reading with great fluency and comprehension at grade level and above.
Ezekiel would occasionally have behavioral incidents at school in the course of his Grade 2 and Grade 3 academic years, but these were generally resolved to the satisfaction of school officials, Ezekiel’s family, and the other student or students involved. Also, teachers would sometimes indicate dissatisfaction with Ezekiel’s degree of diligence in turning in homework assignments, and this sort of dissatisfaction would occasionally lead teachers to underestimate Ezekiel’s actual ability in math and reading.
Rolanda and Rebecca would record such incidents and expressions of teacher concern, we would work through them, and as we moved forward everyone at school and home could see that
Ezekiel’s progress in his sessions with me indeed showed academic precociousness, with display of ability that placed him at grade level for all tasks and above grade level for some.
Ezekiel’s behavioral struggles became more serious in Grade 4 (academic year 2011-2012), his third year of enrollment in the New Salem Educational initiative. In the course of that period, Ezekiel’s biological father tried to become a factor in his life, after many years of neglecting any role connected to fatherhood. But the effort was egocentric on this man’s part, tending to come in the form of alcohol-fueled telephone calls that left Ezekiel confused and edgy.
Luckily, Ezekiel’s Grade 4 teacher, Linda Hubbard, is masterful at her craft, both pedagogically and emotionally. She had a strong sense of how to guide Ezekiel toward productive learning experiences and out of his discordant moods. She and I communicated frequently. She was always aware that I would be working with Ezekiel on Wednesdays, she appreciated the progress in math and reading that Ezekiel achieved under my direction, and she gave him assignments knowing that his work with me would maximize his mathematical understanding and reading comprehension.
Ezekiel was not so fortunate in Grade 5, and his life challenges became more serious. His teacher, Marsha Keller, evidenced a personal sweetness but none of the pedagogical flare or elevated empathic qualities of Linda Hubbard. She and I got along well enough personally, but this was not a case of two master teachers coalescing around the varied needs of a child the way that Linda Hubbard and I had done. From a practical standpoint, Ezekiel’s weekly acquisition of new math and reading skills occurred only in his academic sessions with me.
The turbulent period that was Ezekiel’s Grade 5 academic year (2012-2013) is given essential rendering in Part Three.
Part Three: Another Illustrative Case to Consider in Observng the Principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Motion
Interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson, Melinda Parks, and Family on
19 August 2013
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Three: Ezekiel Jefferson’s Turbulent Grade 5 (Academic Year 2012-2013)
I attended numerous meetings at Kaufman K-5 School centered on Ezekiel’s behavioral incidents. A team formed at the school, composed of a counselor, administrative staff, Ms. Keller, a psychologist, a school liaison, and math and reading specialists. Ambitious plans were proposed for dealing with Ezekiel’s struggles, both academically and behaviorally in the school setting. But on the part of the team and in the implementation of the plans, there was insufficient follow-through.
Ezekiel appreciated my efforts in behalf. He would typically run up to me and give me a hug when I appeared at Kaufman for one of our meetings. But during our academic sessions, he would often be in a foul mood from his day’s experience at school. I strove mightily to keep Ezekiel on course academically, even as I became ever more important as a counselor to this troubled young person and his family.
Ezekiel’s lack of focus hurt his math skills acquisition ability during his Grade 5 year. He and I struggled even to maintain his fundamental skills pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The increasing importance at the Grade 5 level of operations and applications in fractions, decimals, percentages, rudimentary algebra, and basic geometry provided us with severe challenges in skill acquisition as Ezekiel wrestled with his mood swings and I refereed these wild emotional shifts tenaciously.
Ezekiel’s struggles came in the form of his biological dad’s misguided verbal utterances; chronic bullies and situational opponents at school; and the rivals that he perceived in the persons of his younger sister, Anna (Grade 1 during that 2012-2013 academic year) , and newborn brother, Denton. The latter was something of an unplanned surprise for Rolanda and for Drake Parks (Deontay’s de facto stepdad, also the father of Anna). Ezekiel was avowedly jealous of the claims that the younger children made on Rolanda’s attention.
Even as Ezekiel’s biological dad’s calls diminished, and Drake made strenuous efforts to strengthen his own role in Ezekiel’s life, Ezekiel’s Grade 5 year required an ongoing, titanic effort on the part of Ezekiel and his family just to survive emotionally and financially (Rolanda also lost her job in the course of these months) from week to week. As the last six weeks of school approached, Ezekiel’s behavior resulted in serious disciplinary action.
Expulsion loomed, but a kind of indefinite suspension (a less serious classification) persisted. Ezekiel did not go to class, but rather was given assignments to work on at home. A homebound teacher from the school district was supposed to monitor Ezekiel’s progress, but such a role became the promise that was never realized. I became Ezekiel’s sole source for academic instruction.
I often added an extra two-hour academic session per week during this very rough period in Ezekiel’s life. I typically lingered long after the session to discuss critical issues with Ezekiel, Rolanda, Rebecca, and Drake. Somehow, Ezekiel stayed on track with his reading skills at the Grade 5 level. In math, Ezekiel for the most part succeeded in demonstrating skill maintenance in the four basic operations and other fundamental skills absolutely necessary for mastery at Grade 5. As summer winds to a close, Ezekiel and I will continue to work toward full manifestation of skills pertinent to fractions, decimals, percentages, rudimentary algebra, and basic geometry so that he has maximal chance at success during Grade 6.
By the end of Ezekiel’s Grade 5 (2012-2013 academic year), he, Rolanda, Rebecca, Drake, and I breathed a collective sigh of relief. Ezekiel had survived. We all had endured. Ezekiel would never have made progress through this trying period in his life without his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, so that the adult members of his family were enormously robust in their words of gratitude. I thanked them in turn for their ongoing support of my efforts and for their persistence in addressing Ezekiel’s ongoing issues.
Ezekiel and his family unfortunately had an unexpected visitation from Drakes’s mother, arrived from Chicago, at the time of our 8th Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet on 4 June 2013. This was an occasion at which Ezekiel and sister Anna were both slated to demonstrate their reading (and in Anna’s case, mathematical) prowess. I lamented this absence, because the positive attention that Ezekiel would have received for excellence in reading would have been a considerable emotional boost after a tough year.
But this summer, we have kept things on track. During a two-week span when I traveled to the Southwest to visit family, Ezekiel continued to finish the book of readings on which he and I were working as the academic year came to a close. I frequently called Ezekiel to see how he was doing while I was traveling, and I continued with such check-ins for several days after my return.
Then came the remarkable day of 19 August 2013, the events and interactions of which are recorded in Part Four.
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Three: Ezekiel Jefferson’s Turbulent Grade 5 (Academic Year 2012-2013)
I attended numerous meetings at Kaufman K-5 School centered on Ezekiel’s behavioral incidents. A team formed at the school, composed of a counselor, administrative staff, Ms. Keller, a psychologist, a school liaison, and math and reading specialists. Ambitious plans were proposed for dealing with Ezekiel’s struggles, both academically and behaviorally in the school setting. But on the part of the team and in the implementation of the plans, there was insufficient follow-through.
Ezekiel appreciated my efforts in behalf. He would typically run up to me and give me a hug when I appeared at Kaufman for one of our meetings. But during our academic sessions, he would often be in a foul mood from his day’s experience at school. I strove mightily to keep Ezekiel on course academically, even as I became ever more important as a counselor to this troubled young person and his family.
Ezekiel’s lack of focus hurt his math skills acquisition ability during his Grade 5 year. He and I struggled even to maintain his fundamental skills pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The increasing importance at the Grade 5 level of operations and applications in fractions, decimals, percentages, rudimentary algebra, and basic geometry provided us with severe challenges in skill acquisition as Ezekiel wrestled with his mood swings and I refereed these wild emotional shifts tenaciously.
Ezekiel’s struggles came in the form of his biological dad’s misguided verbal utterances; chronic bullies and situational opponents at school; and the rivals that he perceived in the persons of his younger sister, Anna (Grade 1 during that 2012-2013 academic year) , and newborn brother, Denton. The latter was something of an unplanned surprise for Rolanda and for Drake Parks (Deontay’s de facto stepdad, also the father of Anna). Ezekiel was avowedly jealous of the claims that the younger children made on Rolanda’s attention.
Even as Ezekiel’s biological dad’s calls diminished, and Drake made strenuous efforts to strengthen his own role in Ezekiel’s life, Ezekiel’s Grade 5 year required an ongoing, titanic effort on the part of Ezekiel and his family just to survive emotionally and financially (Rolanda also lost her job in the course of these months) from week to week. As the last six weeks of school approached, Ezekiel’s behavior resulted in serious disciplinary action.
Expulsion loomed, but a kind of indefinite suspension (a less serious classification) persisted. Ezekiel did not go to class, but rather was given assignments to work on at home. A homebound teacher from the school district was supposed to monitor Ezekiel’s progress, but such a role became the promise that was never realized. I became Ezekiel’s sole source for academic instruction.
I often added an extra two-hour academic session per week during this very rough period in Ezekiel’s life. I typically lingered long after the session to discuss critical issues with Ezekiel, Rolanda, Rebecca, and Drake. Somehow, Ezekiel stayed on track with his reading skills at the Grade 5 level. In math, Ezekiel for the most part succeeded in demonstrating skill maintenance in the four basic operations and other fundamental skills absolutely necessary for mastery at Grade 5. As summer winds to a close, Ezekiel and I will continue to work toward full manifestation of skills pertinent to fractions, decimals, percentages, rudimentary algebra, and basic geometry so that he has maximal chance at success during Grade 6.
By the end of Ezekiel’s Grade 5 (2012-2013 academic year), he, Rolanda, Rebecca, Drake, and I breathed a collective sigh of relief. Ezekiel had survived. We all had endured. Ezekiel would never have made progress through this trying period in his life without his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, so that the adult members of his family were enormously robust in their words of gratitude. I thanked them in turn for their ongoing support of my efforts and for their persistence in addressing Ezekiel’s ongoing issues.
Ezekiel and his family unfortunately had an unexpected visitation from Drakes’s mother, arrived from Chicago, at the time of our 8th Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet on 4 June 2013. This was an occasion at which Ezekiel and sister Anna were both slated to demonstrate their reading (and in Anna’s case, mathematical) prowess. I lamented this absence, because the positive attention that Ezekiel would have received for excellence in reading would have been a considerable emotional boost after a tough year.
But this summer, we have kept things on track. During a two-week span when I traveled to the Southwest to visit family, Ezekiel continued to finish the book of readings on which he and I were working as the academic year came to a close. I frequently called Ezekiel to see how he was doing while I was traveling, and I continued with such check-ins for several days after my return.
Then came the remarkable day of 19 August 2013, the events and interactions of which are recorded in Part Four.
Part Four: Another Illustrative Case to Consider in Observng the Principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Motion
Interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson, Melinda Parks, and Family on
19 August 2013
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Four: The Specifics of the Interaction
When I arrived at Ezekiel’s home in far North Minneapolis, located on that atypically quiet and remote residential extension of Penn Avenue unfolding northward from 49th Avenue North (the more typical and well-known stretch runs from I-394 past Dowling), at 1:00 PM on Monday, 19 August 2013, my student of multiple years greeted me with a big smile. This was notable, because during the previous academic year, Ezekiel’s facial expression had more typically revealed the challenges and the associated stresses with which he was grappling.
His sister, Anna, came up to me beaming, with, “Me first, Gary!!!”
Not wanting to show favoritism, I looked at Ezekiel. “It’s okay. She can go first. But I finished the whole book!!!”
“You did!!?” I exclaimed, with genuine admiration. “All 45 readings?”
“Yep.”
“Wow, Ezekiel. That’s impressive! Okay, let me work with Anna first, then you can show me all the good reading that you’ve done.”
My academic sessions with Anna generally flow more smoothly that do those with Ezekiel. Like so many younger children participating in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Anna watched an elder sibling go off with me each week for academic sessions held at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, excitedly enrolling herself and doing the same during her Grade K (kindergarten) academic year of 2011-2012.
During Ezekiel’s trying year of 2012-2013, Anna’s second year of enrollment in the Initiative and her Grade 1 year in school, we began to meet in the Jefferson/ Parks home, so that all of us who constituted the most significant and caring adults in Ezekiel’s life could more readily compare notes at any time, even during the academic session itself. Anna herself at times missing piling into my car for the trip to the very well-appointed classroom at the church. But she is by personality generally open to adult decisions, so she was ultimately accommodating with regard to the setting for our sessions.
And, as on this particular day, she is invariably enthusiastic. She is also precocious in the extreme. In her studies with me during her Grade 1 year, Anna learned to perform additive and subtractive operations, carrying and borrowing respectively with up to three digits. This was at a time when at school she was, and would have continued to be, confined to simple single digit operations. When I met with her on this day of 19 August 2013, she and I reviewed those processes, and also followed up on a bare beginning that we had made in learning multiplication.
I often find that students even at the middle school and high school levels who have been enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and who are enrolling at a late stage in the New Salem Educational Initiative, do not have full grasp of the multiplication tables that they need to know to do algebraic equations and to work with various geometric formulas. The more I witness the success that even my younger students have in moving from addition to its cousin, multiplication, the greater is my frustration with the skill deficits manifested by latecomers to the Initiative.
With Anna, for example, I explained that if you have nothing of any number, then by definition you have zero. Then I explained that if you have one of number, you have an amount equal to that number. She immediately grasped those explanations and thus had 20 answers of the 100 responses that will be most important in learning the multiplication table up through the number nine.
Then I had her count by two’s to 20 and by fives to 50, running her then through an explanation then of how this skill relates to multiplying by the numbers two and five. Anna also comprehended this explanation immediately and- -- BOOM--- she was on her way with 40 answers of just 100 that she will need to display knowledge of all of the important operations in the multiplication table up through nine. Based On my experience with other students enrolled during their early years of school in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Anna will have full grasp of the multiplication table and could thus explain and give the answers to many middle school and high school students.
Next, Anna and I read a selection from Aesop’s Fables entitled, “The Young Crab and the Mother.” Sentence construction and vocabulary in the version of the story that we read are pertinent to the typical Grade 4 reading. I had Anna read the story aloud first, correcting her at times on words such as “sideways” and “tripped” and “obediently.” Then I read the story aloud, pausing at times for Amya to pronounce the most challenging words. She then read the fable back to me, which she did to perfection. And, having listened to me explain how the instruction, “Do not tell others how to act unless you can set a good example” is a moral, she gave me her own paraphrase, “Don’t tell someone else to do something unless you can show them how to do it,” correctly telling me that a moral is “somethin’ that we’re s’posed to learn and use in life.”
So Anna and I had quite a day. Through her enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative, she is a Grade 1 student performing at the Grade 3 and Grade 4 levels.
....................................................................................................
Now came Ezekiel’s turn. He proudly brought me his book and showed me that he had indeed read and completed questions on 45 selections. I had him pick two of these to read to me aloud. The first one was a story entitled, “Ups and Downs with Donut,” about a pet rabbit (name Donut) that disappears for a while at an amusement park but resurfaces to help family members conquer their fear of certain rides. I asked Ezekiel about several potentially new vocabulary items, but he needed only a slight clarification on the word, “hysterically,” for which he already had a general sense and had pronounced perfectly.
Ezekiel then selected, “Sea Dreams,” a poem about a child’s dream of creatures and other aspects of maritime life. From context, Ezekiel had figured out words such as “marine biologist,” “galore,” and “glee.” In terms of understanding the poem, Ezekiel additionally needed mainly my explanation of a reference to Jacques Cousteau. We talked about how the latter’s presence in the memory of the child rendering the poetic tale probably had not met Jacques Cousteau, so that his presence in the poem signaled that the child had in fact dreamed of the creatures and events rather than lived the experience exactly as conveyed.
I praised Ezekiel profusely for his level of reading comprehension, oral expression, and vocabulary. He beamed. I had intentionally begun with the skill of reading rather than math, so as to build his academic confidence as we turned to the skill that has for the last several months been more of a struggle for him. To my surprise, Ezekiel could correctly tell me the five most problematic products from the multiplication table ( 6 X 7, 7 X 7, 6 X 8, 7 X8, and 8 X 8), and he put those to use in practice exercises involving up to three digits top and bottom.
I let that be the extent of our work on math for the day. Ezekiel’s focus had been so astray for much of his Grade 5 year that recall of skills already acquired had at time been a difficult proposition. But today, his face was unstrained, his brain was clear, and he demonstrated that he is not at this time manifesting math anxiety. We will build on that foundation of math recovery as Ezekiel enters his Grade 6 year and takes on more applications of fractions, decimals, percentages, rudimentary algebra, and geometry.
Anna and Ezekiel each demonstrated what they had learned and reviewed for the day to grandmother Sandy. Both of them beamed smiles that at this point symbolize different aspects of the New Salem Educational Initiative. Anna’s smile revealed the confidence in the student who has been fully challenged at the earliest grade levels and knows that she can do anything that school requires--- and more. Ezekiel’s smile demonstrated the love and persistence that never go away, never give up, that follow a student through any travail that she or he endures.
I next caught up with mom Rolanda as she was talking to a friend outside. They were in fact discussing school options for Grade 6 students. Rolanda had been wanting to get Ezekiel into a charter school that would offer a smaller physical setting, new school staff, and a different student population. She asked me what I thought of Compton Middle School. I told her that several of my students had attended Compton and had spoken well of administrative policies and personnel at the school, and who in their reports upon my frequent questioning had described classroom instruction that I identified as often mediocre but occasionally rising as high as very good. I also told her that I thought if Ezekiel could handle a regular school setting, it would be a confidence booster.
Rolanda then spoke a line sounding a theme that I might have had to stress if she had not voiced the same sentiment: “And of course, Ezekiel will always learn what he really needs to by studying with you.” And then she continued, “Gary, you have been such a blessing to this entire family. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all that you have done. Anna’s skills are just amazing. Ezekiel is going to make it. And you have been such a help in just helping us to make it through some of the toughest months of our lives.”
I just smiled thankfully, and said, “You’re welcome, Rolanda. You know that I love all of you. Keep me posted as to how that back-to-school conference and the new student orientation at Compton go, and I’ll see you in a few days.”
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Four: The Specifics of the Interaction
When I arrived at Ezekiel’s home in far North Minneapolis, located on that atypically quiet and remote residential extension of Penn Avenue unfolding northward from 49th Avenue North (the more typical and well-known stretch runs from I-394 past Dowling), at 1:00 PM on Monday, 19 August 2013, my student of multiple years greeted me with a big smile. This was notable, because during the previous academic year, Ezekiel’s facial expression had more typically revealed the challenges and the associated stresses with which he was grappling.
His sister, Anna, came up to me beaming, with, “Me first, Gary!!!”
Not wanting to show favoritism, I looked at Ezekiel. “It’s okay. She can go first. But I finished the whole book!!!”
“You did!!?” I exclaimed, with genuine admiration. “All 45 readings?”
“Yep.”
“Wow, Ezekiel. That’s impressive! Okay, let me work with Anna first, then you can show me all the good reading that you’ve done.”
My academic sessions with Anna generally flow more smoothly that do those with Ezekiel. Like so many younger children participating in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Anna watched an elder sibling go off with me each week for academic sessions held at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, excitedly enrolling herself and doing the same during her Grade K (kindergarten) academic year of 2011-2012.
During Ezekiel’s trying year of 2012-2013, Anna’s second year of enrollment in the Initiative and her Grade 1 year in school, we began to meet in the Jefferson/ Parks home, so that all of us who constituted the most significant and caring adults in Ezekiel’s life could more readily compare notes at any time, even during the academic session itself. Anna herself at times missing piling into my car for the trip to the very well-appointed classroom at the church. But she is by personality generally open to adult decisions, so she was ultimately accommodating with regard to the setting for our sessions.
And, as on this particular day, she is invariably enthusiastic. She is also precocious in the extreme. In her studies with me during her Grade 1 year, Anna learned to perform additive and subtractive operations, carrying and borrowing respectively with up to three digits. This was at a time when at school she was, and would have continued to be, confined to simple single digit operations. When I met with her on this day of 19 August 2013, she and I reviewed those processes, and also followed up on a bare beginning that we had made in learning multiplication.
I often find that students even at the middle school and high school levels who have been enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and who are enrolling at a late stage in the New Salem Educational Initiative, do not have full grasp of the multiplication tables that they need to know to do algebraic equations and to work with various geometric formulas. The more I witness the success that even my younger students have in moving from addition to its cousin, multiplication, the greater is my frustration with the skill deficits manifested by latecomers to the Initiative.
With Anna, for example, I explained that if you have nothing of any number, then by definition you have zero. Then I explained that if you have one of number, you have an amount equal to that number. She immediately grasped those explanations and thus had 20 answers of the 100 responses that will be most important in learning the multiplication table up through the number nine.
Then I had her count by two’s to 20 and by fives to 50, running her then through an explanation then of how this skill relates to multiplying by the numbers two and five. Anna also comprehended this explanation immediately and- -- BOOM--- she was on her way with 40 answers of just 100 that she will need to display knowledge of all of the important operations in the multiplication table up through nine. Based On my experience with other students enrolled during their early years of school in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Anna will have full grasp of the multiplication table and could thus explain and give the answers to many middle school and high school students.
Next, Anna and I read a selection from Aesop’s Fables entitled, “The Young Crab and the Mother.” Sentence construction and vocabulary in the version of the story that we read are pertinent to the typical Grade 4 reading. I had Anna read the story aloud first, correcting her at times on words such as “sideways” and “tripped” and “obediently.” Then I read the story aloud, pausing at times for Amya to pronounce the most challenging words. She then read the fable back to me, which she did to perfection. And, having listened to me explain how the instruction, “Do not tell others how to act unless you can set a good example” is a moral, she gave me her own paraphrase, “Don’t tell someone else to do something unless you can show them how to do it,” correctly telling me that a moral is “somethin’ that we’re s’posed to learn and use in life.”
So Anna and I had quite a day. Through her enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative, she is a Grade 1 student performing at the Grade 3 and Grade 4 levels.
....................................................................................................
Now came Ezekiel’s turn. He proudly brought me his book and showed me that he had indeed read and completed questions on 45 selections. I had him pick two of these to read to me aloud. The first one was a story entitled, “Ups and Downs with Donut,” about a pet rabbit (name Donut) that disappears for a while at an amusement park but resurfaces to help family members conquer their fear of certain rides. I asked Ezekiel about several potentially new vocabulary items, but he needed only a slight clarification on the word, “hysterically,” for which he already had a general sense and had pronounced perfectly.
Ezekiel then selected, “Sea Dreams,” a poem about a child’s dream of creatures and other aspects of maritime life. From context, Ezekiel had figured out words such as “marine biologist,” “galore,” and “glee.” In terms of understanding the poem, Ezekiel additionally needed mainly my explanation of a reference to Jacques Cousteau. We talked about how the latter’s presence in the memory of the child rendering the poetic tale probably had not met Jacques Cousteau, so that his presence in the poem signaled that the child had in fact dreamed of the creatures and events rather than lived the experience exactly as conveyed.
I praised Ezekiel profusely for his level of reading comprehension, oral expression, and vocabulary. He beamed. I had intentionally begun with the skill of reading rather than math, so as to build his academic confidence as we turned to the skill that has for the last several months been more of a struggle for him. To my surprise, Ezekiel could correctly tell me the five most problematic products from the multiplication table ( 6 X 7, 7 X 7, 6 X 8, 7 X8, and 8 X 8), and he put those to use in practice exercises involving up to three digits top and bottom.
I let that be the extent of our work on math for the day. Ezekiel’s focus had been so astray for much of his Grade 5 year that recall of skills already acquired had at time been a difficult proposition. But today, his face was unstrained, his brain was clear, and he demonstrated that he is not at this time manifesting math anxiety. We will build on that foundation of math recovery as Ezekiel enters his Grade 6 year and takes on more applications of fractions, decimals, percentages, rudimentary algebra, and geometry.
Anna and Ezekiel each demonstrated what they had learned and reviewed for the day to grandmother Sandy. Both of them beamed smiles that at this point symbolize different aspects of the New Salem Educational Initiative. Anna’s smile revealed the confidence in the student who has been fully challenged at the earliest grade levels and knows that she can do anything that school requires--- and more. Ezekiel’s smile demonstrated the love and persistence that never go away, never give up, that follow a student through any travail that she or he endures.
I next caught up with mom Rolanda as she was talking to a friend outside. They were in fact discussing school options for Grade 6 students. Rolanda had been wanting to get Ezekiel into a charter school that would offer a smaller physical setting, new school staff, and a different student population. She asked me what I thought of Compton Middle School. I told her that several of my students had attended Compton and had spoken well of administrative policies and personnel at the school, and who in their reports upon my frequent questioning had described classroom instruction that I identified as often mediocre but occasionally rising as high as very good. I also told her that I thought if Ezekiel could handle a regular school setting, it would be a confidence booster.
Rolanda then spoke a line sounding a theme that I might have had to stress if she had not voiced the same sentiment: “And of course, Ezekiel will always learn what he really needs to by studying with you.” And then she continued, “Gary, you have been such a blessing to this entire family. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all that you have done. Anna’s skills are just amazing. Ezekiel is going to make it. And you have been such a help in just helping us to make it through some of the toughest months of our lives.”
I just smiled thankfully, and said, “You’re welcome, Rolanda. You know that I love all of you. Keep me posted as to how that back-to-school conference and the new student orientation at Compton go, and I’ll see you in a few days.”
Part Five: Another Illustrative Case to Consider in Observng the Principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative in Motion
Interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson, Melinda Parks, and Family on
19 August 2013
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Five: Concluding Thoughts
My interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson and his family on 19 August 2013 serves as another microcosmic representation of the key features of the New Salem Educational Initiative. Ezekiel Jefferson is now approaching his Grade 6 year. He has been enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative for four entire academic years and the subsequent summers. He knows that when I first told him that this program never ends, I am serious. He knows that I care.
I demonstrate this concretely by coming by his house just to check how things are going, even on days when we do not have an academic session scheduled, and by showing up time after time when he has messed up at school and conferences are called. Ezekiel knows that I have a close relationship with the key adults in his family and in his life. Ezekiel knows that Rolanda, Rebecca, Drake, and I constantly communicate. We talk face to face, we talk on the phone, we text, and we occasionally send emails.
Ezekiel knows that I have met and interacted with personnel at his school, that I understand their strengths and their weaknesses, can discern when Ezekiel himself is at fault and when those at school have let him down. He grasps the fact that I make these differentiations, and that I can tell when a teacher such as the superb Linda Hubbard has the skill to help him through his troubles while the maladroit Marsha Keller means well but is ineffectual time after time.
Ezekiel knows that I am an abiding presence in his life and the reason that he is as far as he is academically. He feels some remorse over the fact that he has not always made my mission easy, and that during his Grade 5 year he claimed a great abundance of my time that could have gone to other students, other families, my own family, other endeavors.
So with this proven credibility and unconditional love did I show up on the remarkable afternoon of 19 August 2013. Ezekiel could tell how far his little sister had advanced under my instruction. He was nearby listening as I conducted my session with her. He remembered his own promising beginning. And he wanted to show me that the ability was still there. Thus Ezekiel had worked diligently while I was away in the Southwest and was able to show me that he had read beyond expectations.
Having fallen short so many times during his Grade 5 year, he beamed at my praise for having completed his book of readings, for reading so mellifluously and fluently, for comprehending so well, for deriving from context a number of unfamiliar words as he built on the advanced vocabulary that had had built through his years of study with me. And he even showed that he was ready to get back into the swing of things in math, a subject that he once ruled but that had ruled him during his Grade 5 year.
Ezekiel, therefore, who could have dropped disastrously behind during his Grade 5 year and started down an all too frequent path of failure that can lead to many dangerous places in the middle school years and beyond---- has recovered his footing o a pathway that viably leads to success. His mom is proud and grateful. His grandmother is lavish in her praise for her grandchildren, and for me. Drake looks on and observes the possibilities in male attentiveness and strives to keep evolving as a role model.
In my ear resound all of the kind articulations of gratitude, and I can feel the great amount of love given to me for the love that I have given, as I walk away and get back into my old ’96 Honda.
I think about the unorthodox approach that I take to sustain the New Salem Educational Initiative seven days a week. I think about the academic quality transmitted, the love exuded, the relationships formed, the lives (very much including my own) enriched. I think about transporting the students, conversing with families, counseling troubled people, doing the necessary fundraising, writing curriculum and preparing materials that will challenge fertile young brains and ending cycles of poverty that have previously endured through many generations.
Then I cast my eyes back at Ezekiel, waving and beaming from the door of the family home. I feel the impact of another microcosmic day. And I am seized with the sense of the opportunity that exists in every single day of interaction with my students and their families, with this particularly affecting episode on 19 August 2013 just one of many that I have experienced and just a fraction of those yet to come.
Note: Data privacy pseudonyms are used for all people and schools cited in this five-part series of articles.
Part Five: Concluding Thoughts
My interaction with Ezekiel Jefferson and his family on 19 August 2013 serves as another microcosmic representation of the key features of the New Salem Educational Initiative. Ezekiel Jefferson is now approaching his Grade 6 year. He has been enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative for four entire academic years and the subsequent summers. He knows that when I first told him that this program never ends, I am serious. He knows that I care.
I demonstrate this concretely by coming by his house just to check how things are going, even on days when we do not have an academic session scheduled, and by showing up time after time when he has messed up at school and conferences are called. Ezekiel knows that I have a close relationship with the key adults in his family and in his life. Ezekiel knows that Rolanda, Rebecca, Drake, and I constantly communicate. We talk face to face, we talk on the phone, we text, and we occasionally send emails.
Ezekiel knows that I have met and interacted with personnel at his school, that I understand their strengths and their weaknesses, can discern when Ezekiel himself is at fault and when those at school have let him down. He grasps the fact that I make these differentiations, and that I can tell when a teacher such as the superb Linda Hubbard has the skill to help him through his troubles while the maladroit Marsha Keller means well but is ineffectual time after time.
Ezekiel knows that I am an abiding presence in his life and the reason that he is as far as he is academically. He feels some remorse over the fact that he has not always made my mission easy, and that during his Grade 5 year he claimed a great abundance of my time that could have gone to other students, other families, my own family, other endeavors.
So with this proven credibility and unconditional love did I show up on the remarkable afternoon of 19 August 2013. Ezekiel could tell how far his little sister had advanced under my instruction. He was nearby listening as I conducted my session with her. He remembered his own promising beginning. And he wanted to show me that the ability was still there. Thus Ezekiel had worked diligently while I was away in the Southwest and was able to show me that he had read beyond expectations.
Having fallen short so many times during his Grade 5 year, he beamed at my praise for having completed his book of readings, for reading so mellifluously and fluently, for comprehending so well, for deriving from context a number of unfamiliar words as he built on the advanced vocabulary that had had built through his years of study with me. And he even showed that he was ready to get back into the swing of things in math, a subject that he once ruled but that had ruled him during his Grade 5 year.
Ezekiel, therefore, who could have dropped disastrously behind during his Grade 5 year and started down an all too frequent path of failure that can lead to many dangerous places in the middle school years and beyond---- has recovered his footing o a pathway that viably leads to success. His mom is proud and grateful. His grandmother is lavish in her praise for her grandchildren, and for me. Drake looks on and observes the possibilities in male attentiveness and strives to keep evolving as a role model.
In my ear resound all of the kind articulations of gratitude, and I can feel the great amount of love given to me for the love that I have given, as I walk away and get back into my old ’96 Honda.
I think about the unorthodox approach that I take to sustain the New Salem Educational Initiative seven days a week. I think about the academic quality transmitted, the love exuded, the relationships formed, the lives (very much including my own) enriched. I think about transporting the students, conversing with families, counseling troubled people, doing the necessary fundraising, writing curriculum and preparing materials that will challenge fertile young brains and ending cycles of poverty that have previously endured through many generations.
Then I cast my eyes back at Ezekiel, waving and beaming from the door of the family home. I feel the impact of another microcosmic day. And I am seized with the sense of the opportunity that exists in every single day of interaction with my students and their families, with this particularly affecting episode on 19 August 2013 just one of many that I have experienced and just a fraction of those yet to come.
Aug 17, 2013
Part One/ Interaction with Damon Preston on Tuesday, 13 August 2013: The New Salem Educational Initiative in Microcosm
Part One/ Introduction: The Microcosmic Nature of My Interaction with Damon Preston and His Family on 13 August 2013
On the afternoon of 13 August 2013, I was struck by the microcosmic nature of my interaction with one of my students, Damon Preston (data privacy pseudonym, as all are all names in this five-part series). I have detailed one amazing day in the life of the program in the compact book, Just Another Day at theThe Office/ A Day in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative: The Remarkably Unremarkable Day of 29 September 2012. The book relates a series of events so varied as to have left my brain abuzz as, having begun interactions with my students at 10:00 AM on that Saturday, I turned my car toward home at 10:00 PM. The day was “remarkably unremarkable” inasmuch as each day in the life of the seven-day-a-week program that is the New Salem Educational Initiative unfolds with such substance as to fill a book.
The Tuesday afternoon of 13 August 2013, though, more clearly than any other day since the one that impelled me to record events in the compact book, resounded with powerful impact and presented a multiplicity of themes that struck me as particularly representative of the program from several different vantage points. In the three substantive parts ahead as you scroll down on my blog, you will read of my specific interactions with Damon, his mom (Evelyn Patterson), his de facto stepdad (Marcel Gifford), and his five year-old brother (Javon). These interactions are varied and illustrate in microcosm the essential features of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
You will read about the challenges faced by Damon and his family and get a sense of what life is like for a young person born to poverty whose parents nevertheless fervently desire a better life for their offspring. And as you read about the specifics of a residentially mobile family seeking to cope with immediate poverty and trying to find a way out, you will find out what makes my efforts in the New Salem Educational Initiative so successful.
With reference to the latter, you will gain a better understanding of the key programmatic features of the New Salem Educational Initiative: the enduring nature of the relationships that I form with my students and their families; my propensity to root my program in North Minneapolis but follow my students wherever they go; the high quality of academic content, with the first task to guide the student to grade level but from there move forward on a college preparatory course of study across the liberal arts curriculum; the exceptionally strong relationships that I form with the families of my students; the ongoing stream of students possessed of a strong desire to continue their study and their relationships with me, followed by multiple younger children in the family in line to participate in the New Salem Educational Initiative, as well.
Part Two of this series (next as you scroll down the blog) begins an account of the remarkable day of 13 August 2013, with an emphasis on how my interaction with Damon Preston and his family illustrates the enduring nature of my relationships with students and their families, and how I track them down as necessary and follow them anywhere they go.
On the afternoon of 13 August 2013, I was struck by the microcosmic nature of my interaction with one of my students, Damon Preston (data privacy pseudonym, as all are all names in this five-part series). I have detailed one amazing day in the life of the program in the compact book, Just Another Day at theThe Office/ A Day in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative: The Remarkably Unremarkable Day of 29 September 2012. The book relates a series of events so varied as to have left my brain abuzz as, having begun interactions with my students at 10:00 AM on that Saturday, I turned my car toward home at 10:00 PM. The day was “remarkably unremarkable” inasmuch as each day in the life of the seven-day-a-week program that is the New Salem Educational Initiative unfolds with such substance as to fill a book.
The Tuesday afternoon of 13 August 2013, though, more clearly than any other day since the one that impelled me to record events in the compact book, resounded with powerful impact and presented a multiplicity of themes that struck me as particularly representative of the program from several different vantage points. In the three substantive parts ahead as you scroll down on my blog, you will read of my specific interactions with Damon, his mom (Evelyn Patterson), his de facto stepdad (Marcel Gifford), and his five year-old brother (Javon). These interactions are varied and illustrate in microcosm the essential features of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
You will read about the challenges faced by Damon and his family and get a sense of what life is like for a young person born to poverty whose parents nevertheless fervently desire a better life for their offspring. And as you read about the specifics of a residentially mobile family seeking to cope with immediate poverty and trying to find a way out, you will find out what makes my efforts in the New Salem Educational Initiative so successful.
With reference to the latter, you will gain a better understanding of the key programmatic features of the New Salem Educational Initiative: the enduring nature of the relationships that I form with my students and their families; my propensity to root my program in North Minneapolis but follow my students wherever they go; the high quality of academic content, with the first task to guide the student to grade level but from there move forward on a college preparatory course of study across the liberal arts curriculum; the exceptionally strong relationships that I form with the families of my students; the ongoing stream of students possessed of a strong desire to continue their study and their relationships with me, followed by multiple younger children in the family in line to participate in the New Salem Educational Initiative, as well.
Part Two of this series (next as you scroll down the blog) begins an account of the remarkable day of 13 August 2013, with an emphasis on how my interaction with Damon Preston and his family illustrates the enduring nature of my relationships with students and their families, and how I track them down as necessary and follow them anywhere they go.
Part Two/ Interaction with Damon Preston on Tuesday 13 August 2013: The New Salem Educational Initiative in Microcosm
Part Two: The Importance of the Enduring Relationship and Going Where They Are
In terms of my interaction with Damon Preston's family on this particular day suggesting in microcosm key programmatic features of the New Salem Educational Initiative, there was first of all the matter of my route to Damon's’s residence. Readers of Just Another Day at the Office know that Damon comes from a family that has faced significant challenges relevant to psychological health and residential stability. In the early autumn of 2012, Damon’s mom, Evelyn Patterson, was working through a number of personal issues and had decided to sever a relationship that she had maintained for several years with Marcel Gifford, who had effectively been serving as Damon’s (very attentive) stepfather. Evelyn moved suddenly in late September 2012 without telling Marcel where she was going. I resolved to track her down.
When students enter the New Salem Educational Initiative, I communicate to them that they and their families will be building a relationship with me that is enduring. Typically, parents of my students let me know when their telephone numbers and residences undergo a (frequent) alteration. Evelyn, though, had made her most recent change with such suddenness that even my weekly appearances and forensic sensibilities had been unable to keep up with the shift.
But a week into October, Evelyn called me to let me know where she was staying, with the request that I not tell Marcel. Although I like Marcel and thought that on balance he was good for Evelyn, I abided by her request and started picking Damon up at the new apartment address in far South Minneapolis. The first two residences at which I had picked up Damon (one off Glenwood Avenue on Newton Avenue North, the other just off Olson Highway) had been on my most favored stomping grounds--- North Minneapolis.
Damon’s academic situation suffered for a while amidst the familial challenges, but in the course of the 2012-2013 academic year his math and reading skill levels stabilized once again as he remained absolutely dedicated to his studies with me as the most firmly constant and joyful experience in his life.
At the end of that academic year, Stacey told me ruefully that she was going to have to move again. Her rent, though covered largely by Section 8, had become too costly for her. The most decent inexpensive apartment that she had been able to find was in St. Paul, just northeast of downtown, northward a bit on I-35E. Stacey was greatly relieved when I affirmed that, if this was where I would find Damon, then that is where I would be.
So it was that on Tuesday, 13 August 2013, I set off for an eastern extremity of St. Paul. I preferably connect with students residentially situated in North Minneapolis. But the relationship is permanent. If they move, I continue to connect with them wherever they are. And, while I prefer to hold academic sessions at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in North Minneapolis, if I go as far afield as the eastern neighborhoods of St. Paul, I find other places to teach my students: the student’s home, a library, a quiet corner of a fast food restaurant; or, as on this given day with Damon, sometimes we pull up to a table in a park or playground.
Damon’s current apartment complex has a fairly nice playground with a picnic table suitable for study. This is where we held our session on the day of note. My arrival at Damon’s apartment, and my interactions with him and his family, featured numerous qualities that contributed to the microcosmic nature of the experience on this particular afternoon.
I record my observations and thoughts from the session conducted at the picnic table in Part Three of this series.
In terms of my interaction with Damon Preston's family on this particular day suggesting in microcosm key programmatic features of the New Salem Educational Initiative, there was first of all the matter of my route to Damon's’s residence. Readers of Just Another Day at the Office know that Damon comes from a family that has faced significant challenges relevant to psychological health and residential stability. In the early autumn of 2012, Damon’s mom, Evelyn Patterson, was working through a number of personal issues and had decided to sever a relationship that she had maintained for several years with Marcel Gifford, who had effectively been serving as Damon’s (very attentive) stepfather. Evelyn moved suddenly in late September 2012 without telling Marcel where she was going. I resolved to track her down.
When students enter the New Salem Educational Initiative, I communicate to them that they and their families will be building a relationship with me that is enduring. Typically, parents of my students let me know when their telephone numbers and residences undergo a (frequent) alteration. Evelyn, though, had made her most recent change with such suddenness that even my weekly appearances and forensic sensibilities had been unable to keep up with the shift.
But a week into October, Evelyn called me to let me know where she was staying, with the request that I not tell Marcel. Although I like Marcel and thought that on balance he was good for Evelyn, I abided by her request and started picking Damon up at the new apartment address in far South Minneapolis. The first two residences at which I had picked up Damon (one off Glenwood Avenue on Newton Avenue North, the other just off Olson Highway) had been on my most favored stomping grounds--- North Minneapolis.
Damon’s academic situation suffered for a while amidst the familial challenges, but in the course of the 2012-2013 academic year his math and reading skill levels stabilized once again as he remained absolutely dedicated to his studies with me as the most firmly constant and joyful experience in his life.
At the end of that academic year, Stacey told me ruefully that she was going to have to move again. Her rent, though covered largely by Section 8, had become too costly for her. The most decent inexpensive apartment that she had been able to find was in St. Paul, just northeast of downtown, northward a bit on I-35E. Stacey was greatly relieved when I affirmed that, if this was where I would find Damon, then that is where I would be.
So it was that on Tuesday, 13 August 2013, I set off for an eastern extremity of St. Paul. I preferably connect with students residentially situated in North Minneapolis. But the relationship is permanent. If they move, I continue to connect with them wherever they are. And, while I prefer to hold academic sessions at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in North Minneapolis, if I go as far afield as the eastern neighborhoods of St. Paul, I find other places to teach my students: the student’s home, a library, a quiet corner of a fast food restaurant; or, as on this given day with Damon, sometimes we pull up to a table in a park or playground.
Damon’s current apartment complex has a fairly nice playground with a picnic table suitable for study. This is where we held our session on the day of note. My arrival at Damon’s apartment, and my interactions with him and his family, featured numerous qualities that contributed to the microcosmic nature of the experience on this particular afternoon.
I record my observations and thoughts from the session conducted at the picnic table in Part Three of this series.
Part Three/ Interaction with Damon Preston on Tuesday 13 August 2013: The New Salem Educational Initiative in Microcosm
Part Three: The Power of the Well-Focused and Joyful Academic Session
Much can be accomplished by the adroit teacher and the receptive student in a short period of time. Teacher knowledge is crucial, and almost all students become receptive when explanations are clear, the love of learning on the part of the teacher is apparent, and the relationship between teacher and student is warm and joyful.
Damon has been a student in the New Salem Educational Initiative since his Grade 1 academic year. I have therefore known him for about four years. At this point, as Damon prepares to enter Grade 5 fully at grade level in both math and reading, with some sense on his part that he has needed my knowledgeable and loving assistance to overcome the life descriptors that have placed him at-risk, he trusts me and is always an open portal for the knowledge that I can pour into his bountiful brain.
While I was on a trip to visit family in Texas and New Mexico at midsummer 2013, I left a Grade 5 reading book with Damon. When I connected with him on 13 August 2013, I found that he had thoroughly read seven selections from the book and demonstrated generally good comprehension on these. As always, though, generally good comprehension is not enough for the level of content knowledge and vocabulary development that I want my students to have.
So, in a session that lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes at the occasion of this rather ad hoc meeting in August 2013, Damon and I went to work on a selection that read as follows:
>>>>>
Phillis Wheatley was a former slave who in the late 1700s became the first published African American poet. Born in 1753, she was kidnapped from her village in Senegal, Africa, at seven years of age and taken by slave traders to the British colonies in what would become the United States. She eventually was sold in Boston to Susannah and John Wheatley.
Slaves were by law not supposed to learn to read and write. Phillis Wheatley, though, yearned for knowledge. She began to try to read the Bible on her own, and to copy words down with a piece of coal in the Wheatley home. Susannah and John were kinder than most slave owners. Rather than punish Phillis for her efforts to learn to read and write, the Wheatleys encouraged her and taught her to read the Bible in Greek and Latin.
Phillis read everything that she could on the well-stocked book shelves of the Wheatley home. She loved to write poetry, and in time she successful published a book of poems in Boston. In 1776, Phillis sent one of her poems to George Washington. He was very impressed with her work. In return for her thoughtfulness in dedicating a poem to him, Washington invited Phillis to his home. Phillis used the opportunity of knowing such a famous person to write him a strong antislavery letter.
Phillis Wheatley died in that city in 1784. Later, more people read her poems, her fame grew again, and today her work can be found in many books.
<<<<<
To begin to understand what a poor knowledge base students enrolled in K-12 (in this case, Grade 5) public education inevitably have, consider just the first paragraph, given above. I had myself never gotten around to asking Damon about how centuries are calculated, and I know that this is rarely explained in the Minneapolis Public Schools. So I asked Damon what century the 1700s cover, to which he predictably but erroneously replied, “seventeenth.” I went through multiple examples covering the 1700s, 1300s, 1500s, 1800s, 1900s, and the years thus far of the new millennium to demonstrate that, for example, Phillis Wheatley was born in the 18th century, the century covering the years from 1701 through 1800.
I explained that the ending year of 1800 gives identity to that group of one hundred years as the 18th century, but that all other years running from 1701 through 1799 would be the 1700s. We discussed the 20th century with special care and noted that his own 2004 year of birth is in the 21st century and the third millennium A. D. Making reference to the latter necessitated an explanation of the terms B. C. and B. C. E. as referring to the years before Christ or the Common Era, while the traditional classification of “A. D.” means Anno Domino (“The year of our Lord”) or the years, decades, centuries, and millennia after the birth of Jesus.
I then asked Damon if he knew where Senegal is, and how it differs from Africa. I sketched out a map for him on my yellow pad and showed him where the nation of Senegal in West Africa, and we reviewed the seven continents and where these are on the globe. My next query, necessitating more explanations, concerned the British colonies, the British, Spanish, and Portuguese slave trade to the Americas, and the role of Boston as a key port for the arrival of slaves in the 18th century.
That was just the first paragraph, which will give you an idea of just what knowledge deficits most public school students bring to the task of reading. My mission in the New Salem Educational Initiative is to ensure that students get a good liberal arts education at the same time that they attain grade level and above skills in math and reading. Any notion that making sure that students are fluent readers with good vocabularies denies teachers the opportunity to teach other subjects is just so much muddled thinking. Reading is a skill but also the key vital conduit through which knowledge flows. When students are asked to read content-rich material, explained by a teacher with a keen grasp of knowledge from across the liberal arts curriculum, reading abets (and by all means does not impede) the acquisition of subject area knowledge.
So as we read together the other four paragraphs, I continued to explain any unfamiliar words, historical references, and other content-specific matters. Hence, we discussed subjects related to conditions of slave life, Greek and Latin as languages often used to render the Bible, George Washington’s roles as head general for the American revolutionary army and as president of the United States, and the difference between poetry and prose. We also discussed the terms “antislavery” and “abolition,” and in the course of our discussion Damon learned the meaning of the prefix, “anti.” And as we covered the final few sentences, Damon also learned what the terms, “free African American” and “free black” meant; and we discussed Phillis Wheatley’s place among African American poets to follow in her footsteps.
Discussion naturally turned then to poets who flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. I identified the heyday of that period of cultural flowering as lying in the 1920s, which gave me an opportunity to review the system of classifying centuries by asking Damon to identify the century encompassing the 1920s. He correctly responded with, “the 20th century.”
The book that I had bought for Damon cost only $4.00. All of my explanations were given orally or written on a yellow pad that cost about $2.00. On the latter inexpensive item, I included as vocabulary items the words “published” and “decline,” along with terms already mentioned for their historical, geographical, or topical importance. I also did a quick math review, generating four-digit additive and subtractive problems necessitating regrouping (carrying and borrowing). And just with spoken words alone, I ran Damon through his multiplication tables involving the numbers one through nine, a task that he performed to perfection.
Careful readers will understand just how rich and monumentally important this just over one hour academic session was for Damon. Whether one poses as a criticizer or a defender of public school systems, one must grasp the weakness of the knowledge base that most all students (especially those of poverty and familial challenge) bring from a public school education. I know that I must provide most of the real education that a student is going to receive, and toward that end, and in the service of that mission, I will follow my students wherever they go to make sure that they receive the education that they deserve.
On this Tuesday, 13 August 2013, it was of immense importance that the economically impoverished, residentially mobile Damon Preston gained even more confidence that when I say I will never go away, I mean just that. It was enormously important that he advanced his subject area education and learned words that he will never learn around the familial dinner table or, apparently, at school. When one embraces the sacred mission of educating a precious young student, it is incumbent upon the teacher not to make excuses but to offer solutions. Damon has known only solutions under my guidance. He knows that I will always find him, wherever he goes. He knows that I will appear consistently, dependably, forever. He has, after four years of participation in the New Salem Educational initiative, a growing confidence in himself as a person who, for all of his life challenges, will live a life of satisfaction and success.
Consider the power of Damon’s confidence and his certain success for himself, his current family, future generations who will no longer be stuck in cyclical poverty, and for a society that can observe a probable severe liability become a major asset.
Consider the power of Damon’s experience week in and week out, throughout his K-12 years, in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Much can be accomplished by the adroit teacher and the receptive student in a short period of time. Teacher knowledge is crucial, and almost all students become receptive when explanations are clear, the love of learning on the part of the teacher is apparent, and the relationship between teacher and student is warm and joyful.
Damon has been a student in the New Salem Educational Initiative since his Grade 1 academic year. I have therefore known him for about four years. At this point, as Damon prepares to enter Grade 5 fully at grade level in both math and reading, with some sense on his part that he has needed my knowledgeable and loving assistance to overcome the life descriptors that have placed him at-risk, he trusts me and is always an open portal for the knowledge that I can pour into his bountiful brain.
While I was on a trip to visit family in Texas and New Mexico at midsummer 2013, I left a Grade 5 reading book with Damon. When I connected with him on 13 August 2013, I found that he had thoroughly read seven selections from the book and demonstrated generally good comprehension on these. As always, though, generally good comprehension is not enough for the level of content knowledge and vocabulary development that I want my students to have.
So, in a session that lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes at the occasion of this rather ad hoc meeting in August 2013, Damon and I went to work on a selection that read as follows:
>>>>>
Phillis Wheatley was a former slave who in the late 1700s became the first published African American poet. Born in 1753, she was kidnapped from her village in Senegal, Africa, at seven years of age and taken by slave traders to the British colonies in what would become the United States. She eventually was sold in Boston to Susannah and John Wheatley.
Slaves were by law not supposed to learn to read and write. Phillis Wheatley, though, yearned for knowledge. She began to try to read the Bible on her own, and to copy words down with a piece of coal in the Wheatley home. Susannah and John were kinder than most slave owners. Rather than punish Phillis for her efforts to learn to read and write, the Wheatleys encouraged her and taught her to read the Bible in Greek and Latin.
Phillis read everything that she could on the well-stocked book shelves of the Wheatley home. She loved to write poetry, and in time she successful published a book of poems in Boston. In 1776, Phillis sent one of her poems to George Washington. He was very impressed with her work. In return for her thoughtfulness in dedicating a poem to him, Washington invited Phillis to his home. Phillis used the opportunity of knowing such a famous person to write him a strong antislavery letter.
Susannah and John Wheatley made clear in their wills that Phillis would be free at the end of their own lives. So after they died, Phillis was no longer a slave. She married a free African American man and moved away from Boston. She continued to write poems, but her popularity declined. Her marriage was not happy, and eventually she returned to Boston.
Phillis Wheatley died in that city in 1784. Later, more people read her poems, her fame grew again, and today her work can be found in many books.
<<<<<
To begin to understand what a poor knowledge base students enrolled in K-12 (in this case, Grade 5) public education inevitably have, consider just the first paragraph, given above. I had myself never gotten around to asking Damon about how centuries are calculated, and I know that this is rarely explained in the Minneapolis Public Schools. So I asked Damon what century the 1700s cover, to which he predictably but erroneously replied, “seventeenth.” I went through multiple examples covering the 1700s, 1300s, 1500s, 1800s, 1900s, and the years thus far of the new millennium to demonstrate that, for example, Phillis Wheatley was born in the 18th century, the century covering the years from 1701 through 1800.
I explained that the ending year of 1800 gives identity to that group of one hundred years as the 18th century, but that all other years running from 1701 through 1799 would be the 1700s. We discussed the 20th century with special care and noted that his own 2004 year of birth is in the 21st century and the third millennium A. D. Making reference to the latter necessitated an explanation of the terms B. C. and B. C. E. as referring to the years before Christ or the Common Era, while the traditional classification of “A. D.” means Anno Domino (“The year of our Lord”) or the years, decades, centuries, and millennia after the birth of Jesus.
I then asked Damon if he knew where Senegal is, and how it differs from Africa. I sketched out a map for him on my yellow pad and showed him where the nation of Senegal in West Africa, and we reviewed the seven continents and where these are on the globe. My next query, necessitating more explanations, concerned the British colonies, the British, Spanish, and Portuguese slave trade to the Americas, and the role of Boston as a key port for the arrival of slaves in the 18th century.
That was just the first paragraph, which will give you an idea of just what knowledge deficits most public school students bring to the task of reading. My mission in the New Salem Educational Initiative is to ensure that students get a good liberal arts education at the same time that they attain grade level and above skills in math and reading. Any notion that making sure that students are fluent readers with good vocabularies denies teachers the opportunity to teach other subjects is just so much muddled thinking. Reading is a skill but also the key vital conduit through which knowledge flows. When students are asked to read content-rich material, explained by a teacher with a keen grasp of knowledge from across the liberal arts curriculum, reading abets (and by all means does not impede) the acquisition of subject area knowledge.
So as we read together the other four paragraphs, I continued to explain any unfamiliar words, historical references, and other content-specific matters. Hence, we discussed subjects related to conditions of slave life, Greek and Latin as languages often used to render the Bible, George Washington’s roles as head general for the American revolutionary army and as president of the United States, and the difference between poetry and prose. We also discussed the terms “antislavery” and “abolition,” and in the course of our discussion Damon learned the meaning of the prefix, “anti.” And as we covered the final few sentences, Damon also learned what the terms, “free African American” and “free black” meant; and we discussed Phillis Wheatley’s place among African American poets to follow in her footsteps.
Discussion naturally turned then to poets who flourished during the Harlem Renaissance. I identified the heyday of that period of cultural flowering as lying in the 1920s, which gave me an opportunity to review the system of classifying centuries by asking Damon to identify the century encompassing the 1920s. He correctly responded with, “the 20th century.”
The book that I had bought for Damon cost only $4.00. All of my explanations were given orally or written on a yellow pad that cost about $2.00. On the latter inexpensive item, I included as vocabulary items the words “published” and “decline,” along with terms already mentioned for their historical, geographical, or topical importance. I also did a quick math review, generating four-digit additive and subtractive problems necessitating regrouping (carrying and borrowing). And just with spoken words alone, I ran Damon through his multiplication tables involving the numbers one through nine, a task that he performed to perfection.
Careful readers will understand just how rich and monumentally important this just over one hour academic session was for Damon. Whether one poses as a criticizer or a defender of public school systems, one must grasp the weakness of the knowledge base that most all students (especially those of poverty and familial challenge) bring from a public school education. I know that I must provide most of the real education that a student is going to receive, and toward that end, and in the service of that mission, I will follow my students wherever they go to make sure that they receive the education that they deserve.
On this Tuesday, 13 August 2013, it was of immense importance that the economically impoverished, residentially mobile Damon Preston gained even more confidence that when I say I will never go away, I mean just that. It was enormously important that he advanced his subject area education and learned words that he will never learn around the familial dinner table or, apparently, at school. When one embraces the sacred mission of educating a precious young student, it is incumbent upon the teacher not to make excuses but to offer solutions. Damon has known only solutions under my guidance. He knows that I will always find him, wherever he goes. He knows that I will appear consistently, dependably, forever. He has, after four years of participation in the New Salem Educational initiative, a growing confidence in himself as a person who, for all of his life challenges, will live a life of satisfaction and success.
Consider the power of Damon’s confidence and his certain success for himself, his current family, future generations who will no longer be stuck in cyclical poverty, and for a society that can observe a probable severe liability become a major asset.
Consider the power of Damon’s experience week in and week out, throughout his K-12 years, in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Part Four/ Interaction with Damon Preston on Tuesday 13 August 2013: The New Salem Educational Initiative in Microcosm
Part Four: Relationships with Families and Understanding of the Home Environment
The trip on 13 August 2013 to the new residence of Damon Preston was my third. I had in early July texted Evelyn, asking how the move had gone and inquiring as to the specific new address. She got right back to me, conveying the sentiment that the move went okay and letting me know the precise new address.
Soon after receiving this return message, I went by the new domicile, just to run a check-in with the family. I wanted Evelyn and Damon to know that I was serious about continuing to be a presence in Damon’s life, even with the family’s move to St. Paul.
So that check-in was the first visit to the new residence. The second came a few days later, just as I was about to visit my own family in the Southwest. At that time, I left the book mentioned in Part Two of this account and agreed with Damon that he would read at least five articles (remember that he went beyond this goal to read seven articles) while I was gone. Before I met with Damon and Evelyn, though, on my way into the apartment building, I ran into Marcel Gifford, the erstwhile significant other of Evelyn and de facto stepfather to Damon.
Marcel was elated to see me, and I was similarly glad to see him. Marcel had grieved over loss of contact with Damon when Evelyn had made her sudden move of residence to far South Minneapolis back in late September 2012. During the entire time (the remainder of academic year 2012-2013) that I had picked up Damon at the Southside address, Marcel had been physically absent and was never mentioned by Evelyn. I still do not know the details, but Marcel’s presence at this still newer address in St. Paul signaled to me that Marcel was at least back on speaking terms with Stacey and that he was present in Damon’s life again.
I inquired as to how Marcel was doing. He seemed upbeat, letting me know that among various gigs as a cook was one that appeared promising for long-term employment, a position that would have him using his skills on the food staffs at several sites of the Minneapolis Public Schools. I wished him well and went forth to my visit with Evelyn, Damon, and Damon’s little brother, Javon.
Then when I arrived for the third visit, detailed in Part Two above, I found that it was Marcel who was keeping Damon and Javon on that Tuesday, 13 August 2013, while Evelyn pursued a three-day-a-week job. I took high interest in this circumstance. When my academic session with Damon was complete, I let Marcel know that I had a bit of time and would work with Javon for a while. This was my first formal session with Javon, who for several years had watched as I picked Damon up for our sessions and had for a long time wanted to go. Evelyn had asked me about working with Javon even when he was four years old; now that he is five and about to enter kindergarten, I signaled that I would make the time.
I ran Javon through a quick oral basic skills exam for numerical sense and verbal ability. Javon had attended preschool classes but had not, as revealed in this exam, learned what he should have learned upon entry to kindergarten. Some of his ABCs were shaky, and he did not count as adroitly as students who have had the best early childhood training do these days. So I’ll have a heightened sense of responsibility to make sure that Javon gets off to the right start through kindergarten, ensuring that by the time he enters Grade 1, he will not only be ready but every bit as academically well-prepared as children from families living in, say, toney areas of Minneapolis such as Linden Hills and Lowry Hill.
By the time that I had finished this first session with Javon, Evelyn had returned to the apartment from work, and it was she to whom I gave the report at the door. She was gratified that Damon had learned as much as he had, and she was elated that I had found time to work with Javon. She said nothing about Marcel’s presence. But I have the definite sense that Marcel is back in Evelyn’s life, that he is living with the family again, and that he is poised to resume pertinent roles that he had been performing at both the first apartment off Glenwood and the second off Olson Highway.
Knowing the family situations of my students is crucial. I was always aware of how Evelyn’s distancing herself from Marcel might affect Damon. As the family went through its struggles in autumn 2012, I was extra careful to speak to Damon in a loving and concerned way, to examine his face for any signs of distress, and to be ready with quips to cheer him up, even as I nurtured his academic life and praised him for his accomplishments. Just as going to the new residence signals to the family that I will remain dedicated to our relationship, understanding shifting circumstances of family composition and definition is also important. Taking Javon on the same academic and life journey onto which I have thrust Damon tells the family that I care about each member and want to maximize the success of all of those in the up and coming generations.
In Part Five of this series I will give some overall reflections on the microcosmic nature of my interaction with Damon and his family on Tuesday, 13 August 2013.
The trip on 13 August 2013 to the new residence of Damon Preston was my third. I had in early July texted Evelyn, asking how the move had gone and inquiring as to the specific new address. She got right back to me, conveying the sentiment that the move went okay and letting me know the precise new address.
Soon after receiving this return message, I went by the new domicile, just to run a check-in with the family. I wanted Evelyn and Damon to know that I was serious about continuing to be a presence in Damon’s life, even with the family’s move to St. Paul.
So that check-in was the first visit to the new residence. The second came a few days later, just as I was about to visit my own family in the Southwest. At that time, I left the book mentioned in Part Two of this account and agreed with Damon that he would read at least five articles (remember that he went beyond this goal to read seven articles) while I was gone. Before I met with Damon and Evelyn, though, on my way into the apartment building, I ran into Marcel Gifford, the erstwhile significant other of Evelyn and de facto stepfather to Damon.
Marcel was elated to see me, and I was similarly glad to see him. Marcel had grieved over loss of contact with Damon when Evelyn had made her sudden move of residence to far South Minneapolis back in late September 2012. During the entire time (the remainder of academic year 2012-2013) that I had picked up Damon at the Southside address, Marcel had been physically absent and was never mentioned by Evelyn. I still do not know the details, but Marcel’s presence at this still newer address in St. Paul signaled to me that Marcel was at least back on speaking terms with Stacey and that he was present in Damon’s life again.
I inquired as to how Marcel was doing. He seemed upbeat, letting me know that among various gigs as a cook was one that appeared promising for long-term employment, a position that would have him using his skills on the food staffs at several sites of the Minneapolis Public Schools. I wished him well and went forth to my visit with Evelyn, Damon, and Damon’s little brother, Javon.
Then when I arrived for the third visit, detailed in Part Two above, I found that it was Marcel who was keeping Damon and Javon on that Tuesday, 13 August 2013, while Evelyn pursued a three-day-a-week job. I took high interest in this circumstance. When my academic session with Damon was complete, I let Marcel know that I had a bit of time and would work with Javon for a while. This was my first formal session with Javon, who for several years had watched as I picked Damon up for our sessions and had for a long time wanted to go. Evelyn had asked me about working with Javon even when he was four years old; now that he is five and about to enter kindergarten, I signaled that I would make the time.
I ran Javon through a quick oral basic skills exam for numerical sense and verbal ability. Javon had attended preschool classes but had not, as revealed in this exam, learned what he should have learned upon entry to kindergarten. Some of his ABCs were shaky, and he did not count as adroitly as students who have had the best early childhood training do these days. So I’ll have a heightened sense of responsibility to make sure that Javon gets off to the right start through kindergarten, ensuring that by the time he enters Grade 1, he will not only be ready but every bit as academically well-prepared as children from families living in, say, toney areas of Minneapolis such as Linden Hills and Lowry Hill.
By the time that I had finished this first session with Javon, Evelyn had returned to the apartment from work, and it was she to whom I gave the report at the door. She was gratified that Damon had learned as much as he had, and she was elated that I had found time to work with Javon. She said nothing about Marcel’s presence. But I have the definite sense that Marcel is back in Evelyn’s life, that he is living with the family again, and that he is poised to resume pertinent roles that he had been performing at both the first apartment off Glenwood and the second off Olson Highway.
Knowing the family situations of my students is crucial. I was always aware of how Evelyn’s distancing herself from Marcel might affect Damon. As the family went through its struggles in autumn 2012, I was extra careful to speak to Damon in a loving and concerned way, to examine his face for any signs of distress, and to be ready with quips to cheer him up, even as I nurtured his academic life and praised him for his accomplishments. Just as going to the new residence signals to the family that I will remain dedicated to our relationship, understanding shifting circumstances of family composition and definition is also important. Taking Javon on the same academic and life journey onto which I have thrust Damon tells the family that I care about each member and want to maximize the success of all of those in the up and coming generations.
In Part Five of this series I will give some overall reflections on the microcosmic nature of my interaction with Damon and his family on Tuesday, 13 August 2013.
Part Five/ Interaction with Damon Preston on Tuesday 13 August 2013: The New Salem Educational Initiative in Microcosm
Concluding Comments: Reflections on the Microcosmic Nature of My Interaction with Damon Preston and His Family on 13 August 2013
What was true of my interaction with Damon Preston and his family on 13 August 2013 is substantially true in every single encounter with a student and her or his family in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Each represents in microcosm the goals of the program and the features that make it possible for me to develop quality relationships, ensure high attendance and retention, and put young people who were originally floundering academically on a college preparatory track of study.
Damon’s case is particularly salient. Evelyn and Marcel had just moved to Minneapolis from Southside Chicago when they enrolled Damon in the New Salem Educational Initiative during his Grade 1 (2009-2010) academic year. Damon had been studying with me ever since that time, and this is true of all---every single one, no exceptions--- of my students. Not one of my students ever indicates any desire to discontinue, and the families parents and guardians of my students typically have younger family members lined up waiting to participate as they come of age.
This is true, as noted in Part Three, in the case of Damon’s little brother, Javon. Marcel, Evelyn, and I formed a bond almost immediately. This, too, is a key feature of the New Salem Educational Initiative. I love the parents of my students. I know the struggles born of history, both societal and familial, that they have endured. I admire them for wanting a better future for their children. And, make no mistake about it, all parents want such a future for their children. They may not have discovered a secure route, they may not themselves be well-educated enough to negotiate the public education system, they may not have the background to give their children academic assistance themselves. But to a person I always find that parents of children in North Minneapolis want the best for their children and deeply appreciate my efforts to provide a route to success.
So I have great relationships with the parents of these Northside students from challenged circumstances. They let me know when their cell phone numbers change. They notify me when they are making a residential move. They thank me profusely for showing up week after week and for the academic improvement that they witness immediately and as an ongoing matter. We hug. We laugh. At times, we cry. We feel part of the same family called Human.
The young people in the New Salem Educational Initiative know that I will never go away. Damon knows that I will follow him anywhere he moves, that I will provide him the minimal materials and the abundant knowledge that he needs to succeed, and that I will do this until he is in college and beyond. Little brother Javon has seen me week after week and has been chomping at the bit to participate. Now he is participating. One life comes to include many lives, and the future of succeeding generations becomes more promising. This is the power of love and concern and teaching that never goes away.
The academic instruction that Damon and now Javon receive is of the highest caliber. It is the product of years of study, keen intellectual pursuit, enormous curiosity about every aspect of the world, and a fervent desire to pass this knowledge on. Students such as these feel my own excitement about the world of learning. They absorb it. They manifest it. They pass it on.
So on this particular day of 13 August 2013, I drove my hail-beaten ’96 Honda to eastern St. Paul from my base in North Minneapolis, connected with the significant adults in Damon’s life, reinforced and advanced his skills in reading and math, provided an array of liberal arts academic content, maintained light-hearted banter against the backdrop of a life that has known multiple challenges, started little brother Javon on a successful academic track of his own, and left all concerned with no doubt whatsoever that I would return again, week after week, month after month, year after year.
My efforts in the New Salem Educational Initiative are undergirded with the programmatic features of enduring relationships, loving and empathetic communication with families, knowledge of familial circumstances and shifts in cell phone numbers and residence, flexibility as I track students down wherever they are on a given day, with all of this making possible our avowed mutual goal of exploring the exciting and vivifying world of knowledge toward life satisfaction and good citizenship.
All of this may be seen in motion and implementation as I interacted with Damon and his family on 13 August 2013. That interaction was composed of constituent parts in formation of a Gestaldt that is leading Damon and others toward a better life. The parts are lubricated with elbow grease, a huge dose of love, a great desire to know, and passion for the healing power of knowledge.
What was true of my interaction with Damon Preston and his family on 13 August 2013 is substantially true in every single encounter with a student and her or his family in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Each represents in microcosm the goals of the program and the features that make it possible for me to develop quality relationships, ensure high attendance and retention, and put young people who were originally floundering academically on a college preparatory track of study.
Damon’s case is particularly salient. Evelyn and Marcel had just moved to Minneapolis from Southside Chicago when they enrolled Damon in the New Salem Educational Initiative during his Grade 1 (2009-2010) academic year. Damon had been studying with me ever since that time, and this is true of all---every single one, no exceptions--- of my students. Not one of my students ever indicates any desire to discontinue, and the families parents and guardians of my students typically have younger family members lined up waiting to participate as they come of age.
This is true, as noted in Part Three, in the case of Damon’s little brother, Javon. Marcel, Evelyn, and I formed a bond almost immediately. This, too, is a key feature of the New Salem Educational Initiative. I love the parents of my students. I know the struggles born of history, both societal and familial, that they have endured. I admire them for wanting a better future for their children. And, make no mistake about it, all parents want such a future for their children. They may not have discovered a secure route, they may not themselves be well-educated enough to negotiate the public education system, they may not have the background to give their children academic assistance themselves. But to a person I always find that parents of children in North Minneapolis want the best for their children and deeply appreciate my efforts to provide a route to success.
So I have great relationships with the parents of these Northside students from challenged circumstances. They let me know when their cell phone numbers change. They notify me when they are making a residential move. They thank me profusely for showing up week after week and for the academic improvement that they witness immediately and as an ongoing matter. We hug. We laugh. At times, we cry. We feel part of the same family called Human.
The young people in the New Salem Educational Initiative know that I will never go away. Damon knows that I will follow him anywhere he moves, that I will provide him the minimal materials and the abundant knowledge that he needs to succeed, and that I will do this until he is in college and beyond. Little brother Javon has seen me week after week and has been chomping at the bit to participate. Now he is participating. One life comes to include many lives, and the future of succeeding generations becomes more promising. This is the power of love and concern and teaching that never goes away.
The academic instruction that Damon and now Javon receive is of the highest caliber. It is the product of years of study, keen intellectual pursuit, enormous curiosity about every aspect of the world, and a fervent desire to pass this knowledge on. Students such as these feel my own excitement about the world of learning. They absorb it. They manifest it. They pass it on.
So on this particular day of 13 August 2013, I drove my hail-beaten ’96 Honda to eastern St. Paul from my base in North Minneapolis, connected with the significant adults in Damon’s life, reinforced and advanced his skills in reading and math, provided an array of liberal arts academic content, maintained light-hearted banter against the backdrop of a life that has known multiple challenges, started little brother Javon on a successful academic track of his own, and left all concerned with no doubt whatsoever that I would return again, week after week, month after month, year after year.
My efforts in the New Salem Educational Initiative are undergirded with the programmatic features of enduring relationships, loving and empathetic communication with families, knowledge of familial circumstances and shifts in cell phone numbers and residence, flexibility as I track students down wherever they are on a given day, with all of this making possible our avowed mutual goal of exploring the exciting and vivifying world of knowledge toward life satisfaction and good citizenship.
All of this may be seen in motion and implementation as I interacted with Damon and his family on 13 August 2013. That interaction was composed of constituent parts in formation of a Gestaldt that is leading Damon and others toward a better life. The parts are lubricated with elbow grease, a huge dose of love, a great desire to know, and passion for the healing power of knowledge.
Aug 3, 2013
We Must Regard all Students as Members of the Human Family
Charged with the responsibility to provide an excellent education to all of our precious children, we have the responsibility to regard all students as part of the human family.
Too often, commentators of both the political left and the political right variously apologize for the inadequacies of K-12 public education or moan pessimistically about prospects for gaining better results, based on the putative failings of families mired in poverty. Many of those so apologizing or so moaning write as if they themselves are nestled in cozy domestic retreats or are engaged in the conceit of philosophical speculation from the safety of think-tanks.
From the perspective of one who is on the streets and in the homes of those about whom the lefties and the righties despair, the apologizing and the moaning have the aura of the surreal, reality skewed by the romantic ruminations of those more interested in sounding smart and professing concern than working toward solutions. And the solutions are available if we were to embrace, depending on the religious or humanist orientations of the commentators, either our religious or our civic responsibility, to consider ourselves part of the human family and thus to regard all children as our own.
This is my approach, pursued seven days a week, in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Increasingly, new students who enter my program are very young, typically younger members of families who already have at least one child (and often two, three, or more) in the Initiative. New participants understand, without even having to wonder, that they are now more active members of a family to which they already belong, a family that is an extension of their natal domiciles, the extended family that is New Salem. They know that the relationships that they form with me are eternal. They know this because they have witnessed other family members pack into my car every week and ride off for two hours of training for eventual performance at the highest levels in math, reading, and a broad and rich liberal arts curriculum.
These newer students tend to be in kindergarten when they first enroll. This means that they will study with me, converse with me, go to Shakespearean festivals with me, dine on dinners of my preparation, and demonstrate their stratospheric feats of academic skill and talent at the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative across the weeks, months, and years to come. These students will hear stern words from me about the consequences of faulty academic effort at school, homework not turned in, projects that are neglected.
They will rarely face those consequences, because they do not want to disappoint me, to hear a reiteration of those words; and over time they internalize the ethic of educational excellence so thoroughly that they want to succeed for themselves, their lives, their futures. My students feel my love, as all children do when nurtured by a caring adult. They feel in it in the way that I speak to them, ask about their lives, listen to their complaints, offer counsel when they are laden with the burdens of growing up in tough urban environments. They feel the love in my hugs. They know I mean it when I say something like “You know I love you, right?” because they are likely to reply, “Yeah, and I love you, too, Mr. [or, more typically, without the title of “Mister”] Gary.”
When a teacher deserving of the appellation embraces the sacred responsibility of educating all children who grace her or his life, that teacher regards each as that caring adult’s own. A teacher whose students are mostly those from challenged economic and familial circumstances does not ring her or his hands while uttering apologies for not being able to do the job or emitting moans that nothing can be done until all families are more nearly an approximation of perfection. She or he instead communicates that an enduring relationship has been formed, that the caring is as deep as if forged by bonds of consanguinity, that the standards are high, that the academic goals will be met, and all necessary help will be rendered in the ascent toward success.
To the degree that student failure in K-12 education occurs because of familial circumstances, those shortcomings are those of the human family of which we are all a part and for which we all bear religious or humanistic responsibility.
Too often, commentators of both the political left and the political right variously apologize for the inadequacies of K-12 public education or moan pessimistically about prospects for gaining better results, based on the putative failings of families mired in poverty. Many of those so apologizing or so moaning write as if they themselves are nestled in cozy domestic retreats or are engaged in the conceit of philosophical speculation from the safety of think-tanks.
From the perspective of one who is on the streets and in the homes of those about whom the lefties and the righties despair, the apologizing and the moaning have the aura of the surreal, reality skewed by the romantic ruminations of those more interested in sounding smart and professing concern than working toward solutions. And the solutions are available if we were to embrace, depending on the religious or humanist orientations of the commentators, either our religious or our civic responsibility, to consider ourselves part of the human family and thus to regard all children as our own.
This is my approach, pursued seven days a week, in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Increasingly, new students who enter my program are very young, typically younger members of families who already have at least one child (and often two, three, or more) in the Initiative. New participants understand, without even having to wonder, that they are now more active members of a family to which they already belong, a family that is an extension of their natal domiciles, the extended family that is New Salem. They know that the relationships that they form with me are eternal. They know this because they have witnessed other family members pack into my car every week and ride off for two hours of training for eventual performance at the highest levels in math, reading, and a broad and rich liberal arts curriculum.
These newer students tend to be in kindergarten when they first enroll. This means that they will study with me, converse with me, go to Shakespearean festivals with me, dine on dinners of my preparation, and demonstrate their stratospheric feats of academic skill and talent at the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative across the weeks, months, and years to come. These students will hear stern words from me about the consequences of faulty academic effort at school, homework not turned in, projects that are neglected.
They will rarely face those consequences, because they do not want to disappoint me, to hear a reiteration of those words; and over time they internalize the ethic of educational excellence so thoroughly that they want to succeed for themselves, their lives, their futures. My students feel my love, as all children do when nurtured by a caring adult. They feel in it in the way that I speak to them, ask about their lives, listen to their complaints, offer counsel when they are laden with the burdens of growing up in tough urban environments. They feel the love in my hugs. They know I mean it when I say something like “You know I love you, right?” because they are likely to reply, “Yeah, and I love you, too, Mr. [or, more typically, without the title of “Mister”] Gary.”
When a teacher deserving of the appellation embraces the sacred responsibility of educating all children who grace her or his life, that teacher regards each as that caring adult’s own. A teacher whose students are mostly those from challenged economic and familial circumstances does not ring her or his hands while uttering apologies for not being able to do the job or emitting moans that nothing can be done until all families are more nearly an approximation of perfection. She or he instead communicates that an enduring relationship has been formed, that the caring is as deep as if forged by bonds of consanguinity, that the standards are high, that the academic goals will be met, and all necessary help will be rendered in the ascent toward success.
To the degree that student failure in K-12 education occurs because of familial circumstances, those shortcomings are those of the human family of which we are all a part and for which we all bear religious or humanistic responsibility.
Celebrating the Academic Ascent of Monique Taylor-Myers
Sunday, 4 August 2013, will be a day for even greater celebration than is each day in the life of the New Salem Educational Initiative. For that will be the day when Monique Taylor-Myers (name assigned for data privacy reasons) moves from her high perch as a superlative student possessed of extraordinary math and verbal skills, toward the academic summit as a young person realistically aspiring to be the best student in the state of Minnesota.
Such things happen for a reason. Preparation begins years in advance. Monique first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 3 student. I observed immediately that she is very bright. But I also heard accounts from her mother (Janette) and grandmother (Sonya) that Monique struggled at times at school, that teachers identified her math and reading skills as languishing below grade level, and that there was at home considerable concern over these indicators of subpar academic performance. I also witnessed a couple of academic years go by before Monique's performance on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading met the goals that she, her mother, grandmother, and I had for her.
Then, at the beginning of Monique’s Grade 5 year, she reached grade level performance and began a steady, sure ascent toward the head of her class. Each week she mastered math skills above grade level and successfully took on challenges more typical of those at the Grade 6 and Grade 7 levels. Her vocabulary became ever richer; she even acquired an understanding of many words properly termed college level. She rarely missed a weekly academic session with me, and when she did, she rescheduled to another day.
By Grade 8, Monique entered a rigorous weekly session that I created expressly for her and two other students in the same grade who were also probing the academic heights. She and these two students began to train for SAT and ACT exams that even now, as students entering Grade 11, they will not actually take until the end of this academic year. Thus, they know full well what to expect, and their brains are full of skill and knowledge sets that maximize their chances for outstanding performances on these tests.
By the end of her Grade 10 academic year, Monique was distinguishing herself as a student soaring even above the academic eminences of her talented session mates. She consistently conjoined high intelligence and years of training under my direction in math, reading, and subjects across a rich liberal arts curriculum with meticulous habits of academic study and personal discipline. Thus it was that Monique earned designation at the 8th Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet as the best student of my (to date) four decades-long career.
And thus comes the special occurrence of August 4, 2013. Monique has agreed to weekly one-on-one tutorials, to be held every Sunday from 5:00 until 7:00 PM, in which she will train with me toward becoming the best student in the state of Minnesota. Monique will joyously and rigorously train at the university level in the skill and knowledge sets pertinent to math, literature, economics, psychology, history, government, fine arts and the natural sciences. When I feel that she would benefit from professorial expertise that ranges into the third and fourth years of college, I will arrange for her to meet with professors in advancement to that level of knowledge mastery.
Monique Taylor-Myers, on the cusp of her Grade 11 academic year, has at this point mastered algebra, geometry, and much of trigonometry. She has read, line by line, accompanied with my careful explanations, the Shakespearean plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Monique has for three summers running traveled with me and others from among my most advanced students to see most of these plays at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona.
In weekly academic sessions with me, Monique has in recent years studied economic topics pertinent to such matters as national debt and deficit, the stock market (understanding the vagaries of Dow Jones, Standard and Poor’s, and Nasdaq), the Federal Reserve, minimum wage, economic quarters and how these relate to recession and depression. She knows the difference between Shi’ites and Sunnis, she understands the movements of Al Qaida and the Taliban, she knows the social background that gave rise the vicious attack on the courageous Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai. Monique has explored in depth articles from major journals on topics ranging from the electoral college; to the nature of asteroids, meteoroids, meteorites, meteors, and comets; to forms of domestic violence from the perspectives of psychology and law; and many more.
This is a great deal of academic training for a young woman entering her Grade 11 year at school. And now she aspires to the very summit of academic achievement in the state of Minnesota. Monique Taylor-Myers is dwelling near the apogee of the intellectual heights that I envision for all of my students. The stunning success of Monique Taylor-Myers demonstrates clearly what can be accomplished as a result of the academic weight and ballast acquired when admirable qualities of personality and intelligence are given full rein in a program of highest expectations and excellence of training.
Monique Taylor-Myers is at the pinnacle of the aspirations that I have for all of my students, all of whom face economic challenges and issues pertinent to life circumstance. She demonstrates the possible. She augurs the future. Her personal qualities and those measures that have given rise to her accomplishments are cause for great celebration.
And, to be sure, she and I will be celebrating at 5:00 PM on Sunday, 4 August 2013, as we begin the most amazing chapter yet in the book of achievement that Monique Taylor-Myers has composed for herself as the most superlative student in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Such things happen for a reason. Preparation begins years in advance. Monique first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 3 student. I observed immediately that she is very bright. But I also heard accounts from her mother (Janette) and grandmother (Sonya) that Monique struggled at times at school, that teachers identified her math and reading skills as languishing below grade level, and that there was at home considerable concern over these indicators of subpar academic performance. I also witnessed a couple of academic years go by before Monique's performance on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in math and reading met the goals that she, her mother, grandmother, and I had for her.
Then, at the beginning of Monique’s Grade 5 year, she reached grade level performance and began a steady, sure ascent toward the head of her class. Each week she mastered math skills above grade level and successfully took on challenges more typical of those at the Grade 6 and Grade 7 levels. Her vocabulary became ever richer; she even acquired an understanding of many words properly termed college level. She rarely missed a weekly academic session with me, and when she did, she rescheduled to another day.
By Grade 8, Monique entered a rigorous weekly session that I created expressly for her and two other students in the same grade who were also probing the academic heights. She and these two students began to train for SAT and ACT exams that even now, as students entering Grade 11, they will not actually take until the end of this academic year. Thus, they know full well what to expect, and their brains are full of skill and knowledge sets that maximize their chances for outstanding performances on these tests.
By the end of her Grade 10 academic year, Monique was distinguishing herself as a student soaring even above the academic eminences of her talented session mates. She consistently conjoined high intelligence and years of training under my direction in math, reading, and subjects across a rich liberal arts curriculum with meticulous habits of academic study and personal discipline. Thus it was that Monique earned designation at the 8th Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet as the best student of my (to date) four decades-long career.
And thus comes the special occurrence of August 4, 2013. Monique has agreed to weekly one-on-one tutorials, to be held every Sunday from 5:00 until 7:00 PM, in which she will train with me toward becoming the best student in the state of Minnesota. Monique will joyously and rigorously train at the university level in the skill and knowledge sets pertinent to math, literature, economics, psychology, history, government, fine arts and the natural sciences. When I feel that she would benefit from professorial expertise that ranges into the third and fourth years of college, I will arrange for her to meet with professors in advancement to that level of knowledge mastery.
Monique Taylor-Myers, on the cusp of her Grade 11 academic year, has at this point mastered algebra, geometry, and much of trigonometry. She has read, line by line, accompanied with my careful explanations, the Shakespearean plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Monique has for three summers running traveled with me and others from among my most advanced students to see most of these plays at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona.
In weekly academic sessions with me, Monique has in recent years studied economic topics pertinent to such matters as national debt and deficit, the stock market (understanding the vagaries of Dow Jones, Standard and Poor’s, and Nasdaq), the Federal Reserve, minimum wage, economic quarters and how these relate to recession and depression. She knows the difference between Shi’ites and Sunnis, she understands the movements of Al Qaida and the Taliban, she knows the social background that gave rise the vicious attack on the courageous Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai. Monique has explored in depth articles from major journals on topics ranging from the electoral college; to the nature of asteroids, meteoroids, meteorites, meteors, and comets; to forms of domestic violence from the perspectives of psychology and law; and many more.
This is a great deal of academic training for a young woman entering her Grade 11 year at school. And now she aspires to the very summit of academic achievement in the state of Minnesota. Monique Taylor-Myers is dwelling near the apogee of the intellectual heights that I envision for all of my students. The stunning success of Monique Taylor-Myers demonstrates clearly what can be accomplished as a result of the academic weight and ballast acquired when admirable qualities of personality and intelligence are given full rein in a program of highest expectations and excellence of training.
Monique Taylor-Myers is at the pinnacle of the aspirations that I have for all of my students, all of whom face economic challenges and issues pertinent to life circumstance. She demonstrates the possible. She augurs the future. Her personal qualities and those measures that have given rise to her accomplishments are cause for great celebration.
And, to be sure, she and I will be celebrating at 5:00 PM on Sunday, 4 August 2013, as we begin the most amazing chapter yet in the book of achievement that Monique Taylor-Myers has composed for herself as the most superlative student in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
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