Chapter Five ----- Way Down, Moving Up

“Hey, Gary, guess what?”

“What’s that, Maria?”

“I’m making a 'C+' in math.”

“Woah, and that’s seventh grade math. Looks like all that work we did last year in sixth grade paid off. I’m very proud of you.”

I generally greet reports of any “C” type grade with exhortations toward “A’s” and “B’s,” but in Maria’s case, a “C+” represents such a large stride from where she was when she first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative that I didn’t have the heart.

At this point in my exchange with Maria, her brother, Mateo, a year younger and now in Grade 6, poked his head around the doorway off the front porch where Maria and I were standing.

“And you, Mateo? How are you doing at school?” I asked.

“Good,” came the brief reply.

“No, he’s not!” two younger family members tattled impishly.

“Oh, really--- So what’s that about, Mateo?”

“Well, I did get suspended one day.”

“Okay, we’ll talk about that. And are you doing your homework?”

“Some of it.”

“Okay, we’ll talk about that, too. Come on, you two. Let’s go get in the car.”

Mateo Duran (Grade 6) and Maria Salazar Duran (Grade 7) are part of the extended family that includes Orlando, Carlos, and Helena. I generally pick them up on Saturday evenings at about 7:30, when I return Orlando and Carlos back home. I was a bit earlier than usual, given the flow of the day in the absence of the usual session with Raul Sanchez-Ruiz.

The mother of Mateo and Maria is Carla Duran, sister to Helena. Carla, like Helena and another sister, Francesca (whose children, Susanna [Grade 5], Anna [Grade 8], and Eduardo [Grade 9] are also enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative]), works at Taco Bell. She seems tired a great deal of the time and weighed down by the circumstances of a life that may not be everything that she hoped it would be. Whatever relationship she had with the father of her children (there is a 6 year-old brother [one of the impish tattlers] of Mateo and Maria for whom I will also find space in the Initiative), he is not in the picture now. Carla depends a lot on her parents, with whom she lived until recently, for sustenance and to help her manage her sometimes wayward brood.

Over this past summer 2012, Carla and her children moved to the residence in the 3100 block of Chicago Avenue to which Helena, Orlando, and Carlos also recently shifted. For Mateo and Maria, this is fortuitous. Helena is a strong personality who is highly adept at negotiating the frequent changes in her own life, which at one point featured a trip back to Mexico for an extended time, for reasons (immigration? family exigency?) about which I was never entirely clear. She rides herd on Orlando and Carlos, and from what I have observed so far in this academic year 2012-2013, she does so with Mateo and Maria and the younger children gathered in the household, as well.

Mateo and Maria need this kind of firm adult presence. They first enrolled in the Initiative during last academic year 2011-2012. Mateo is highly skilled at math, though his indifference to homework and tendency to play the class clown have left him with gaping holes even in his academic strong suit. In reading, he caught up one full grade level from a depth three grade levels below. The English language as such is not his problem, except inasmuch as his mother and grandparents have almost exclusively spoken Spanish to him at home; his English language vocabulary lagged seriously upon entrance into the Initiative but is increasing now at a promising pace.

Maria faces the same challenges in acquiring full grade level skills in reading, but she is an adept verbal learner and during her time in the Initiative her vocabulary and comprehension have risen to near grade level. In math, I decided early on that Maria would have to follow a slow, steady arc to success, so disastrously was she behind when she first came under my tutelage. Upon entrance to the Initiative in Grade 6, she never had really learned how to regroup (carry and borrow) in addition and subtraction; she knew, aside from the zero’s and one’s, only those multiplication tables that flow from counting by two’s and five’s in the early grades; and operations involving division and pre-algebra were completely beyond her grasp.

So during my work with Maria during her first year of enrollment, I would always start with a reading assignment, work on vocabulary, praise her for her rapid grasp of new words, her appropriate use of these in sentences, and her applying these toward better reading comprehension. We then proceeded to a math task that she knew was far below grade level, and about which she was embarrassed. But I would coax her through the task, she would make incremental progress, I would praise her for this, and I would communicate my absolute confidence that she was on a long but promising path to full grade level competence in math.

I would then have Maria return to a reading assignment, which would induce the sequence of sincere praise and encouragement on my part that would leave her smiling and feeling that the steep hill toward academic accomplishment at grade level was scalable, after all.

My first academic year of work with both Mateo and Maria was, more than in most instances, a careful exercise in building genuine self-confidence. For my students, this means not recourse to the false praise and shallow self-esteem building that occurs in the public schools in the absence of any chartable academic progress--- but rather incremental mastery of concepts for which the young person can feel true pride and build the kind of confidence in self that has staying power.

I had many a heart to heart with Mateo about the vacuity of claiming “I don’t care” or “This is boring” when the real problem is fear of recovering academic ground and taking on a challenge. “I just don’t like to read,” Mateo would tell me frequently.

“What you really mean is that you don’t know a lot of the words, and reading is hard because of that. So I’m going to teach you these words, we’ll talk about the article, then you’ll be interested. Okay?”

“No,” he would typically say.

“Oh, yes it is okay,” I would reply. “Because it has to be. You are going to get where you need to be in school, and then you’re going to the head of your class. And you’re going to go to college and be whatever you want to be. Right?”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, you will, because if you don’t, I will look like this---” I would make a clownish frowny face.

“But if you become the student that I know you can be, I’ll look like this---“ And my face would become clownishly smiley.

“Oh, man, you are so lame,” Mateo would say, but he’d be grinning ear to ear. His spirits had risen, he would master the words, I’d guide him toward reading cues and enhanced comprehension, and he would leave each session feeling that reading was okay, after all. It was not having the tools to enjoy reading that had been the real problem.
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I continued to work with Mateo and Maria over summer 2012 when our schedules were in synchrony, but we missed connections a number of times, our meetings were fewer than was the case for the Shakespeareans and many others whom I saw more often, and there was much in the way of the rhythm of the previous academic year that we needed to reestablish.

I was pleased that both Mateo and Maria were eager to resume regular weekly sessions. This is inevitably the case with my students, but these two were relatively new to my program and upon entry had evidenced terrible study habits, variable moods, and a tendency to slack in the absence of external exhortation.

In Mateo’s case, on this meeting of 29 September, there were not nearly so many complaints about the laboriousness of reading. There was instead a genuine desire to move forward. And he looked with great anticipation for my facial overreactions to things that he said. I gladly obliged. At evening’s end, Mateo knew, for example, the disparate uses and meanings of “legend,” “myth,” and “allegory”; the relationship but differing grammatical functions of the words, “endure,” “enduring,” and “endurance”; the different pronunciations of the verbal and adjectival applications of the word, “alternate”; and the distinction between the oft-misused “affect” and “effect.” Mateo also gained clarification of the rules governing decimal points in additive versus multiplicative operations with decimals.

For her part, Maria became adept at using words such as “vivid,” “embellish,” “alliteration,” “agile,” and “monsoons.” In the case of alliteration, we had a good laugh over her example of “Maria moves marvelously.” And we struggled forward in math, overcoming her disappointment that her fairly good understanding as to how to solve simple equations (dutifully done on her homework as the topic currently introduced at school) did not eliminate the need to continue our sequential study of arithmetic processes that she had not been pushed to learn by teachers in the early grades. I had to expend quite a bit of verbal and demonstrative energy to convince her that such fundamental knowledge was necessary as she moved forward into algebra and geometry. But Maria came around. She and Mateo both departed the church that night excited about what they had accomplished, each claiming to have learned more new vocabulary words than the other. ……………………………………………………………………………………

The ego of the child from impoverished circumstances tinged with familial dysfunction can be very fragile. I think long and hard about the prevailing psyche of each child. Particularly because my academic goals for my students are so high, and their fear of failure is so apparent, the decision as to what incremental step to take, and at what pace, is crucial.

This is particularly true for students such as Mateo and Maria, who came to me at the beginning of their middle school years so far behind. But the careful decisions have been made, sequential learning has ensued, and, though I had to work harder and longer than I do in the case of many of my students to get them into the rhythm of the program, Mateo and Maria are now what I term “plugged in.” They are part of the system and the opportunity that is the New Salem Educational Initiative. They started way down, but they now see themselves moving up.

I delivered Maria and Mateo back home at about 9:30 PM that Saturday, 29 September. I gave my report to Helena, rather than Carla, who was asleep. I told her how much I appreciated the interest that she took in all of the children of her extended family.

“Maria has improved so much and she is convinced that she can succeed in math now. Please make sure that she does her homework every evening,” I told Helena.

“That’s what I’ve been doing, and she actually seems to appreciate me nagging her.  Mateo is a tougher case, but I’m working on him, too.”

Sometimes the kids hang close as I give the presiding adult the report for the night. But as Helena and I stood talking on the screened-in porch at the front of the house, Maria and Mateo had gone on inside.

“Hey, Maria,” I yelled through the open doorway, “keep up the good work.

“I will,” she yelled back, then in time appeared at the doorway.

“Is there a chance that you can get that 'C+' into 'B' territory?"
“I’ll try.”

“That’d be super. I’m proud of you now, and I’ll be even prouder.”

As if on cue, Mateo now returned to the doorway and slipped onto the porch to stand close to Helena and me.

“And you, Mateo, no suspensions, okay?”

“Okay.”

“For real?”

“Yeah, man.”

“And don’t make it so hard on Helena and your mom. What are you going to do about that homework?”

“Do it.”

“For real?”

“Yeah, man.”

“Okay, Mateo, because you know how that’d make me feel, right?”

He said, “Yeah,” and then flashed an excellent imitation of my clownish smiley face.

“Right. Good night everyone!” I yelled out and turned back toward my car.

I heard the sound of spirits lifted, the music of joy in accomplishment that played on my mental radio as I drove on to visit one more house before heading homeward.