Monique Taylor-Myers---
Ever Upward as the Best Student in the State of Minnesota
Personifying the Possibilities for Students Enrolled in the
New Salem Educational Initiative From a Young Age
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
There was a telling moment that came last July 2013, as I sat on the steps of the paternal (ClemMyers) residence of Monique Taylor-Myers.
This is just one house at which I visit Monique and pick her up for transport to our weekly two-hour academic sessions. I find her at least as often at her mother’s (Bernadette Taylor’s) home, and also frequently at the quarters of a very remarkable maternal grandmother Jenna Taylor).
We were sitting on the steps of Monique’s father’s house, reflecting on Monique’s rapid ascent during academic year 2012-2013. I was recalling a juncture at mid-spring of that year at which Monique had grown frustrated with the relative lack of diligence on the part of two other highly talented students enrolled in a Sunday evening academic session focused on rigorous college-level material.
The other students, while magnificent talents, had not been demonstrating the self-starting, highly conscientious approach that Monique takes to everything that she does.
By the time of this July 2013 conversation, Monique had performed the part of King Lear’s middle daughter, Regan, in our compressed version (with all original Shakespearean lines), of the Bard’s great play. She had also read Twelfth Night with me and gone with other students to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona to see this refined Shakespearean comedy. Her mood was very upbeat, and she was excited to delve into the ACT preparatory materials that I was leaving for her at the time of this conversation.
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What you’ve got to remember,” I told Monique, “is that in the same way that I am not like just another teacher [Monique smiled], “you are not like just another student. You are very special.”
Monique smiled, knowingly, confidently, determinedly.
“I love you, kiddo,” I said.
“I love you, too, Gary,” this extraordinary Grade 11 student, whom I had taught since she was in Grade 3, replied.
As splendid as our academic and interpersonal experiences had been, the very best, the most exquisite, were about to unfold before four eyes watching in wonder and gratitude.
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Monique and I agreed that she had progressed to the point that she would begin to meet with me one-on-one in an Oxford/ Cambridge style tutorial. Beginning in the late weeks of summer and extending to the present time (December 2013), I have guided Monique through a series of compact, densely informative courses in psychology, economics, political science, and world religions.
Monique proved to be even smarter and more intensely intellectually ambitious than even my high standards and abiding confidence foresaw. Topic after topic, she would grasp immediately. I would provide illustrative examples, we would explore applications in the workaday world, and this absolutely stunningly talented young woman would be ready for the next step.
Psychology
Thus, she quickly grasped Freud’s concepts of Id, Ego, and Superego--- understanding my examples in application to human behavior, then providing her own insights into how such ideas could viably be applied to act in everyday life. Also following Freud, we examined psychoanalytic technique, distinguishing psychoanalyst from psychiatrist from psychotherapist.
Angelic comprehended immediately my explanations of the Oedipus Complex and the Electra Complex. She discerned the difference between the human unconscious and the human subconscious, and how each of these must be understood as they relate to conscious behavior. And she grasped the Vienna middle class context in which Freud conducted his psychoanalytic sessions, considering what limitations these may or may not have placed on his observations and on the generation of his theories.
Monique then eagerly listened to my explanations of behaviorist psychology, culminating in the work of B. F. Skinner. She very rapidly grasped the difference between classical conditioning of Ivan Pavlov and operant conditioning of Skinner. She recognized immediately the explanatory content that I provided with regard to primary reinforcers versus secondary reinforcers, ratio versus interval reinforcement schedules, fixed versus variable reinforcement, the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment, and the sustaining power of positive reinforcement as a shaper of human behavior.
We then examined key findings of neuropsychology, how these have helped us understand phenomena as varied as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia; and the functioning of the brain of the psychopath and the schizophrenic. She learned the varying functions of right brain and left brain, and she grasped with astonishing rapidity the functions of numerous areas of the brain: cerebral cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, cerebellum, corpus callosum, and on and on.
We then discussed the long-standing differences between humanists and behaviorists, and we shared views on what research and observations from psychologists working from different perspectives have to tell us about nature versus nurture, and about free will versus determinism. We also reviewed the key concerns and research foci of developmental psychology, psychometric psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and abnormal psychology.
Over not more than three academic sessions, totaling at most six hours, Monique Taylor-Myers thus had grasped beyond question, and in fact upon much questioning by me, concepts that college students taking an introductory psychology course would be happy to remember from a whole semester’s worth of instruction.
But we had hardly begun, and the story gets much, much better.
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Monique and I next proceeded to move through the most important concepts in the discipline of economics.
Economics
Over about the same duration of three academic sessions and six hours, Monique and I moved through our compact course in economics.
Monique had no difficulty at all grasping the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics. She demonstrated her Immediate understanding by very quickly identifying consumer behavior, decision-making within an economic enterprise, corporate wages and prices, federal budgeting, Gross Domestic Product, recession, depression, and quarterly economic growth for proper association with either microeconomics or macroeconomics.
Monique quickly absorbed information as to how the technical definition of recession differs from the popular perception, when economic decline goes from recession into depression, the fundamental causes of the Great Depression, and how economic cycles have occurred over time. She quickly came to understand the difference between monetary policy and fiscal policy, inflation and deflation, deficit and debt. She rapidly grasped the difference in constituent membership within the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and Standard and Poor’s indexes, how stocks differ from bonds, and methods used to calculate daily rise and fall of indicators across these three key indexes.
With astonishing mental acuity, Monique sat in eager intellectual absorption of the key tenets of Adam Smith; Marx and Engels, and John Maynard Keynes. We discussed the location of the concepts of these thinkers on the left-right continuum, and we compared the concepts of these economic philosophers to the prevailing liberal-conservative views in the United States.
Our compact course in economics would most likely have moved even more quickly in response to this magnificent young talent’s mental agility, except that we read five articles of varying lengths that related the economic concepts that we had discussed to a daily stock market report, sequestration, debt ceiling, federal stimulus through bond-buying, and the debate over minimum wage.
Again, many college students would be happy to retain this much information, this time in two different courses, microeconomics and macroeconomics, that Monique had absorbed in six two-hour sessions over three weeks.
But this account of the accomplishments of Monique Taylor-Myers as we assess her progress into early December 2013 is just at the halfway point.
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The compact course in political science was even shorter in duration than the others, similarly packed with information but ever more adroitly absorbed by Monique.
Political Science
We reviewed political organization in historical context, considering decision-making as to “who gets what, when, where, and how” according to the hunter-gatherer historical stage, at the agrarian village stage, in city-state and early imperial systems, in feudal society, and in traditional monarchies.
We then explored political organization in modernity, understanding the importance of feudalism giving way to monarchy and monarchy gaining differentiation as to benevolent, absolutist, and constitutional forms.
We took a look at developments in the course of the 19th and 20th century and into the 21st century, as liberal democracy, fascism, communism, and democratic socialist systems become especially relevant.
Monique and I explored the key concepts of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Locke as they were adapted by Jefferson, Madison, and others at the founding of the United States. We studied the Marxist historical progression of political systems and analyzed the validity of the scheme. We compared Marxism in theory to the alteration in practice witnessed in Soviet, Chinese Communist, and Cuban systems. We discussed the evolution of the term, “liberal,” from the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill to the contemporary liberalism that developed from the New Deal forward.
Many of these concepts and clarifications thereof take considerable intellectual nimbleness. The terms “communist” and “liberal,” just to cite two examples, require a grasp of historical context and wariness of popular misconception that can take students some time to decode and internalize.
Monique handled all of this with aplomb.
So on we went to world religions.
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World Religions
We began with an overview of the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, discussing why these are labeled as such and belong together in historical context.
We then proceeded to examine Judaism in more detail, considering the patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob according to their momentous experiences and contributions.
Monique knows all of the Ten Commandments by heart, she understands the meaning of the Covenant, the importance of the Ark of the Covenant, the first exilic and post-exilic periods, the second exile in Babylon, and the meaning for the Hebrew people each time in return to the Promised Land.
Monique understands the historical division of Israel versus Judah in terms of political geography. She knows how Roman rule affected the history of Palestine, and how the diaspora came about. She knows also about the historicity of the term, “ghetto,’ and the ant-Semitism that eventually gave rise in unprecedented extremity to Hitler and induced the recognition of the nation of Israel in 1948.
Monique also comprehends expressions of contemporary Judaism. She knows the differences among Orthodox and Conservative and Reform practices. She understands Kosher dietary strictures. She knows the essence of the Jewish High Holidays and the less important but seasonally notable Hanukkah, and she knows what the bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah mean to Jewish males and females respectively.
Monique also understands the historical forces behind the Hebrew-Jewish emphasis on education, with study in Talmud-Torah schools often occurring after regular school ended. She can evaluate Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in terms of Jewish success at professions eschewed by Christians. She knows the Torah as the Pentateuch or first five books of the Bible, and she grasps the essence of the academic and religious traditions that resulted in Talmudic scholarship.
Monique and I both have a penchant for memorization as well as analysis; thus, we have memorized the books of the Old Testament, with the practical application of categorization into the Mosaic first five books, the historical books, the poetic books, and the books of major and minor prophets.
Similarly, we have memorized the books of the New Testament, for fun and for the practical purpose of categorization of the Gospels delivering our information on the life of Jesus, the Acts of the Apostles for information on the development of Christianity in the aftermath of the death of Jesus, the numerous Epistles attributed to Paul, the Epistles by other early Christian adherents, and the closing books of Jude and Revelation.
Monique understands the evolution from persecuted faith to official imperial faith that Christianity traversed in the Roman Empire, she knows how the Roman Catholic and Greek/ Russian Orthodox traditions diverged, the essence of how the papacy developed over history, and what the Protestant Reformation meant in terms of Christian sectarianism and the eventual proliferation of the great variety of Protestant denominations.
Along the way, Monique came to understand why, despite chronological categories of Before Christ (B. C.) and Anno Domino (“in the year of our Lord,” A. D.), Jesus actually most likely was born before 4 B. C. (when Herod died). And in examination of the Gospels she knows much about the life and teachings of Jesus, contextualized within the prophetic tradition quintessentially represented by Isaiah, and within the religious, political, and social realities of Jesus’s own times.
Thus far, Monique and I have spent three academic sessions for a total of six hours on such matters of world religions. We will now spend a projected three additional weeks on the religious traditions of Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism (Daoism), and Shinto. Angelic meanwhile is reading a distillation of Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad, which we will use as segue into polytheistic traditions in the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas.
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Monique Taylor-Myers: At Once An Extraordinary Young Talent and a Vision of the Possible in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Monique Taylor-Myers has learned all of this material over the course of about three months. In the months ahead, Monique and I will move through compact courses in world and American history; world and American literature; the visual and musical arts; the most important concepts of biology, chemistry, physics--- emphasizing the concepts most prominently omitted in school-based courses; and, similarly, we will explore those topics in mathematics that have been given short shrift in Angelic’s regular algebra, geometry, and trigonometry courses to date--- with our attention also trained on calculus up ahead.
Actually, Monique and I have already begun to study many of these just-mentioned subject areas at the college preparatory level, many of which have come up as we have taken on the subject areas detailed in the sections above. And did I mention that we paused in the midst of all of the compact course delivery to prepare Angelic for the PSAT that can bestow National Merit Scholar status? Or that we have read, almost incidentally, as a kind of midway break in our academic sessions, the exquisite play, Fences, part of the decalogy of plays by master dramatist, August Wilson, conveying the African American experience for each decade of the 20th century?
I have known Monique Taylor-Myers since she was eight years old, a Grade 3 student struggling below level of school enrollment in both math and reading. She caught up quickly, gained full grade level performance by Grade 5, and has been soaring ever since.
Monique lives on and traverses the meanest streets in North Minneapolis. Her grandmother, whom she often visits and in whose home she was living when she first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative, lives on the most drug-infested, gang-ridden street in the Metro.
Thus, Monique Taylor-Myers represents a case of personal triumph over the odds. But she also represents the potential of students for achievement if they start on a challenging academic track early in their K-12 experience. Not all students have Monique’s combination of natural talent, steady disposition, and enormous dedication. But all students who enroll in the New Salem Educational Initiative from a young age thrive academically to become viable candidates for matriculation at high quality colleges and universities.
So Monique Taylor-Myers, whose participation in the New Salem Educational initiative encompasses all but two years of the program’s existence, represents not only a case of astounding individual success, but also the vision of what all students can achieve if they are given love, enduring commitment, and the highest quality academic training from early in their K-12 experience, through the high school years, and on to the best colleges and universities in the land.
Students of all economic and social identifiers can succeed.
We await not the emergence of young people of promise, but the attention of enough caring adults willing to nurture that promise.
Dec 18, 2013
Felicia Benitez--- Overcoming Multiple Obstacles, Achieving Enduring Success
Felicia Benitez---
Overcoming Multiple Obstacles, Achieving Enduring Success
Promoting the Persistent Effort Necessary for the Impoverished English Language Learner Through the Programmatic Features of the New Salem Educational initiative
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
I first met Felicia Benitez in the spring of 2008, on the steps of the dilapidated home of Sonia Garcia. Sonia had three students enrolled in the program, all of whom were friends of Felicia and her sister, Melinda Benitez. The location of Sonia’s home at the corner of 24th Avenue North and 6th Street North places it in one of the most impoverished, crime-ridden, gang-infested areas of North Minneapolis.
Sonia was oh so very happy to see her three children go off with me for weekly two-hour academic sessions as students enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. The children, Corazon Garcia (then in Grade 8), Hernando Cruz (Grade 6), and Anna (Grade K [kindergarten]), were all thriving on the basis of a big boost in their academic performance at school in the course of just a few months’ participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
I met Felica (then in Grade 5) and her sister, Melinda (Grade 4) as I picked up Sonia’s three children for transport a few blocks away to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, where I hold most academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- the very few exceptions being sessions held in the homes of students.
I looked at Felicia’s eager face and asked, “I’m Gary, the guy who runs this program. What’s your name?”
Felicia introduced herself and Melinda.
“Would you and Felicia be interested in participating in the program?” I asked.
I thought that Felicia’s smile would expand toward Robbinsdale to the west, all the way to the Mississippi to the east. She radiated joy at being asked. Melinda also indicated that she would love to participate.
And thus it was that these two began to attend an academic session on Wednesday evenings from 7:00 until 9:00 PM that remains their time of joint attendance now, in December 2013. As will be explained, though, Felicia now also attends a very important session on Sunday evenings at a similar time of the day.
Felicia and Melindda proved to be my most enthusiastic students, quite a feat in a program in which enthusiasm on my part and that of the students runs very high. The enthusiasm of Felicia and Melinda was a godsend, because the academic deficits with which they entered the New Salem Educational initiative were severe, and their life challenges were multiple.
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The Great Effort to Attain Grade Level Academic Performance
Felicia and Melinda were at the time classified as English Language Learners at Nellie Stone Johnson K-8 School, located at 26th Avenue North and Lyndale Avenue North, close both to Sonia’s home and to the church. These two sisters were at the time living on Queen Avenue North, in an area north of Lowry Avenue North and west of Fremont Avenue North, a street like so many on the Northside on which multiple human dramas are tensely played out every day. From the beginning, when I would arrive to pick up Felicia and Melinda, they would be peeking through the windows of their home, chomping at the bit for me to pull up. Seeing me, they would dash to my car.
Once at New Salem, the sisters would pull out their homework and immediately get to work, calling frequently for my assistance in their desire to master whatever math or reading or subject area task they had for the evening. There was much catching up do for both the Grade 4 Melinda and the Grade 5 Felicia. Neither knew their multiplication tables, a traditionally Grade 3 skill. The world of long division was a mystery. Felicia had most operations and applications of addition and subtraction under control, but Melinda still struggled even operationally with subtraction, and when called upon to perform applicative tasks, consistently sat with a blank look on her face.
So I put the sisters through a logical sequence of exercises designed to speed skill acquisition, and they responded with alacrity. By the end of that academic year of 2007-2008, Melinda and Felicia were on their way to mastery of the math skills needed to attain grade level performance. They would need academic year 2008-2009 to attain full mathematic competence, but their progress was dramatic. And by the end of that latter academic year, when Melinda was in Grade 5 and Felicia in Grade 6, the two sisters were consistently demonstrating through mastery of applications in word problems, necessitating decisions as to operation needed and strategy to be utilized, that they had securely internalized the skills and the logic necessary for practical application.
Reading was another matter. Melinda gave evidence of very severe deficits, languishing at a Grade 3 level of vocabulary development, even with highly aggressive remediation under my direction for many months during academic years 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Her reading comprehension was also substandard, even when she understood the vocabulary in a reading that I would choose to match her actual skill level.
To her credit, though, Melinda is a workhorse. She plugs ahead and never lets frustration get the best of her. Nothing comes easy for Melinda, but she accepts this as a fact of her life and does what she needs to do to demonstrate viable performance at grade level. Thus it was that by Melinda’s Grade 6 year of school enrollment (2009-2010), she had greatly increased her vocabulary and, notably, when I would assist her with vocabulary on homework assignments requiring reading (whether in language arts, social science, or natural science) she was giving evidence of comprehension enhanced enough to achieve a grade of “B” or better on the assignment. Melinda’s grades in school rose steadily, so that by that academic year of 2009-2012, she was receiving mostly “B’s” in her classes, with the occasional “A” as well as the occasional “C” sprinkled in.
Felicia has always been a different case. Felicia is much intellectually quicker than Melinda, and she has avid interest in subjects across the liberal arts curriculum. In the course of academic year 2009-2010, her third year of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Felicia was consistently achieving “A’s” and “B’s” in school, with the former coming to dominate. Felicia loved math at that point, and she showed great aptitude for the subject, easily grasping concepts upon my explanation. Middle school mathematics tasks pertinent to percentages, ratios, proportions, and fundamental algebra provided no obstacle for Felicia, so that by the time of her Grade 8 year she was in a position to take on high school math on a solid foundation of skill development.
And she eagerly completed exercises in explicit vocabulary development that I provided for her, also keeping a list of terms encountered in homework. Her vocabulary grew enormously throughout her Grade 5, 6, and 7 academic years. Felicia, unlike Melinda at the beginning, had always demonstrated excellent comprehension when she was in control of the vocabulary necessary to understand a given assignment. As a student bearing the label of English Language Learner (ELL) for speaking absolutely no English at home, Felicia’s abiding task then--- and now--- concerns accumulation and accumulation and then more accumulation--- of the vocabulary that young people residing in upper middle class, English-speaking homes often assume as a kind of birthright.
By the end of her Grade 7 year, Felicia was emerging as one of the most intellectually engaged, advanced students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. She was pouring through books in the Core Knowledge series edited by E. D. Hirsch, exploring a wide range of topics in history, literature, science, and the fine arts.
Given a grasp of the relevant vocabulary, Felicia was perfectly capable of taking on readings relevant, for example, to the Spanish-American War in the context of world imperialism; the emergence of Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Donatello to challenge the staid assumptions that had governed medieval art; the development of the novel in the course of work produced by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Toni Morrison; and altered perspectives on humankind’s behavioral motivations and cosmic location necessitated by revelations in the work of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.
Thus it was that at the beginning of her Grade 8 year, I invited Felcia into a newly created class for joint attendance with two other intellectually astute and highly motivated eighth grade students, Monique Taylor-Myers and Lana Okoye.
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Advancement in the College Preparatory Experience
Monique, Lana, and Felicia met during their Grade 8, 9, and 10 academic years at 7:00-9:00 PM to begin aggressive preparation for the ACT, engage in an ambitious exercise in explicit vocabulary development, and to read material from across the liberal arts curriculum, frequently cued by current items in the news.
Topics ranged from the courageous quest of Malala Yousafsai for the proper education of Muslim females in Pakistan and elsewhere; the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage; the vagaries of the stock market as witnessed in the responses of investors in companies listed on the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and Standard and Poor’s; the origins and current functioning of the electoral college as observed in the presidential election of 2012; and the difference among meteors, meteorites, and asteroids as relevant to incidents in Russia and in the cosmos in relatively close proximity to earth. These students also read numerous Shakespearean plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; and they traveled with me in the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013 to see the former three plays at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona. In autumn of 2012 Monique, Lana, and Felicia went with me to see Hamlet at the Jungle Theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.
At banquets in three successive years, the students did both soliloquys from Shakespeare and renderings of great African American leaders such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Then, in one of our most ambitious undertakings to date, Monique, Lana, and Felicia had the major roles and were accompanied by seven other students in minor roles in performing my condensation of King Lear, with all original Elizabethan language.
Imagine how proud Felicia and her family were when this highly talented young woman shone mightily as Cordelia, the youngest daughter whom King Lear loves the most but vindictively treats so abominably.
This English Language Learner had come a long, long way since first enrolling as a Grade 5 student for participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
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The Continuing Challenge at Grade 11
As talented and intellectually engaged as Felicia is, circumstances of personality and life itself gave evidence of a situation in which she was not going to be able keep up with the most illustrious Monique Taylor-Myers. Monique has at least as many economic challenges as does Felicia, but she is an enormously self-starting and disciplined student, so that she makes the most of her formal school time. Monique learns more in her academic sessions with me, but she applies herself to the fullest at school and has soared to a 3.967 GPA.
Felicia is much more scattered in her own study routine, and she is not nearly as diligent in keeping up with homework assignments as she should be. So advanced did she reveal herself to be to me in her Sunday evening sessions, and so very intellectually astute, that her relative lack of engagement with her high school classes took a while for me to realize.
Felicia has always maintained attendance on Wednesday evenings with Melinda, even as she rose to the challenge of the Sunday evening class. Now, in those Wednesday classes, we work strictly on homework, and I go long and hard on the necessity of follow-through on the details of the high school experience so as to build the kind of record attractive to good colleges and universities.
On Sunday, I now work with Lana, Felicia, and Monique separately. For a variety of reasons, Lana is now working with me in a kind of independent study status. I meet with Monique in the late afternoon on Sunday according to an intense Oxford/ Cambridge tutorial arrangement, while I have kept Felicia at the 7:00-9:00 PM slot, also in the one-on-one Oxford/ Cambridge arrangement that differs in some emphases with the session that I run for Monique. Monique has been studying--- fully manifesting her enormous diligence over the long course of years---with me since she was in Grade 3. She could now take her place in a sophomore college classroom and not feel out of place.
Felicia is fast at work upgrading her study habits and finding the motivation to emulate an Monique-type diligence, while also continuing to work assiduously and aggressively on vocabulary in application to an enormous variety of college-level reading materials.
Explicit vocabulary work is important for all students from economically poor, ill-educated families. This is all the more important when the student speaks no English at home. Even with all of the advanced training that Felicia has had, and despite her rapid intellectual development in her academic sessions with me, she still can display surprising gaps in her vocabulary. A student who has long know the meaning of “atavistic,” “existential,” “ratiocination,” “truculent,” and “ontology”; still can come up short on more pedestrian words such as “preclude,” “billowing,” “maritime,” “dissonance,” and “semblance”; that she has just not happen to come across in her voluminous reading with me, that she most certainly does not hear at home, and that she is only now becoming self-starter enough to work on by aggressively and ambitiously reading college-level material on her own (with attention to vocabulary).
Felicia Benitez has received a level of training in the New Salem Educational Initiative associated with well-regarded private schools such as St. Paul Academy, Breck, and Blake. But her life descriptors put her in a very different position from those on the perches of upper middle class status (and above) who typically can afford and who naturally ease into seats at such institutions.
Felicia has lived in five different residences since I have known her. There is rarely a dependable phone number operational in the family: As bills go unpaid, service is shut off and numbers otherwise change with great frequency. Felicia’s home is forever crowded with newly arrived family and friends from Central America (her familial roots are to El Salvador); privacy is at a premium and a secure place to study is often hard to find.
None of these life descriptors abet the academic discipline of a young woman who by nature is neurologically gifted and intellectually curious but requires a good bit of external exhortation to follow through on mundane details necessary to generate a first-rate academic record. Properly alerted, I am ever more providing that external exhortation, urging as an attentive parent would, this superlatively talented student to synchronize her academic talents and the progress that she has made in the New Salem Educational Initiative with the kind of personal diligence that will be necessary to attain the lofty goals that we have for her future.
In her four hours with me each week, she is receiving the highest level academic training. She is learning to match intellectual engagement with personal discipline. She continues to train rigorously for the ACT that she will take at the end of this Grade 11 academic year. She will continue to ride this elevated academic course right on through her Grade 12 academic year and into a well-regarded college or university. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
One shudders to think where Felicia would be if I had not met her at Sonia Garcia’s door in the spring of 2008. She is still a work In progress, but that progress has been momentous, and it will continue for another year and a half until she succeeds as few do who are economically poor and not naturally given to speaking English at home.
The success of Felicia Benitez has been made possible through my work with her, at the behest of a generous donor. She will continue to need the support of us both if she is to provide an example of how, through excellence in K-12 education, we can at last attain true democracy in the United States.
Overcoming Multiple Obstacles, Achieving Enduring Success
Promoting the Persistent Effort Necessary for the Impoverished English Language Learner Through the Programmatic Features of the New Salem Educational initiative
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
I first met Felicia Benitez in the spring of 2008, on the steps of the dilapidated home of Sonia Garcia. Sonia had three students enrolled in the program, all of whom were friends of Felicia and her sister, Melinda Benitez. The location of Sonia’s home at the corner of 24th Avenue North and 6th Street North places it in one of the most impoverished, crime-ridden, gang-infested areas of North Minneapolis.
Sonia was oh so very happy to see her three children go off with me for weekly two-hour academic sessions as students enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. The children, Corazon Garcia (then in Grade 8), Hernando Cruz (Grade 6), and Anna (Grade K [kindergarten]), were all thriving on the basis of a big boost in their academic performance at school in the course of just a few months’ participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
I met Felica (then in Grade 5) and her sister, Melinda (Grade 4) as I picked up Sonia’s three children for transport a few blocks away to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, where I hold most academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- the very few exceptions being sessions held in the homes of students.
I looked at Felicia’s eager face and asked, “I’m Gary, the guy who runs this program. What’s your name?”
Felicia introduced herself and Melinda.
“Would you and Felicia be interested in participating in the program?” I asked.
I thought that Felicia’s smile would expand toward Robbinsdale to the west, all the way to the Mississippi to the east. She radiated joy at being asked. Melinda also indicated that she would love to participate.
And thus it was that these two began to attend an academic session on Wednesday evenings from 7:00 until 9:00 PM that remains their time of joint attendance now, in December 2013. As will be explained, though, Felicia now also attends a very important session on Sunday evenings at a similar time of the day.
Felicia and Melindda proved to be my most enthusiastic students, quite a feat in a program in which enthusiasm on my part and that of the students runs very high. The enthusiasm of Felicia and Melinda was a godsend, because the academic deficits with which they entered the New Salem Educational initiative were severe, and their life challenges were multiple.
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The Great Effort to Attain Grade Level Academic Performance
Felicia and Melinda were at the time classified as English Language Learners at Nellie Stone Johnson K-8 School, located at 26th Avenue North and Lyndale Avenue North, close both to Sonia’s home and to the church. These two sisters were at the time living on Queen Avenue North, in an area north of Lowry Avenue North and west of Fremont Avenue North, a street like so many on the Northside on which multiple human dramas are tensely played out every day. From the beginning, when I would arrive to pick up Felicia and Melinda, they would be peeking through the windows of their home, chomping at the bit for me to pull up. Seeing me, they would dash to my car.
Once at New Salem, the sisters would pull out their homework and immediately get to work, calling frequently for my assistance in their desire to master whatever math or reading or subject area task they had for the evening. There was much catching up do for both the Grade 4 Melinda and the Grade 5 Felicia. Neither knew their multiplication tables, a traditionally Grade 3 skill. The world of long division was a mystery. Felicia had most operations and applications of addition and subtraction under control, but Melinda still struggled even operationally with subtraction, and when called upon to perform applicative tasks, consistently sat with a blank look on her face.
So I put the sisters through a logical sequence of exercises designed to speed skill acquisition, and they responded with alacrity. By the end of that academic year of 2007-2008, Melinda and Felicia were on their way to mastery of the math skills needed to attain grade level performance. They would need academic year 2008-2009 to attain full mathematic competence, but their progress was dramatic. And by the end of that latter academic year, when Melinda was in Grade 5 and Felicia in Grade 6, the two sisters were consistently demonstrating through mastery of applications in word problems, necessitating decisions as to operation needed and strategy to be utilized, that they had securely internalized the skills and the logic necessary for practical application.
Reading was another matter. Melinda gave evidence of very severe deficits, languishing at a Grade 3 level of vocabulary development, even with highly aggressive remediation under my direction for many months during academic years 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Her reading comprehension was also substandard, even when she understood the vocabulary in a reading that I would choose to match her actual skill level.
To her credit, though, Melinda is a workhorse. She plugs ahead and never lets frustration get the best of her. Nothing comes easy for Melinda, but she accepts this as a fact of her life and does what she needs to do to demonstrate viable performance at grade level. Thus it was that by Melinda’s Grade 6 year of school enrollment (2009-2010), she had greatly increased her vocabulary and, notably, when I would assist her with vocabulary on homework assignments requiring reading (whether in language arts, social science, or natural science) she was giving evidence of comprehension enhanced enough to achieve a grade of “B” or better on the assignment. Melinda’s grades in school rose steadily, so that by that academic year of 2009-2012, she was receiving mostly “B’s” in her classes, with the occasional “A” as well as the occasional “C” sprinkled in.
Felicia has always been a different case. Felicia is much intellectually quicker than Melinda, and she has avid interest in subjects across the liberal arts curriculum. In the course of academic year 2009-2010, her third year of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Felicia was consistently achieving “A’s” and “B’s” in school, with the former coming to dominate. Felicia loved math at that point, and she showed great aptitude for the subject, easily grasping concepts upon my explanation. Middle school mathematics tasks pertinent to percentages, ratios, proportions, and fundamental algebra provided no obstacle for Felicia, so that by the time of her Grade 8 year she was in a position to take on high school math on a solid foundation of skill development.
And she eagerly completed exercises in explicit vocabulary development that I provided for her, also keeping a list of terms encountered in homework. Her vocabulary grew enormously throughout her Grade 5, 6, and 7 academic years. Felicia, unlike Melinda at the beginning, had always demonstrated excellent comprehension when she was in control of the vocabulary necessary to understand a given assignment. As a student bearing the label of English Language Learner (ELL) for speaking absolutely no English at home, Felicia’s abiding task then--- and now--- concerns accumulation and accumulation and then more accumulation--- of the vocabulary that young people residing in upper middle class, English-speaking homes often assume as a kind of birthright.
By the end of her Grade 7 year, Felicia was emerging as one of the most intellectually engaged, advanced students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. She was pouring through books in the Core Knowledge series edited by E. D. Hirsch, exploring a wide range of topics in history, literature, science, and the fine arts.
Given a grasp of the relevant vocabulary, Felicia was perfectly capable of taking on readings relevant, for example, to the Spanish-American War in the context of world imperialism; the emergence of Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Donatello to challenge the staid assumptions that had governed medieval art; the development of the novel in the course of work produced by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Toni Morrison; and altered perspectives on humankind’s behavioral motivations and cosmic location necessitated by revelations in the work of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein.
Thus it was that at the beginning of her Grade 8 year, I invited Felcia into a newly created class for joint attendance with two other intellectually astute and highly motivated eighth grade students, Monique Taylor-Myers and Lana Okoye.
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Advancement in the College Preparatory Experience
Monique, Lana, and Felicia met during their Grade 8, 9, and 10 academic years at 7:00-9:00 PM to begin aggressive preparation for the ACT, engage in an ambitious exercise in explicit vocabulary development, and to read material from across the liberal arts curriculum, frequently cued by current items in the news.
Topics ranged from the courageous quest of Malala Yousafsai for the proper education of Muslim females in Pakistan and elsewhere; the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage; the vagaries of the stock market as witnessed in the responses of investors in companies listed on the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and Standard and Poor’s; the origins and current functioning of the electoral college as observed in the presidential election of 2012; and the difference among meteors, meteorites, and asteroids as relevant to incidents in Russia and in the cosmos in relatively close proximity to earth. These students also read numerous Shakespearean plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet; and they traveled with me in the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013 to see the former three plays at the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona. In autumn of 2012 Monique, Lana, and Felicia went with me to see Hamlet at the Jungle Theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.
At banquets in three successive years, the students did both soliloquys from Shakespeare and renderings of great African American leaders such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Then, in one of our most ambitious undertakings to date, Monique, Lana, and Felicia had the major roles and were accompanied by seven other students in minor roles in performing my condensation of King Lear, with all original Elizabethan language.
Imagine how proud Felicia and her family were when this highly talented young woman shone mightily as Cordelia, the youngest daughter whom King Lear loves the most but vindictively treats so abominably.
This English Language Learner had come a long, long way since first enrolling as a Grade 5 student for participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
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The Continuing Challenge at Grade 11
As talented and intellectually engaged as Felicia is, circumstances of personality and life itself gave evidence of a situation in which she was not going to be able keep up with the most illustrious Monique Taylor-Myers. Monique has at least as many economic challenges as does Felicia, but she is an enormously self-starting and disciplined student, so that she makes the most of her formal school time. Monique learns more in her academic sessions with me, but she applies herself to the fullest at school and has soared to a 3.967 GPA.
Felicia is much more scattered in her own study routine, and she is not nearly as diligent in keeping up with homework assignments as she should be. So advanced did she reveal herself to be to me in her Sunday evening sessions, and so very intellectually astute, that her relative lack of engagement with her high school classes took a while for me to realize.
Felicia has always maintained attendance on Wednesday evenings with Melinda, even as she rose to the challenge of the Sunday evening class. Now, in those Wednesday classes, we work strictly on homework, and I go long and hard on the necessity of follow-through on the details of the high school experience so as to build the kind of record attractive to good colleges and universities.
On Sunday, I now work with Lana, Felicia, and Monique separately. For a variety of reasons, Lana is now working with me in a kind of independent study status. I meet with Monique in the late afternoon on Sunday according to an intense Oxford/ Cambridge tutorial arrangement, while I have kept Felicia at the 7:00-9:00 PM slot, also in the one-on-one Oxford/ Cambridge arrangement that differs in some emphases with the session that I run for Monique. Monique has been studying--- fully manifesting her enormous diligence over the long course of years---with me since she was in Grade 3. She could now take her place in a sophomore college classroom and not feel out of place.
Felicia is fast at work upgrading her study habits and finding the motivation to emulate an Monique-type diligence, while also continuing to work assiduously and aggressively on vocabulary in application to an enormous variety of college-level reading materials.
Explicit vocabulary work is important for all students from economically poor, ill-educated families. This is all the more important when the student speaks no English at home. Even with all of the advanced training that Felicia has had, and despite her rapid intellectual development in her academic sessions with me, she still can display surprising gaps in her vocabulary. A student who has long know the meaning of “atavistic,” “existential,” “ratiocination,” “truculent,” and “ontology”; still can come up short on more pedestrian words such as “preclude,” “billowing,” “maritime,” “dissonance,” and “semblance”; that she has just not happen to come across in her voluminous reading with me, that she most certainly does not hear at home, and that she is only now becoming self-starter enough to work on by aggressively and ambitiously reading college-level material on her own (with attention to vocabulary).
Felicia Benitez has received a level of training in the New Salem Educational Initiative associated with well-regarded private schools such as St. Paul Academy, Breck, and Blake. But her life descriptors put her in a very different position from those on the perches of upper middle class status (and above) who typically can afford and who naturally ease into seats at such institutions.
Felicia has lived in five different residences since I have known her. There is rarely a dependable phone number operational in the family: As bills go unpaid, service is shut off and numbers otherwise change with great frequency. Felicia’s home is forever crowded with newly arrived family and friends from Central America (her familial roots are to El Salvador); privacy is at a premium and a secure place to study is often hard to find.
None of these life descriptors abet the academic discipline of a young woman who by nature is neurologically gifted and intellectually curious but requires a good bit of external exhortation to follow through on mundane details necessary to generate a first-rate academic record. Properly alerted, I am ever more providing that external exhortation, urging as an attentive parent would, this superlatively talented student to synchronize her academic talents and the progress that she has made in the New Salem Educational Initiative with the kind of personal diligence that will be necessary to attain the lofty goals that we have for her future.
In her four hours with me each week, she is receiving the highest level academic training. She is learning to match intellectual engagement with personal discipline. She continues to train rigorously for the ACT that she will take at the end of this Grade 11 academic year. She will continue to ride this elevated academic course right on through her Grade 12 academic year and into a well-regarded college or university. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
One shudders to think where Felicia would be if I had not met her at Sonia Garcia’s door in the spring of 2008. She is still a work In progress, but that progress has been momentous, and it will continue for another year and a half until she succeeds as few do who are economically poor and not naturally given to speaking English at home.
The success of Felicia Benitez has been made possible through my work with her, at the behest of a generous donor. She will continue to need the support of us both if she is to provide an example of how, through excellence in K-12 education, we can at last attain true democracy in the United States.
Lana Okoye--- Magnificent Talent, Requiring Adroit Teaching and Mentorship
Lana Okoye---
Magnificent Talent, Requiring Adroit Teaching and Mentorship
The Importance of Making Sound Judgments in Assessing the Highly Particular Personality Traits that Accompany a Bountiful Brain
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
One evening in the midst of the 2007-2008 academic year, my cell phone rang with a call from Jeremiah Okoye, requesting academic assistance for his daughters and asking that I contact him.
I followed through with a stop at Jeremiah’s house in far North Minneapolis. located in the 4900 block of Logan Avenue North, just north of 49th street and a short walk to Olson Middle School northeastward from the residence.
Awaiting me were two bright-eyed, eager female students of Yoruba Nigerian heritage, Lana Okoye (then in Grade 5 at Olson) and Esther Okoye (Grade 9, making the long bus ride every day crosstown to Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis). I started Lana and Esther immediately in different academic sessions that were synchronous with their individual schedules and my own.
Under my instruction, Esther overcame enormous challenges with written expression to pass the Grade 9 Writing Test that at the time was necessary for graduation; and she also met expectations on the Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), also required for graduation. Esther has now successfully completed her first two years in college and is a junior at the University of Minnesota studying social work. I continue to serve as mentor and to offer academic assistance as necessary as I follow her progress.
My relationship with Lana during her K-12 years has been longer, and as a highly talented student she is poised at a level of achievement seldom reached by students in high school. As a Grade 11 student at Henry High School this academic year 2013-2014,Lana does well in math and in her verbal development manifests skills typically associated with the college sophomore.
But Lana’s academic ride has not always been as smooth as the similarly talented Monique Taylor-Myers, who for three academic years was her session mate in a specially designed Sunday evening academic meeting for three students (also including Felicia Benitez) soaring toward collegiate performance. She is different in personality and in matters of personal discipline, offering an interesting case for consideration among those pertinent to young people of impoverished and immigrant status.
...........................................................................................................................................................
The Academic Ascent of Lana Okoye
Lana was functioning well below grade level in math and only approaching grade level in reading when she enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. As a Grade 5 student in her first year at Olson Middle School, her academic performance languished in the setting of mediocrity that described the quality of the Minneapolis Public Schools during those years.
Such mediocrity still abides, but under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson there is at the present time, in this very academic year of 2013-2014, a persistent effort to promote policies that address long-vexing issues. But in academic year 2007-2008 the culture of mediocrity persisted, in the absence of any viable program to remedy the situation.
Lana arrived in the New Salem Educational Initiative not knowing all of her multiplication tables, insecure in making good decisions as to which of the four operations to use in situations posed in word problems, and unsure as to how to construct tables, charts, and graphs based on good numerical placement on an x-y axis. Lana, though, proved very responsive to my instruction. She quickly learned all of her multiplication factors on the table for numbers zero through ten, became adept at multi-digit multiplication, uncovered the mysteries of long division, became adept at making good decisions concerning the four basic operations, and learned skillfully to construct tables, charts, and graphs. Her grades in math rose from “C” territory, to a realm dominated by “B’s” and (mostly) ”A’s.”
But it was in verbal development that Lana came to reveal herself as something of a phenomenon. She eagerly engaged with my exercises for explicit vocabulary acquisition, and she accumulated many more items as she poured through a rich set of reading materials in history, literature, social science, natural science, and the fine arts.
Lana remained in my program even when she attained grade level status on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) and as the officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools started to prioritize students for receiving supplemental instruction according to academic need. While making a certain intuitive sense, this approach has never been my own.
My goal is to get students to grade level and then put them on an ambitious college preparatory track. For maximum efficiency, my students stay in the Minneapolis Public Schools, where they receive free breakfast and lunch, gain access to extracurricular activities, and get a modicum of education. In their academic sessions with me, they get that level of instruction that imparts to them a quality of education at least on a par with well-regarded private schools such as St. Paul Academy, Breck, and Blake.
And Lana Okoye proved to be one of the most outstanding beneficiaries of that quality of instruction.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The College Preparatory Track of Lana Okoye
By the time of her Grade 8 year, Lana was academically distinguishing herself at a level that also described the performances of fellow Grade 8 students Felicia Benitez and Monique Taylor-Myers. I invited Lana into a newly created academic session that began to meet from 7:00 to 9:00 PM on Sunday evenings. In just their Grade 8 year of school enrollment, these students began aggressively to train for the ACT (generally taken late in the Grade 11 academic year), acquire advanced vocabulary items associated with college-level material, and read a wide variety of materials across the liberal arts curriculum.
Lana came to understand things that she had never learned and was not learning in school: the difference between deficit and debt in the federal budget; the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, and between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims; the evolution of hominids through stages calling forth reference to Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and on through the emergence of homo sapiens; 19th century imperialism as a precursor to World War I; and the essence of gravity-focused Newtonian laws by contrast with Albert Einstein’s focus on relativity in the cosmos.
On the basis of such training and the implied vocabulary development that such wide reading and discussion entails, Lana achieved a score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.0 (with a 3.0 needed to indicate grade level achievement, then necessary to graduate) on her Grade 9 Writing Test; and she similarly achieved a high passing rate on her Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA).
And Lana was reading, along with other advanced students and myself, Shakespearean plays:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. Lana traveled with fellow advanced students of the New Salem Educational Initiative to Winona for three successive summers to see the first three plays of reference, and in the autumn of 2012 she participated in our visit to the Jungle Theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis to see Hamlet.
Lana also was proving to be a startlingly talented thespian, delivering ringing interpretations of speeches by Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King at our Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet and expertly performing the part of King Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, in my compressed version of King Lear, maintaining all original Shakespearean (Elizabethan) language.
Lana, though, began to develop habits that did not respect the training that she was receiving, the academic ascent that she had achieved, or the time that I was giving her, Monique, and Felicia each week.
This called for an adjustment by way of delivered message that I have not made or constructed for any other student in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
................................................................................................................................................................
The Unique Current Status of Lana in the New Salem Educational Initiative
My first heads-up that Lana would have to be observed carefully came at the end the second semester of her Grade 9 academic year, a time at which her skill level was approaching that of the first-year college student, especially in tasks related to verbal acuity. I had assumed that Lana was applying herself at school and achieving up to her enormous potential as a student at Roosevelt High School (for that academic year of 2010-2011, riding the bus crosstown as had her sister, Esther). She conveyed to me that this was so in our weekly rides to and from New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, where academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative convene.
But at the end of her first semester at Roosevelt, I discovered that she had not been forthcoming about study habits and diligence in turning in assignments--- and that she was barely passing a number of her courses. I had a long talk with Lana’s mother (Mary Okoye), who was extremely concerned. We agreed that I would closely monitor Lana’s application of her labor and time to school-based tasks, and that I would be readily available by cell phone to meet any midweek exigency.
This close monitoring and my constant exhortations about the importance of accumulating a suitable GPA had the desired impact. Lana and I have a very strong student-teacher/mentor relationship, and I have become a kind of adjunct member of the family. She did not want to disappoint me.
Lana has since that time recorded “B’s” and “A’s,” tending toward the latter. On the basis of school performance and her soaring academic skill development in the New Salem Educational Initiative, she has established herself as a viable candidate for matriculation at a first-rate college or university.
But in the course of her Grade 10 year (academic year 2012-2013), there arose another problem. In her appearances at our Sunday evening session, she would offer splendid analysis of articles that we would read, and her vocabulary level rose ever more precipitously. And yet, she began to miss too many sessions, calling in late with word of family gatherings that she just had to attend or functions at her church in which she felt compelled to participate. Later checks with her parents would reveal that these meetings were not as necessary as Lana would report, so that they were more of her own volition, the outcome of prioritizing social life over the very rare academic opportunity presented to her each Sunday evening.
When this pattern of behavior began to repeat the previous academic year’s course as we entered this academic year of 2013-2014, I decided to shake things up, in a way that I had never before done in the New Salem Educational Initiative. I put Lana on an independent course of study, with weekly deliveries of reading material, vocabulary lists, and mathematics assignments intended to promote continued rapid advancement toward excellent performance on the ACT and candidacy for acceptance at an excellent college or university.
But I was giving Lana more responsibility for her own education, so that she could deepen her appreciation of how much my explanations facilitated quick grasp of an astonishing amount of information across the liberal arts curriculum.
From time to time, Lana has shirked her responsibility in the independent study arrangement, so that her mother and father and I have huddled in plans to reestablish her on the path of rapid ascent. She fervently now wants back in a regular session such as I am now offering to former session mates, Monique Taylor-Myers and Felicia Benitez.
This may happen in the course of second semester of this 2013-2014 academic year, but I am taking my time.
The independent study arrangement requires extra time in material preparation and delivery, and in discussions with parents Jeremiah and Mary. But I am intent on always meeting the needs as best fits the skills and work habits of the individual student. And there is no doubt that the current arrangement has worked to the benefit of this magnificently talented student, motivating her to elevate her attention to priorities and fully respect the level of instruction that she has been getting.
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My time investment in the unique case of Lana Okoye is all the more taxing because she is not a paying customer in the program: She is among many students for whom no donor has stepped forward to offer payment of tuition; thus, my services, theoretically conceived as my source of remuneration, are rendered in this case, and a good number of others, on a volunteer basis.
My donor base increases steadily, and the progress of my students fully rewards my decision to go with private funding so that students can move beyond basic skills to college preparation. As the donor base expands, those who in this manner join the community of participants and supporters of the New Salem Educational Initiative will be rewarded, as I have been, in the knowledge of what we are accomplishing together.
My exertions in the New Salem Educational Initiative promote advancement to the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement through the achievement of excellence in K-12 education. Action of this sort will result in the termination of cyclical poverty and the establishment of the national democratic community that we imagine ourselves to be.
An effort of such importance deserves firm support and brings abiding rewards for those supporters standing in witness.
Magnificent Talent, Requiring Adroit Teaching and Mentorship
The Importance of Making Sound Judgments in Assessing the Highly Particular Personality Traits that Accompany a Bountiful Brain
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
One evening in the midst of the 2007-2008 academic year, my cell phone rang with a call from Jeremiah Okoye, requesting academic assistance for his daughters and asking that I contact him.
I followed through with a stop at Jeremiah’s house in far North Minneapolis. located in the 4900 block of Logan Avenue North, just north of 49th street and a short walk to Olson Middle School northeastward from the residence.
Awaiting me were two bright-eyed, eager female students of Yoruba Nigerian heritage, Lana Okoye (then in Grade 5 at Olson) and Esther Okoye (Grade 9, making the long bus ride every day crosstown to Roosevelt High School in South Minneapolis). I started Lana and Esther immediately in different academic sessions that were synchronous with their individual schedules and my own.
Under my instruction, Esther overcame enormous challenges with written expression to pass the Grade 9 Writing Test that at the time was necessary for graduation; and she also met expectations on the Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), also required for graduation. Esther has now successfully completed her first two years in college and is a junior at the University of Minnesota studying social work. I continue to serve as mentor and to offer academic assistance as necessary as I follow her progress.
My relationship with Lana during her K-12 years has been longer, and as a highly talented student she is poised at a level of achievement seldom reached by students in high school. As a Grade 11 student at Henry High School this academic year 2013-2014,Lana does well in math and in her verbal development manifests skills typically associated with the college sophomore.
But Lana’s academic ride has not always been as smooth as the similarly talented Monique Taylor-Myers, who for three academic years was her session mate in a specially designed Sunday evening academic meeting for three students (also including Felicia Benitez) soaring toward collegiate performance. She is different in personality and in matters of personal discipline, offering an interesting case for consideration among those pertinent to young people of impoverished and immigrant status.
...........................................................................................................................................................
The Academic Ascent of Lana Okoye
Lana was functioning well below grade level in math and only approaching grade level in reading when she enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. As a Grade 5 student in her first year at Olson Middle School, her academic performance languished in the setting of mediocrity that described the quality of the Minneapolis Public Schools during those years.
Such mediocrity still abides, but under Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson there is at the present time, in this very academic year of 2013-2014, a persistent effort to promote policies that address long-vexing issues. But in academic year 2007-2008 the culture of mediocrity persisted, in the absence of any viable program to remedy the situation.
Lana arrived in the New Salem Educational Initiative not knowing all of her multiplication tables, insecure in making good decisions as to which of the four operations to use in situations posed in word problems, and unsure as to how to construct tables, charts, and graphs based on good numerical placement on an x-y axis. Lana, though, proved very responsive to my instruction. She quickly learned all of her multiplication factors on the table for numbers zero through ten, became adept at multi-digit multiplication, uncovered the mysteries of long division, became adept at making good decisions concerning the four basic operations, and learned skillfully to construct tables, charts, and graphs. Her grades in math rose from “C” territory, to a realm dominated by “B’s” and (mostly) ”A’s.”
But it was in verbal development that Lana came to reveal herself as something of a phenomenon. She eagerly engaged with my exercises for explicit vocabulary acquisition, and she accumulated many more items as she poured through a rich set of reading materials in history, literature, social science, natural science, and the fine arts.
Lana remained in my program even when she attained grade level status on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) and as the officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools started to prioritize students for receiving supplemental instruction according to academic need. While making a certain intuitive sense, this approach has never been my own.
My goal is to get students to grade level and then put them on an ambitious college preparatory track. For maximum efficiency, my students stay in the Minneapolis Public Schools, where they receive free breakfast and lunch, gain access to extracurricular activities, and get a modicum of education. In their academic sessions with me, they get that level of instruction that imparts to them a quality of education at least on a par with well-regarded private schools such as St. Paul Academy, Breck, and Blake.
And Lana Okoye proved to be one of the most outstanding beneficiaries of that quality of instruction.
...................................................................................................................................................................
The College Preparatory Track of Lana Okoye
By the time of her Grade 8 year, Lana was academically distinguishing herself at a level that also described the performances of fellow Grade 8 students Felicia Benitez and Monique Taylor-Myers. I invited Lana into a newly created academic session that began to meet from 7:00 to 9:00 PM on Sunday evenings. In just their Grade 8 year of school enrollment, these students began aggressively to train for the ACT (generally taken late in the Grade 11 academic year), acquire advanced vocabulary items associated with college-level material, and read a wide variety of materials across the liberal arts curriculum.
Lana came to understand things that she had never learned and was not learning in school: the difference between deficit and debt in the federal budget; the difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians, and between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims; the evolution of hominids through stages calling forth reference to Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and on through the emergence of homo sapiens; 19th century imperialism as a precursor to World War I; and the essence of gravity-focused Newtonian laws by contrast with Albert Einstein’s focus on relativity in the cosmos.
On the basis of such training and the implied vocabulary development that such wide reading and discussion entails, Lana achieved a score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.0 (with a 3.0 needed to indicate grade level achievement, then necessary to graduate) on her Grade 9 Writing Test; and she similarly achieved a high passing rate on her Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA).
And Lana was reading, along with other advanced students and myself, Shakespearean plays:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. Lana traveled with fellow advanced students of the New Salem Educational Initiative to Winona for three successive summers to see the first three plays of reference, and in the autumn of 2012 she participated in our visit to the Jungle Theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis to see Hamlet.
Lana also was proving to be a startlingly talented thespian, delivering ringing interpretations of speeches by Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King at our Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet and expertly performing the part of King Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril, in my compressed version of King Lear, maintaining all original Shakespearean (Elizabethan) language.
Lana, though, began to develop habits that did not respect the training that she was receiving, the academic ascent that she had achieved, or the time that I was giving her, Monique, and Felicia each week.
This called for an adjustment by way of delivered message that I have not made or constructed for any other student in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
................................................................................................................................................................
The Unique Current Status of Lana in the New Salem Educational Initiative
My first heads-up that Lana would have to be observed carefully came at the end the second semester of her Grade 9 academic year, a time at which her skill level was approaching that of the first-year college student, especially in tasks related to verbal acuity. I had assumed that Lana was applying herself at school and achieving up to her enormous potential as a student at Roosevelt High School (for that academic year of 2010-2011, riding the bus crosstown as had her sister, Esther). She conveyed to me that this was so in our weekly rides to and from New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, where academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative convene.
But at the end of her first semester at Roosevelt, I discovered that she had not been forthcoming about study habits and diligence in turning in assignments--- and that she was barely passing a number of her courses. I had a long talk with Lana’s mother (Mary Okoye), who was extremely concerned. We agreed that I would closely monitor Lana’s application of her labor and time to school-based tasks, and that I would be readily available by cell phone to meet any midweek exigency.
This close monitoring and my constant exhortations about the importance of accumulating a suitable GPA had the desired impact. Lana and I have a very strong student-teacher/mentor relationship, and I have become a kind of adjunct member of the family. She did not want to disappoint me.
Lana has since that time recorded “B’s” and “A’s,” tending toward the latter. On the basis of school performance and her soaring academic skill development in the New Salem Educational Initiative, she has established herself as a viable candidate for matriculation at a first-rate college or university.
But in the course of her Grade 10 year (academic year 2012-2013), there arose another problem. In her appearances at our Sunday evening session, she would offer splendid analysis of articles that we would read, and her vocabulary level rose ever more precipitously. And yet, she began to miss too many sessions, calling in late with word of family gatherings that she just had to attend or functions at her church in which she felt compelled to participate. Later checks with her parents would reveal that these meetings were not as necessary as Lana would report, so that they were more of her own volition, the outcome of prioritizing social life over the very rare academic opportunity presented to her each Sunday evening.
When this pattern of behavior began to repeat the previous academic year’s course as we entered this academic year of 2013-2014, I decided to shake things up, in a way that I had never before done in the New Salem Educational Initiative. I put Lana on an independent course of study, with weekly deliveries of reading material, vocabulary lists, and mathematics assignments intended to promote continued rapid advancement toward excellent performance on the ACT and candidacy for acceptance at an excellent college or university.
But I was giving Lana more responsibility for her own education, so that she could deepen her appreciation of how much my explanations facilitated quick grasp of an astonishing amount of information across the liberal arts curriculum.
From time to time, Lana has shirked her responsibility in the independent study arrangement, so that her mother and father and I have huddled in plans to reestablish her on the path of rapid ascent. She fervently now wants back in a regular session such as I am now offering to former session mates, Monique Taylor-Myers and Felicia Benitez.
This may happen in the course of second semester of this 2013-2014 academic year, but I am taking my time.
The independent study arrangement requires extra time in material preparation and delivery, and in discussions with parents Jeremiah and Mary. But I am intent on always meeting the needs as best fits the skills and work habits of the individual student. And there is no doubt that the current arrangement has worked to the benefit of this magnificently talented student, motivating her to elevate her attention to priorities and fully respect the level of instruction that she has been getting.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
My time investment in the unique case of Lana Okoye is all the more taxing because she is not a paying customer in the program: She is among many students for whom no donor has stepped forward to offer payment of tuition; thus, my services, theoretically conceived as my source of remuneration, are rendered in this case, and a good number of others, on a volunteer basis.
My donor base increases steadily, and the progress of my students fully rewards my decision to go with private funding so that students can move beyond basic skills to college preparation. As the donor base expands, those who in this manner join the community of participants and supporters of the New Salem Educational Initiative will be rewarded, as I have been, in the knowledge of what we are accomplishing together.
My exertions in the New Salem Educational Initiative promote advancement to the next stage of the Civil Rights Movement through the achievement of excellence in K-12 education. Action of this sort will result in the termination of cyclical poverty and the establishment of the national democratic community that we imagine ourselves to be.
An effort of such importance deserves firm support and brings abiding rewards for those supporters standing in witness.
Orlando Martinez Cultivating the Talent of the Particularly Gifted Child
Orlando Martinez
---
Cultivating the Talent of the Particularly Gifted Child
Recognizing Genius Hiding under Rubble Piled High with Poverty and Dysfunction
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
I experienced great cognitive dissonance upon the entry of Orlando Martinez into the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Orlando entered my program at a time when I was still contracting with the Minneapolis Public Schools to offer academic services to students at schools wherein most students qualified for free or reduced price lunch, and at which students were overwhelmingly struggling to reach grade level performance in math and reading. At the time, the Minneapolis Public Schools had started to prioritize students who as individuals were struggling to reach grade level performance as indicated by scores on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).
This was fine and expected as students entered the New Salem Educational Initiative, but as the months and then years rolled by, I was in a quandary. Ironically, as I inevitably did what I was contracted to do--- raise student performance--- I would lose funding when a student reached grade level performance in math and reading.
Also, my highly mobile students from families of poverty and frequent dysfunction very well might move residences and shift schools to a wide variety of locations, so that if the school itself did not qualify for supplemental academic services, or if the school lay outside the Minneapolis Public Schools, no funding was forthcoming.
My commitment to my students is enduring, so that the contractual arrangement with the Minneapolis Public Schools was becoming inappropriate to the chief tenets of the New Salem Educational Initiative. For two academic years now, I have gone entirely with private funding, building a community of donors who sponsor a particular student and then have the opportunity to track her or his progress.
Why I have adopted this approach is seen clearly in the case of Orlando Martinez. Also apparent will be the cognitive dissonance that I felt as I confronted the dual reality of a failed record at school, paired incongruously with the superlative talent that I observed in Orlando during his academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
..............................................................................................................................................................
Genius Lurking in Life’s Rubble
Orlando was just in Grade 1 when he enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. His enrollment, coming as it did when the Minneapolis Public Schools had already gone to academic prioritization as a chief qualifier for supplemental academic services, constituted a statement that Pedro was not functioning at grade level in math, reading, or both. So in his first academic session with me, Orlando responded to my Grade 1 skills tests in math and reading in the way that all of my newly enrolled students do.
But the results were not typical. As a rule, I find that the results of my own test match, in most respects, those recorded on the MCA or MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) assessments. In Orlando’s case, though, I found that in mathematics he not only was fully at grade level but that he could quickly grasp explanations for skill exercises a grade and even two grades above that of school enrollment.
And in reading, Orlando was already able to read material at Grade 2, one grade level above that of school enrollment; and with a bit of explanation of vocabulary items, Orlando had no trouble interpreting the sentence structures for material appropriate for Grade 3 and even Grade 4 students.
Putting aside for the moment the matter of what had caused Orlando to test so poorly by comparison to his actual skill and ability level, I just plunged ahead with a logically sequenced program of skill development. Orlando quickly mastered calculative and applicative exercises for multi-digit addition and subtraction, including calculations and applications requiring carrying and borrowing (regrouping). He had no trouble analyzing simple tables and graphs presenting two or more categories paired on an x-y axis. Thus, in mastering these skills, Orlando was demonstrating a Grade 2 level of competence.
Such competence was demonstrated by February of 2011, in Orlando’s first academic year of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative. My approach is always to take as long as needed for proper skill development, but never to insist on repetitive demonstration (except in exercises incorporating these skills, or in occasional exercises for the purpose of review) of skills once they have been mastered to the point of automaticity.
So, with regard to mathematics skill development, I put other challenges before Orlando, and he responded with eager mastery of these, as well. Most notably, I began to pursue my rapid-fire method for mastery of multiplication facts zero (0) through ten (10) in presentation to Orlando, who astonishingly acquired the relevant skills in just two academic sessions. The method essentially builds student confidence by going through the ten pairings involving zero, and the ten pairings involving one--- thereby giving her or him the satisfaction of immediately recognizing twenty (20) products or multiples.
We then draw upon the rather easy exercise of counting by twos (2’s), fives (5’s), and tens (10’s) to demonstrate mastery of twenty (30) more products or multiples, for a total of 50. I then teach students my version of the nine (9) trick, so that we are now past the halfway point on the table; next come the rather easily mastered threes (3’s) and fours (4’s), followed by sixes (6’s), the latter of which have a number of rhymes when presented in a certain order (“six times four is twenty-four;,” “six times six is twenty-six ,” “six times eight is forty-eight”).
At that point, the student comes to understand that she or he has mastered 90 pairings, with just 20 more to go in the sevens (7’s) and eights (8’s), so that with this confidence, most students proceed to master the typically problematic pairings of 6 X 7, 7 x 7, 7 X 8, and 8 x 8 fairly quickly.
And so Orlando did, as just a grade 1 student, showing that he could do calculative and applicative exercises for single digit multiplication that are more typically mastered as a Grade 3 skill.
Similarly, Orlando responded with alacrity to my program of explicit vocabulary acquisition, with terms generated both in isolation and as an organic process involving attention to new words that appear in reading material for literature, social science, natural science, and the fine arts. By the end of that Grade 1 year of school enrollment, Orlando had no problem at all comprehending material written at a level appropriate for Grade 4 students.
..................................................................................................................................................................
Considering Why theStudent from an Impoverished Family, with Elements of Dysfunction, Might Perform Below Actual Skill Level
Orlando’s mother, Helena Martinez, attended schools in the Minneapolis public K-12 system and has lived in the United States for several decades. Her spoken English is good, unaccented, with display of a suitable conversational vocabulary. She is properly attentive to her children, including now nine year-old Orlando, eleven year-old Carlos, and seven year-old Maria. Helena is in fact the most responsible parent among three sisters, one of whom (Grace) has been in the United States for about a decade, and the other of whom (Dorothea) has been in the country the better part of two decades.
But these sisters all struggle with issues rooted in conditions of under-education, low-paying jobs, rapidly shifting residences, variably working and constantly changing phone numbers, and undependable men--- the latter of whom include males with whom they have had their children and brothers with a penchant for getting in trouble with the law and calling attention to shaky citizenship status.
Helena herself has to go out of the country every once in a while to cope with a residential status that I have never clarified but falls short of citizenship and apparently requires renewal of visa. When she does go back to Mexico, the family suffers, not only in the cases of her own children (who in Helena’s absence fall under the care of less reliable aunts) but also in the extended family, for which Helena functions as an important anchor.
Helena was out of the United States, for example, most of spring 2012, at the close of Orlando’s Grade 2 year. The extended family encountered an array of travails that members had to endure without Helena's steady presence.
In the meantime, various family members struggle with pregnancies productive of more hungry bellies, evictions when rent cannot be paid, internecine conflicts and attendant shifting of personages in shared residences, scrapes with the law, the need to bail family members out of jail--- and many other life challenges that people of middle class and upper middle class status generally do not confront as an ongoing matter.
Orlando worries when his mother is out of the country. He is affected by the constant psychological assault on him from many quarters of family travail. He goes to school many days with that very deft brain cluttered with the problems of a family that just never works at anywhere near an acceptable level of functionality.
Orlando’s very brightness also gets in his way. He is something of the creative genius who finds much of what goes on in class boring. Often he has not taken skill testing seriously, because he has either not heard or not been told that his performance will affect the perceptions of people judging his academic level.
This radiantly bright young man has drawn close to me, and he takes seriously what I say. I have counseled him to pay attention to the minutiae of classroom procedures and school-based testing, so that his grades and formal academic performance match in acceptable measure what the two of us know to be his capability.
Accordingly, Orlando’s grades have improved, most of his formal testing now shows that he “meets” or “exceeds” expectations, and his school-based performance is now giving teachers in that setting a more accurate indication of his enormous talents. Orlando’s interactions with me have also lent greater stability to his life. I am a safe haven on which he knows that he can depend.
Orlando has now been in an instructional setting and in a teacher-mentor relationship with me for almost four years. He knows that I mean what I say when I vow that I will never go away, that I will be in his life forever, that I will see him on through the K-12 years and into college, and indeed that I will be checking in on him during his adult years.
Orlando sees cases at the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative of students who have graduated from high school and still draw close in relationship to me--- so he gains further factual grounding for my vows and for what he himself has experienced. This has been enormously restorative of a sense of constancy in Orlando’s life and offers the most compelling demonstration of the life challenges that he faces and how those challenges can be met when a caring adult correctly assesses the difficulty and acts so as to provide the remedy.
...............................................................................................................................................................
TheAll- Important Participatiion of Orlando Martinez in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Orlando Martinez has thus experienced life-transformation via his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative:
His manifested skill level is soaring three grades above level of school enrollment.
He is taking the routines of the school setting seriously, making good grades and doing well on standardized tests.
He is stabilizing emotionally by bringing to me his weekly troubles and acting upon the counsel that I give him.
Orlando has only received partial tuition sponsorship for his participation in the New Salem Educational initiative. Like many other students, I carry him substantially on a volunteer basis, because I care about him as my own child and will never let him go.
When more caring adults, including donors but also people just vowing to take the time and give the love, become engaged with young people caught in a trap at the urban core, we will move toward the termination of cyclical poverty and the establishment of that democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
Cultivating the Talent of the Particularly Gifted Child
Recognizing Genius Hiding under Rubble Piled High with Poverty and Dysfunction
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
I experienced great cognitive dissonance upon the entry of Orlando Martinez into the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Orlando entered my program at a time when I was still contracting with the Minneapolis Public Schools to offer academic services to students at schools wherein most students qualified for free or reduced price lunch, and at which students were overwhelmingly struggling to reach grade level performance in math and reading. At the time, the Minneapolis Public Schools had started to prioritize students who as individuals were struggling to reach grade level performance as indicated by scores on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs).
This was fine and expected as students entered the New Salem Educational Initiative, but as the months and then years rolled by, I was in a quandary. Ironically, as I inevitably did what I was contracted to do--- raise student performance--- I would lose funding when a student reached grade level performance in math and reading.
Also, my highly mobile students from families of poverty and frequent dysfunction very well might move residences and shift schools to a wide variety of locations, so that if the school itself did not qualify for supplemental academic services, or if the school lay outside the Minneapolis Public Schools, no funding was forthcoming.
My commitment to my students is enduring, so that the contractual arrangement with the Minneapolis Public Schools was becoming inappropriate to the chief tenets of the New Salem Educational Initiative. For two academic years now, I have gone entirely with private funding, building a community of donors who sponsor a particular student and then have the opportunity to track her or his progress.
Why I have adopted this approach is seen clearly in the case of Orlando Martinez. Also apparent will be the cognitive dissonance that I felt as I confronted the dual reality of a failed record at school, paired incongruously with the superlative talent that I observed in Orlando during his academic sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
..............................................................................................................................................................
Genius Lurking in Life’s Rubble
Orlando was just in Grade 1 when he enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative. His enrollment, coming as it did when the Minneapolis Public Schools had already gone to academic prioritization as a chief qualifier for supplemental academic services, constituted a statement that Pedro was not functioning at grade level in math, reading, or both. So in his first academic session with me, Orlando responded to my Grade 1 skills tests in math and reading in the way that all of my newly enrolled students do.
But the results were not typical. As a rule, I find that the results of my own test match, in most respects, those recorded on the MCA or MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) assessments. In Orlando’s case, though, I found that in mathematics he not only was fully at grade level but that he could quickly grasp explanations for skill exercises a grade and even two grades above that of school enrollment.
And in reading, Orlando was already able to read material at Grade 2, one grade level above that of school enrollment; and with a bit of explanation of vocabulary items, Orlando had no trouble interpreting the sentence structures for material appropriate for Grade 3 and even Grade 4 students.
Putting aside for the moment the matter of what had caused Orlando to test so poorly by comparison to his actual skill and ability level, I just plunged ahead with a logically sequenced program of skill development. Orlando quickly mastered calculative and applicative exercises for multi-digit addition and subtraction, including calculations and applications requiring carrying and borrowing (regrouping). He had no trouble analyzing simple tables and graphs presenting two or more categories paired on an x-y axis. Thus, in mastering these skills, Orlando was demonstrating a Grade 2 level of competence.
Such competence was demonstrated by February of 2011, in Orlando’s first academic year of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative. My approach is always to take as long as needed for proper skill development, but never to insist on repetitive demonstration (except in exercises incorporating these skills, or in occasional exercises for the purpose of review) of skills once they have been mastered to the point of automaticity.
So, with regard to mathematics skill development, I put other challenges before Orlando, and he responded with eager mastery of these, as well. Most notably, I began to pursue my rapid-fire method for mastery of multiplication facts zero (0) through ten (10) in presentation to Orlando, who astonishingly acquired the relevant skills in just two academic sessions. The method essentially builds student confidence by going through the ten pairings involving zero, and the ten pairings involving one--- thereby giving her or him the satisfaction of immediately recognizing twenty (20) products or multiples.
We then draw upon the rather easy exercise of counting by twos (2’s), fives (5’s), and tens (10’s) to demonstrate mastery of twenty (30) more products or multiples, for a total of 50. I then teach students my version of the nine (9) trick, so that we are now past the halfway point on the table; next come the rather easily mastered threes (3’s) and fours (4’s), followed by sixes (6’s), the latter of which have a number of rhymes when presented in a certain order (“six times four is twenty-four;,” “six times six is twenty-six ,” “six times eight is forty-eight”).
At that point, the student comes to understand that she or he has mastered 90 pairings, with just 20 more to go in the sevens (7’s) and eights (8’s), so that with this confidence, most students proceed to master the typically problematic pairings of 6 X 7, 7 x 7, 7 X 8, and 8 x 8 fairly quickly.
And so Orlando did, as just a grade 1 student, showing that he could do calculative and applicative exercises for single digit multiplication that are more typically mastered as a Grade 3 skill.
Similarly, Orlando responded with alacrity to my program of explicit vocabulary acquisition, with terms generated both in isolation and as an organic process involving attention to new words that appear in reading material for literature, social science, natural science, and the fine arts. By the end of that Grade 1 year of school enrollment, Orlando had no problem at all comprehending material written at a level appropriate for Grade 4 students.
..................................................................................................................................................................
Considering Why theStudent from an Impoverished Family, with Elements of Dysfunction, Might Perform Below Actual Skill Level
Orlando’s mother, Helena Martinez, attended schools in the Minneapolis public K-12 system and has lived in the United States for several decades. Her spoken English is good, unaccented, with display of a suitable conversational vocabulary. She is properly attentive to her children, including now nine year-old Orlando, eleven year-old Carlos, and seven year-old Maria. Helena is in fact the most responsible parent among three sisters, one of whom (Grace) has been in the United States for about a decade, and the other of whom (Dorothea) has been in the country the better part of two decades.
But these sisters all struggle with issues rooted in conditions of under-education, low-paying jobs, rapidly shifting residences, variably working and constantly changing phone numbers, and undependable men--- the latter of whom include males with whom they have had their children and brothers with a penchant for getting in trouble with the law and calling attention to shaky citizenship status.
Helena herself has to go out of the country every once in a while to cope with a residential status that I have never clarified but falls short of citizenship and apparently requires renewal of visa. When she does go back to Mexico, the family suffers, not only in the cases of her own children (who in Helena’s absence fall under the care of less reliable aunts) but also in the extended family, for which Helena functions as an important anchor.
Helena was out of the United States, for example, most of spring 2012, at the close of Orlando’s Grade 2 year. The extended family encountered an array of travails that members had to endure without Helena's steady presence.
In the meantime, various family members struggle with pregnancies productive of more hungry bellies, evictions when rent cannot be paid, internecine conflicts and attendant shifting of personages in shared residences, scrapes with the law, the need to bail family members out of jail--- and many other life challenges that people of middle class and upper middle class status generally do not confront as an ongoing matter.
Orlando worries when his mother is out of the country. He is affected by the constant psychological assault on him from many quarters of family travail. He goes to school many days with that very deft brain cluttered with the problems of a family that just never works at anywhere near an acceptable level of functionality.
Orlando’s very brightness also gets in his way. He is something of the creative genius who finds much of what goes on in class boring. Often he has not taken skill testing seriously, because he has either not heard or not been told that his performance will affect the perceptions of people judging his academic level.
This radiantly bright young man has drawn close to me, and he takes seriously what I say. I have counseled him to pay attention to the minutiae of classroom procedures and school-based testing, so that his grades and formal academic performance match in acceptable measure what the two of us know to be his capability.
Accordingly, Orlando’s grades have improved, most of his formal testing now shows that he “meets” or “exceeds” expectations, and his school-based performance is now giving teachers in that setting a more accurate indication of his enormous talents. Orlando’s interactions with me have also lent greater stability to his life. I am a safe haven on which he knows that he can depend.
Orlando has now been in an instructional setting and in a teacher-mentor relationship with me for almost four years. He knows that I mean what I say when I vow that I will never go away, that I will be in his life forever, that I will see him on through the K-12 years and into college, and indeed that I will be checking in on him during his adult years.
Orlando sees cases at the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative of students who have graduated from high school and still draw close in relationship to me--- so he gains further factual grounding for my vows and for what he himself has experienced. This has been enormously restorative of a sense of constancy in Orlando’s life and offers the most compelling demonstration of the life challenges that he faces and how those challenges can be met when a caring adult correctly assesses the difficulty and acts so as to provide the remedy.
...............................................................................................................................................................
TheAll- Important Participatiion of Orlando Martinez in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Orlando Martinez has thus experienced life-transformation via his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative:
His manifested skill level is soaring three grades above level of school enrollment.
He is taking the routines of the school setting seriously, making good grades and doing well on standardized tests.
He is stabilizing emotionally by bringing to me his weekly troubles and acting upon the counsel that I give him.
Orlando has only received partial tuition sponsorship for his participation in the New Salem Educational initiative. Like many other students, I carry him substantially on a volunteer basis, because I care about him as my own child and will never let him go.
When more caring adults, including donors but also people just vowing to take the time and give the love, become engaged with young people caught in a trap at the urban core, we will move toward the termination of cyclical poverty and the establishment of that democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz: Grade 6 Through Grade 11 in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz
An Experience in the New Salem Educational Initiative From Grade 6 through Grade 11
A Case of the English Language Learner Enrolling in the
New Salem Educational Initiative Just in Time
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative in the spring of 2009, in the midst of his Grade 6 year of school enrollment at Sheridan K-8 School in Minneapolis. He came to the program upon the recommendation of his aunt, Carla Ruiz, who had witnessed the rapid academic progress of her three sons over just a three-month period. The recommendation went to Carla’s sister, Magdalena, Raul’s mother, a factory worker who speaks only very, very limited English.
When Raul came into the New Salem Educational Initiative, he was dealing with a host of personal and academic issues. At school, he was acting out with great frequency, often getting suspended, and was upon the recommendation of school officials attending anger management counseling sessions. He was failing all of his classes and was by report totally lost in math.
Thus it was in March of 2009 that Raul Sanchez-Ruiz first started attending weekly two-hour academic sessions in the New Salem Educational Initiative. At first, I reserved that late Wednesday afternoon time exclusively for him. By the following academic year, with enrollment beyond full, I brought in two younger students (both Grade 3), positioning them in another room and floating myself between the two rooms, giving rapid-fire assistance and inducing fast-paced learning for all three students.
Raul’s most critical academic deficit in the course of his Grade 6 and Grade 7 years was in math, a subject in which he had been allowed to move forward in school while learning very little. Upon enrollment in spring 2009, Raul did not know how to borrow (regroup) in subtractive exercises; he did not know many of his multiplication tables; he had not a clue as to how to do even simple division problems, much less long division; so that mastery of rudimentary material in fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, and simple probability were--- at this juncture--- impossible.
So we went to work. By the end of his Grade 6 academic year, Raul was adept at multi-digit addition and subtraction, in exercises both of calculation and application. At any given time, he could respond to my prompting so as to recall products (multiples) for factors in the multiplication table for numbers zero through ten. Some of these had a tendency, though, to slip away; thus it was through constant review that Raul came, by Grade 8, to know firmly and with immediate recall the products for 6 x 7, 6 x 8, 7 x 7, 7 x 8, and 8 x 8--- those that for many years had been problematic for him.
By that Grade 8 year, Raul could now draw upon such basic math skill to work out many types of problems that prior to enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative had constituted a mysterious and unknown world. He could do calculation and application for a wide variety of problems involving multi-digit addition, subtraction, and multiplication; and he had found the key for opening the door into the world of long division.
By the end of academic year 2010-2011, Raul Sanchez-Ruiz could now perform mathematical tasks actually required at the Grade 8 level: With the critical sequential basic skills under control, he could now figure percentages and do various calculations and applications involving ratios, proportions, and simple probability.
Remarkably, Raul was at this juncture performing fully at grade level in math. And as his academic frustration at school abated, and his relationship with me deepened, Raul no longer had any anger issues manifested as inappropriate behavior at school. Raul was on the “B” honor roll, his behavior was exemplary, and he was fully prepared to enter Grade 9 as a student well-positioned for high school. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz, Scholar of Shakespeare
During rides to and from Raul’s home and New Salem Missionary Baptist Church (where l conduct all academic sessions, except for a few held in students’ homes), we talked about all manner of topics, as I became aware of this young man’s insatiable curiosity:
We would, for example, pass a billboard advertising the services of a DUI attorney, which would lead to a succession of questions from Raul as to the meaning of “DUI,” the laws pertinent to blood alcohol level, the penalties for conviction, and the sort of education required to become an attorney.
“Oh, and what other kinds of lawyers are there?” Raul asked in continuing this conversational dialectic.
I would then explain real estate, entertainment, mergers, matrimony, and criminal topics as examples of areas of expertise in which a given attorney might specialize.
“And how does the education for an attorney compare to that of a doctor?” Raul would ask.
I thereupon would explain that medical school takes a bit longer and involves periods of internship and residency before certification.
Knowing that I am originally from Texas, Raul asked one day, “Say, I saw somewhere that Texas was once its own country. Is that true?”
So I explained that yes, Texas was a republic for nine years before gaining entry as the 28th state of the United States in 1845. And that in turn would lead to a discussion of the requirements for statehood, prospects for Puerto Rico becoming a state, the exact meaning of the term, “republic,” the difference between “republic” and “democracy,” the meanings of other terms for political systems, when in history certain political forms came into existence--- and we would still be talking as we arrived at his home (the discussion this time had occurred upon return; we had already covered other matters en route to New Salem).
En route to and from New Salem, I am always asking my students what good books they have been reading. One day after I asked Raul this question, I got a fortuitous question in return:
"And what have you been reading?”
“Hey, thanks for asking. Actually, I’m a huge fan of Shakespeare, and I’m forever trying to decide if Hamlet or King Lear is the greater tragedy. I recently reread each of these great plays.”
This engendered a whole host of questions that resulted in my passing a great deal of information on to Raul about the Bard: from where he hailed; the founding of the Globe Theater; the 37 plays divided among tragedies, histories, and comedies; the 154 sonnets; the two narrative poems; and a few quotations that I have committed to memory.
“So which one?”
“Huh?” I replied to a question that Raul posed in isolation after my delivery of a short lesson in Shakespeare and his universe.
“Which play do you think is better, King Lear or Hamlet ?
“Oh, yeah,” I remembered, “I had almost forgotten I raised that question. The thing is, a good number of people think that King Lear is even better than Hamlet. King Lear is such an audacious character; he is singularly memorable, and yet his character is very recognizable for the rashness and pettiness that leads him on his downward spiral. But for me, I just can’t let go of the sheer magnificence of numerous soliloquies in Hamlet. And the soaring beauty of the language is just stunning.”
“Could I read it?” Raul asked.
“Which one?”
“Hamlet.”
“Sure. I’ll tell you what. If you promise me that you will utilize the glossary and read the whole play in the original language, I’ll give you a copy that you can keep.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll read the whole thing? The language is called Elizabethan, after the queen who was reigning after James II died toward the latter decades of Shakespeare’s life. It’s different, but terrifically elegant as rendered by Shakespeare. It’ll take patience. You’ll do it--- read Hamlet in the original?”
"Yes.”
At our next academic session, I presented a copy of Hamlet to Raul. He went to work and read the whole play in two weeks.
“So, how did you like it?” I asked.
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever read."
...........................................................................................................................................
Overcoming the Challenges of the English Language Learner
This trajectory from angry, failed Grade 6 student, to an academically engaged student reading Shakespeare with full understanding is all the more remarkable, given the fact that Raul was still classified as an English Language Learner who spoke only Spanish at home when he first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Economically challenged English Language Learners (ELL, in the official jargon) face even more challenges than do poor kids in general. Those of us who come from reasonably well-educated middle class (or above) families have enormous advantages over poor kids from families of little education. The words that we hear, and the ideas to which we are exposed, give us the advantage of several years’ worth of knowledge over kids of poverty. If frequent familial dysfunction is added to the mix, the problems are compounded greatly, and if English is not heard in the home, the problems can be insuperable for young people who do not get aggressive academic assistance.
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz came to me just in time. The task of overcoming academic deficits gets much harder as a student moves into middle school, and by the time a student gets to high school the life script is typically written. For poor kids, especially those from one-parent homes or from families with significant dysfunction, the script holds, at best, another spoke on the cycle of poverty; at worst, that script calls for life running the streets and onto a path that can well lead to prison.
We grabbed hold of Raul’s worst struggles in math and solved those and his attendant anger management issues within two years. By grade 8, he was functioning at grade level in all subjects and had landed on the “B” honor roll. By Grade 9 he was reading Shakespeare. By Grade 10, Raul was cast in the part of Albany (husband to King Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril) in our compact presentation (with all original Shakespearean lines) at the June 4, 2013 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet.
Raul has made three trips now to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota, seeing Midsummer Night’s Dream in summer 2011, King Lear in summer 2012 and Twelfth Night (which he also read with me) in summer 2013. In autumn 2012, Raul read (again, this time with several students and myself) and then saw Hamlet at the Jungle Theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.
Raul still struggles from time to time in math. He got poor advice from a high school counselor (before I could intervene) and was placed in a math course over his head as he began high school. We constantly scramble to keep his head above water in mathematics. But he makes “A’s” and “B’s” in everything else and has passed all Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) necessary for graduation.
I now have Raul enrolled with me in a one-on-one Cambridge/ Oxford style tutorial that I reserve variously for advanced students; students in the late stage of high school when ACT exams must be taken and so many other details must gain attention; and students for whom there remain significant needs.
Ironically, in Raul’s case, although he is most definitely an advanced student for the academic challenges that he has met and for his keen intellectual drive, he also still has significant academic needs. And, in double irony, I am not most worried about mathematics. Math is very concrete. The types of mathematics problems that will be on the ACT are no mystery.
I am most worried about Raul’s performance in his areas of academic strength involving verbal skills. Despite the fact that Raul is an avid reader and gobbles up material that I place with him; even though he sits with me and learns advanced vocabulary item after advanced vocabulary item; regardless of Raul’s excellent reading comprehension when he is master of the relevant vocabulary---- there are still words that come up that he does not know, that even now can stun me.
A student who has mastered words such as “truculent,” “quintessential,” “excoriate,” “paragon,” and “ameliorate”--- may stumble over more pedestrian vocabulary such as “meddle,” “indifferent,” “ trod,” “squabble,” or “paternal” because such words have just not happened to come up in the voluminous readings that we have done together--- and because he most certainly has not heard these words (all of which my own son, Ryan, knew by the time he was in Grade 4) at home.
Such is the challenge faced by students who live in immigrant families that speak a language other than English at home. Raul has had extraordinary assistance, and he has achieved so much. He is on the academic road leading to matriculation at a good college or university. But in the course of this next year and a half, we will continue our aggressive effort to advance Raul’s vocabulary, fill his head with ideas from across the liberal arts curriculum, sharpen his writing and research skills, and do everything necessary to assure his success once he gets to college.
The only question will be whether or not we can get him ready at that level of success on the ACT that will allow Raul to attend a first-tier selective college, or whether he will have to settle for a little less prestige.
However that may be, Raul is thriving. He is no longer angry. He is alive in a world of ideas and intellectual pursuit. He soaks up all of the information that I convey to him and then asks for more. He aspires either to be a photojournalist or a history teacher. He will succeed mightily at either profession.
All of this would not have been remotely possible if Raul had not entered the New Salem Educational Initiative five years ago and undergone the kind of aggressive skill and knowledge advancement that participation entails.
And Raul’s enormous progress would not have been imaginable without the support of the wonderful donors who have made his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative possible.
So to all of those donors, I say,
“Be proud of Raul, and what you have wrought.”
Be proud of yourselves as you celebrate the reclamation of a human life now destined for a bright future.
An Experience in the New Salem Educational Initiative From Grade 6 through Grade 11
A Case of the English Language Learner Enrolling in the
New Salem Educational Initiative Just in Time
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative in the spring of 2009, in the midst of his Grade 6 year of school enrollment at Sheridan K-8 School in Minneapolis. He came to the program upon the recommendation of his aunt, Carla Ruiz, who had witnessed the rapid academic progress of her three sons over just a three-month period. The recommendation went to Carla’s sister, Magdalena, Raul’s mother, a factory worker who speaks only very, very limited English.
When Raul came into the New Salem Educational Initiative, he was dealing with a host of personal and academic issues. At school, he was acting out with great frequency, often getting suspended, and was upon the recommendation of school officials attending anger management counseling sessions. He was failing all of his classes and was by report totally lost in math.
Thus it was in March of 2009 that Raul Sanchez-Ruiz first started attending weekly two-hour academic sessions in the New Salem Educational Initiative. At first, I reserved that late Wednesday afternoon time exclusively for him. By the following academic year, with enrollment beyond full, I brought in two younger students (both Grade 3), positioning them in another room and floating myself between the two rooms, giving rapid-fire assistance and inducing fast-paced learning for all three students.
Raul’s most critical academic deficit in the course of his Grade 6 and Grade 7 years was in math, a subject in which he had been allowed to move forward in school while learning very little. Upon enrollment in spring 2009, Raul did not know how to borrow (regroup) in subtractive exercises; he did not know many of his multiplication tables; he had not a clue as to how to do even simple division problems, much less long division; so that mastery of rudimentary material in fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, proportions, and simple probability were--- at this juncture--- impossible.
So we went to work. By the end of his Grade 6 academic year, Raul was adept at multi-digit addition and subtraction, in exercises both of calculation and application. At any given time, he could respond to my prompting so as to recall products (multiples) for factors in the multiplication table for numbers zero through ten. Some of these had a tendency, though, to slip away; thus it was through constant review that Raul came, by Grade 8, to know firmly and with immediate recall the products for 6 x 7, 6 x 8, 7 x 7, 7 x 8, and 8 x 8--- those that for many years had been problematic for him.
By that Grade 8 year, Raul could now draw upon such basic math skill to work out many types of problems that prior to enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative had constituted a mysterious and unknown world. He could do calculation and application for a wide variety of problems involving multi-digit addition, subtraction, and multiplication; and he had found the key for opening the door into the world of long division.
By the end of academic year 2010-2011, Raul Sanchez-Ruiz could now perform mathematical tasks actually required at the Grade 8 level: With the critical sequential basic skills under control, he could now figure percentages and do various calculations and applications involving ratios, proportions, and simple probability.
Remarkably, Raul was at this juncture performing fully at grade level in math. And as his academic frustration at school abated, and his relationship with me deepened, Raul no longer had any anger issues manifested as inappropriate behavior at school. Raul was on the “B” honor roll, his behavior was exemplary, and he was fully prepared to enter Grade 9 as a student well-positioned for high school. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz, Scholar of Shakespeare
During rides to and from Raul’s home and New Salem Missionary Baptist Church (where l conduct all academic sessions, except for a few held in students’ homes), we talked about all manner of topics, as I became aware of this young man’s insatiable curiosity:
We would, for example, pass a billboard advertising the services of a DUI attorney, which would lead to a succession of questions from Raul as to the meaning of “DUI,” the laws pertinent to blood alcohol level, the penalties for conviction, and the sort of education required to become an attorney.
“Oh, and what other kinds of lawyers are there?” Raul asked in continuing this conversational dialectic.
I would then explain real estate, entertainment, mergers, matrimony, and criminal topics as examples of areas of expertise in which a given attorney might specialize.
“And how does the education for an attorney compare to that of a doctor?” Raul would ask.
I thereupon would explain that medical school takes a bit longer and involves periods of internship and residency before certification.
Knowing that I am originally from Texas, Raul asked one day, “Say, I saw somewhere that Texas was once its own country. Is that true?”
So I explained that yes, Texas was a republic for nine years before gaining entry as the 28th state of the United States in 1845. And that in turn would lead to a discussion of the requirements for statehood, prospects for Puerto Rico becoming a state, the exact meaning of the term, “republic,” the difference between “republic” and “democracy,” the meanings of other terms for political systems, when in history certain political forms came into existence--- and we would still be talking as we arrived at his home (the discussion this time had occurred upon return; we had already covered other matters en route to New Salem).
En route to and from New Salem, I am always asking my students what good books they have been reading. One day after I asked Raul this question, I got a fortuitous question in return:
"And what have you been reading?”
“Hey, thanks for asking. Actually, I’m a huge fan of Shakespeare, and I’m forever trying to decide if Hamlet or King Lear is the greater tragedy. I recently reread each of these great plays.”
This engendered a whole host of questions that resulted in my passing a great deal of information on to Raul about the Bard: from where he hailed; the founding of the Globe Theater; the 37 plays divided among tragedies, histories, and comedies; the 154 sonnets; the two narrative poems; and a few quotations that I have committed to memory.
“So which one?”
“Huh?” I replied to a question that Raul posed in isolation after my delivery of a short lesson in Shakespeare and his universe.
“Which play do you think is better, King Lear or Hamlet ?
“Oh, yeah,” I remembered, “I had almost forgotten I raised that question. The thing is, a good number of people think that King Lear is even better than Hamlet. King Lear is such an audacious character; he is singularly memorable, and yet his character is very recognizable for the rashness and pettiness that leads him on his downward spiral. But for me, I just can’t let go of the sheer magnificence of numerous soliloquies in Hamlet. And the soaring beauty of the language is just stunning.”
“Could I read it?” Raul asked.
“Which one?”
“Hamlet.”
“Sure. I’ll tell you what. If you promise me that you will utilize the glossary and read the whole play in the original language, I’ll give you a copy that you can keep.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll read the whole thing? The language is called Elizabethan, after the queen who was reigning after James II died toward the latter decades of Shakespeare’s life. It’s different, but terrifically elegant as rendered by Shakespeare. It’ll take patience. You’ll do it--- read Hamlet in the original?”
"Yes.”
At our next academic session, I presented a copy of Hamlet to Raul. He went to work and read the whole play in two weeks.
“So, how did you like it?” I asked.
“It’s the best thing I’ve ever read."
...........................................................................................................................................
Overcoming the Challenges of the English Language Learner
This trajectory from angry, failed Grade 6 student, to an academically engaged student reading Shakespeare with full understanding is all the more remarkable, given the fact that Raul was still classified as an English Language Learner who spoke only Spanish at home when he first enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Economically challenged English Language Learners (ELL, in the official jargon) face even more challenges than do poor kids in general. Those of us who come from reasonably well-educated middle class (or above) families have enormous advantages over poor kids from families of little education. The words that we hear, and the ideas to which we are exposed, give us the advantage of several years’ worth of knowledge over kids of poverty. If frequent familial dysfunction is added to the mix, the problems are compounded greatly, and if English is not heard in the home, the problems can be insuperable for young people who do not get aggressive academic assistance.
Raul Sanchez-Ruiz came to me just in time. The task of overcoming academic deficits gets much harder as a student moves into middle school, and by the time a student gets to high school the life script is typically written. For poor kids, especially those from one-parent homes or from families with significant dysfunction, the script holds, at best, another spoke on the cycle of poverty; at worst, that script calls for life running the streets and onto a path that can well lead to prison.
We grabbed hold of Raul’s worst struggles in math and solved those and his attendant anger management issues within two years. By grade 8, he was functioning at grade level in all subjects and had landed on the “B” honor roll. By Grade 9 he was reading Shakespeare. By Grade 10, Raul was cast in the part of Albany (husband to King Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril) in our compact presentation (with all original Shakespearean lines) at the June 4, 2013 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet.
Raul has made three trips now to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota, seeing Midsummer Night’s Dream in summer 2011, King Lear in summer 2012 and Twelfth Night (which he also read with me) in summer 2013. In autumn 2012, Raul read (again, this time with several students and myself) and then saw Hamlet at the Jungle Theater in the Uptown area of Minneapolis.
Raul still struggles from time to time in math. He got poor advice from a high school counselor (before I could intervene) and was placed in a math course over his head as he began high school. We constantly scramble to keep his head above water in mathematics. But he makes “A’s” and “B’s” in everything else and has passed all Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) necessary for graduation.
I now have Raul enrolled with me in a one-on-one Cambridge/ Oxford style tutorial that I reserve variously for advanced students; students in the late stage of high school when ACT exams must be taken and so many other details must gain attention; and students for whom there remain significant needs.
Ironically, in Raul’s case, although he is most definitely an advanced student for the academic challenges that he has met and for his keen intellectual drive, he also still has significant academic needs. And, in double irony, I am not most worried about mathematics. Math is very concrete. The types of mathematics problems that will be on the ACT are no mystery.
I am most worried about Raul’s performance in his areas of academic strength involving verbal skills. Despite the fact that Raul is an avid reader and gobbles up material that I place with him; even though he sits with me and learns advanced vocabulary item after advanced vocabulary item; regardless of Raul’s excellent reading comprehension when he is master of the relevant vocabulary---- there are still words that come up that he does not know, that even now can stun me.
A student who has mastered words such as “truculent,” “quintessential,” “excoriate,” “paragon,” and “ameliorate”--- may stumble over more pedestrian vocabulary such as “meddle,” “indifferent,” “ trod,” “squabble,” or “paternal” because such words have just not happened to come up in the voluminous readings that we have done together--- and because he most certainly has not heard these words (all of which my own son, Ryan, knew by the time he was in Grade 4) at home.
Such is the challenge faced by students who live in immigrant families that speak a language other than English at home. Raul has had extraordinary assistance, and he has achieved so much. He is on the academic road leading to matriculation at a good college or university. But in the course of this next year and a half, we will continue our aggressive effort to advance Raul’s vocabulary, fill his head with ideas from across the liberal arts curriculum, sharpen his writing and research skills, and do everything necessary to assure his success once he gets to college.
The only question will be whether or not we can get him ready at that level of success on the ACT that will allow Raul to attend a first-tier selective college, or whether he will have to settle for a little less prestige.
However that may be, Raul is thriving. He is no longer angry. He is alive in a world of ideas and intellectual pursuit. He soaks up all of the information that I convey to him and then asks for more. He aspires either to be a photojournalist or a history teacher. He will succeed mightily at either profession.
All of this would not have been remotely possible if Raul had not entered the New Salem Educational Initiative five years ago and undergone the kind of aggressive skill and knowledge advancement that participation entails.
And Raul’s enormous progress would not have been imaginable without the support of the wonderful donors who have made his participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative possible.
So to all of those donors, I say,
“Be proud of Raul, and what you have wrought.”
Be proud of yourselves as you celebrate the reclamation of a human life now destined for a bright future.
Ginger Taylor-Myers--- Precocious, Eager, and Responsive
Ginger Taylor-Myers---
Precocious, Eager, and Responsive
The Power of Enduring Commitment and Familial Association With the New Salem Educational Initiative
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Ginger Taylor-Myers has never known life without the New Salem Educational Initiative. When the radiance that is Monique Taylor-Myers was a mere age eight and in her first year at Grade 3 in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Ginger was just one year old. When I would pick Monique up at her grandmother’s home on 6th Street North, Ginger was just beginning to walk. I would amble up to her and smile, she would smile back, then I would pick her up and give her a big hug.
That particular routine would last for at least a couple of additional years before I eventually acquired the habit of sitting down and engaging in more verbal interaction with Ginger. A child feels it when a caring adult joyfully shows attention. And an impoverished child from an ill-educated family benefits enormously when someone of considerably more education spends time and speaks words that the girl or boy otherwise would not hear.
Thus, Ginger has had advantages that even the superbly talented and long-participating Monique Taylor-Myers did not have. Ginger has been associated with the New Salem Educational Initiative essentially her whole life. She has received my direct attention throughout her life, and for years Ginger watched as sister Monique and cousins Talika Wilson and Daniel Raymond-Johnson packed into my hail-beaten ’96 Honda for transport to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church for weekly two-hour academic sessions.
Then, when Ginger reached kindergarten, off she went with her cousins and sister. For two years, she attended Saturday morning sessions with Daniel, Talika, and Monique. At that point, in her Grade 8 year, I moved Monique to an advanced-track college preparatory session that met on Sunday evenings. Ginger at that time was in Grade 2. Cousin Walter Allison (Daniel’s brother) joined the Saturday morning group as a kindergarten student. For two years, the Saturday morning group consisted of Daniel, Talika, Walter, and Ginger. Then, this academic year of 2012-2013, Amber Allison, the sister of Daniel and Walter, joined the group.
The family odyssey of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative continues. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The Precocity of Honeycomb
For some reason, from the time she was about four years of age, I have called Ginger, “Honeycomb.”
I oftentimes intentionally mispronounce words when interacting with my younger students. I say things like, “It’s time to snow to the jar” (“That’s ‘go to the car,’ man!”); “Okay, let’s grow on into the broom” (“Do you mean, ‘go on into the room’ ?“); and “Isn’t bath fun?” (“‘Math,’ man. ‘math,’--- We ain’t takin’ no bath.”) As silly as this may sound to some adults, such things keep kids on their toes, bring a smile to their faces, get them to consider word usage, jerk them into an unconventional realm of thought, and give them the all-important opportunity to correct an adult.
Young children love to correct an adult.
But aside from similarly mispronounced names and the adoption of nicknames used by the families of students, I don’t as a rule have nicknames of my own coinage for students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Ginger (whom the family often calls, “Gigi”), though, has this spunky cuteness for which--- in my admittedly atypical mode of thinking--- seemed to make something like, “Honeycomb,” an appropriately goofy appellation.
Ginger rolls with it, and in return calls me, “Harry,” at which point I always act like I am going to chase her, she pretends to be scared--- and so it goes. She is after all essentially my god-daughter, I’ve known and loved her for so long. We have a lot of fun.
And Honeycomb is without a doubt the child whom at her creation featured God saying, “All right--- now I’ve done some good work up to the present--- but today I’m going to create the world’s cutest child.”
Ginger is enormously precocious, revealing an intelligence that has been given great scope for development and demonstration in the New Salem Educational Initiative. I never even gave her a Grade K (kindergarten) skill development book. She skipped right to Grade 1, and by the end of her kindergarten year, Honeycomb could add and subtract with multi-digit numbers, she could carry and borrow (regroup), and she was highly adept at deciding which of these two operations was appropriate for given word problems.
In the meantime, Ginger mastered standard fare such as time, money, fundamental geometric shapes, and spatial directions with aplomb. During her actual Grade 1 year of school enrollment, we reinforced these skills, worked on graphs and tables, and placed a great deal of emphasis on reading.
By the end of Grade 2, Ginger knew her multiplication tables (conventionally a Grade 3 skill) and could do long division of multi-digit numbers with remainders. By the end of Grade 3, she was multiplying multi-digit numbers, adding and subtracting fractions requiring conversion to common denominators, and performing additive, subtractive, and multiplicative tasks with decimals. Now, in Grade 4, Ginger can figure percentages, multiply and divide fractions, and calculate simple probability.
By the end of this academic year, she will have learned to work with ratios and proportions, progressing to a level of math that conventionally has been associated with Grade 8 skill development.
Ginger’s advanced development as a math student is demonstrated at least as acutely in verbal performance, and indeed it is this that has astounded the crowd gathered at the Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....
Ginger’s Mastery of College Preparatory Vocabulary
One of the great advantages that a student has who regularly attends academic sessions in the New Salem Educational Initiative with older relatives is that this younger student is exposed very naturally to highly advanced material. I go long and hard with my students on explicit vocabulary acquisition, some of which is tested and repeated orally.
Thus it was that Ginger would overhear Monique and then Talika and Daniel practicing words that even for them constituted advanced vocabulary, drawn from college preparatory material such as practice ACTs. As early as Grade 2, Ginger began to repeat such words as her older relatives learned and practiced them, so that Snodgrass was with great accuracy defining--- and recognizing by definition--- college-level vocabulary such as “malapropism” ( a rather easy one for my students, who recall my own intentional misusage), “adroit,” “amicable,” “propitiate,” and “serendipitous.”
For two years running now, I have given Ginger the opportunity to demonstrate her astounding gift for words at the Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet. Many a mouth popped open as this little, sweet voice chimed forth with “misusage of words,”” highly skillful,” “friendly and easy to get along with,” “to please by offering gifts and sacrifices,” and “occurring very fortunately and at just the right time” for malapropism, adroit, amicable, propitiate, and serendipitous respectively.
Honeycomb beamed, her family radiated joy, and her mother shed a few happy tears.
Honeycomb is now in Grade 4 and, in addition to manifesting her verbal precocity by easily learning college-level vocabulary to which she is exposed, she reads consistently with the comprehension of a Grade 7 student. She takes great pride in reading with expressiveness, paying close attention to exclamation points, sad or happy moods, plot quirks and twists, age and personality of characters, and setting in circumstances running the gamut from the ordinary to the mysterious.
Ginger is increasingly applying her reading skills to a wide variety of subject area material (history, biology, and the fine arts, as well as fiction and poetry), broadening both her vocabulary and her knowledge base.
Her advancement is superior to many young people who can afford to attend private schools and do so at tuition rates similar to those prevailing at today’s colleges and universities. This is the power of the highly focused approach of the New Salem Educational Initiative, especially for those students who have been associated with the program throughout their lives. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Power of Enduring Familial Relationships as Witnessed in the Case of Ginger Taylor-Myers
Having begun attendance in formal academic sessions three years earlier in terms of level of school enrollment than her magnificently talented and academically disciplined sister Monique, having interacted me throughout her lifetime, and having internalized values pertinent to education over the course of many years, Honeycomb is on a very steep upward trajectory.
Enduring commitment and strong relationships with the families of my students are important on many levels:
Affectively, I love my students and their families, and they love me--- the stuff of life itself.
Pedagogically, the benefits are numerous. Children imbibe my ethic of education over many years and adopt the mores of the New Salem Educational Initiative at the core of their beings, as did my son, Ryan. They race to my car each time I pick them up, as if they are going to the zoo--- They consider learning fun, not because of some contrived project designed to “make learning fun,” but rather because the accumulation of knowledge is its own pleasure, and becomes ever more the delight the more one knows.
The multi-year participants among my students (at this point, almost everybody) readily take reading and math material home for further mastery, because they are excited to get to the next step, learn the next new thing, not because I have given them “homework.”
In the midst of an academic session such as that of Ginger on Saturday morning, involving as many as five students who are relatives or know each other well, I can call on older students to take a break and help out with younger students:
Ginger has benefitted from such instruction under the tutelage of Monique, Talika, and Daniel; now she herself is turning teacher at certain moments, with great pride and skill helping cousins Walter and Amber learn math and verbal concepts, or animating their imaginations with her expressive reading. This reinforces what she herself has learned, makes her feel intellectually mature, and deepens her appreciation for education as something precious to be passed on from generation to generation.
I now have at least ten students who have come to me at such early ages through their family networks. These children have never known anything but association with the New Salem Educational Initiative. I have a special attachment to such students, as does a parent blessed with the opportunity to watch a young life grow from the time of birth throughout life.
In Ginger Taylor-Myers we have the great gift of a child who is among the cutest of God’s creatures, blessed with a magnificent brain, and venturing forth as if life and education are one and the same.
And isn’t that so, and isn’t it wonderful to behold at work in the life of Ginger Taylor-Myers?
The Power of Enduring Commitment and Familial Association With the New Salem Educational Initiative
December 2013 Update for Donors and Others Interested in the New Salem Educational Initiative
Ginger Taylor-Myers has never known life without the New Salem Educational Initiative. When the radiance that is Monique Taylor-Myers was a mere age eight and in her first year at Grade 3 in the New Salem Educational Initiative, Ginger was just one year old. When I would pick Monique up at her grandmother’s home on 6th Street North, Ginger was just beginning to walk. I would amble up to her and smile, she would smile back, then I would pick her up and give her a big hug.
That particular routine would last for at least a couple of additional years before I eventually acquired the habit of sitting down and engaging in more verbal interaction with Ginger. A child feels it when a caring adult joyfully shows attention. And an impoverished child from an ill-educated family benefits enormously when someone of considerably more education spends time and speaks words that the girl or boy otherwise would not hear.
Thus, Ginger has had advantages that even the superbly talented and long-participating Monique Taylor-Myers did not have. Ginger has been associated with the New Salem Educational Initiative essentially her whole life. She has received my direct attention throughout her life, and for years Ginger watched as sister Monique and cousins Talika Wilson and Daniel Raymond-Johnson packed into my hail-beaten ’96 Honda for transport to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church for weekly two-hour academic sessions.
Then, when Ginger reached kindergarten, off she went with her cousins and sister. For two years, she attended Saturday morning sessions with Daniel, Talika, and Monique. At that point, in her Grade 8 year, I moved Monique to an advanced-track college preparatory session that met on Sunday evenings. Ginger at that time was in Grade 2. Cousin Walter Allison (Daniel’s brother) joined the Saturday morning group as a kindergarten student. For two years, the Saturday morning group consisted of Daniel, Talika, Walter, and Ginger. Then, this academic year of 2012-2013, Amber Allison, the sister of Daniel and Walter, joined the group.
The family odyssey of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative continues. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The Precocity of Honeycomb
For some reason, from the time she was about four years of age, I have called Ginger, “Honeycomb.”
I oftentimes intentionally mispronounce words when interacting with my younger students. I say things like, “It’s time to snow to the jar” (“That’s ‘go to the car,’ man!”); “Okay, let’s grow on into the broom” (“Do you mean, ‘go on into the room’ ?“); and “Isn’t bath fun?” (“‘Math,’ man. ‘math,’--- We ain’t takin’ no bath.”) As silly as this may sound to some adults, such things keep kids on their toes, bring a smile to their faces, get them to consider word usage, jerk them into an unconventional realm of thought, and give them the all-important opportunity to correct an adult.
Young children love to correct an adult.
But aside from similarly mispronounced names and the adoption of nicknames used by the families of students, I don’t as a rule have nicknames of my own coinage for students in the New Salem Educational Initiative. Ginger (whom the family often calls, “Gigi”), though, has this spunky cuteness for which--- in my admittedly atypical mode of thinking--- seemed to make something like, “Honeycomb,” an appropriately goofy appellation.
Ginger rolls with it, and in return calls me, “Harry,” at which point I always act like I am going to chase her, she pretends to be scared--- and so it goes. She is after all essentially my god-daughter, I’ve known and loved her for so long. We have a lot of fun.
And Honeycomb is without a doubt the child whom at her creation featured God saying, “All right--- now I’ve done some good work up to the present--- but today I’m going to create the world’s cutest child.”
Ginger is enormously precocious, revealing an intelligence that has been given great scope for development and demonstration in the New Salem Educational Initiative. I never even gave her a Grade K (kindergarten) skill development book. She skipped right to Grade 1, and by the end of her kindergarten year, Honeycomb could add and subtract with multi-digit numbers, she could carry and borrow (regroup), and she was highly adept at deciding which of these two operations was appropriate for given word problems.
In the meantime, Ginger mastered standard fare such as time, money, fundamental geometric shapes, and spatial directions with aplomb. During her actual Grade 1 year of school enrollment, we reinforced these skills, worked on graphs and tables, and placed a great deal of emphasis on reading.
By the end of Grade 2, Ginger knew her multiplication tables (conventionally a Grade 3 skill) and could do long division of multi-digit numbers with remainders. By the end of Grade 3, she was multiplying multi-digit numbers, adding and subtracting fractions requiring conversion to common denominators, and performing additive, subtractive, and multiplicative tasks with decimals. Now, in Grade 4, Ginger can figure percentages, multiply and divide fractions, and calculate simple probability.
By the end of this academic year, she will have learned to work with ratios and proportions, progressing to a level of math that conventionally has been associated with Grade 8 skill development.
Ginger’s advanced development as a math student is demonstrated at least as acutely in verbal performance, and indeed it is this that has astounded the crowd gathered at the Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....
Ginger’s Mastery of College Preparatory Vocabulary
One of the great advantages that a student has who regularly attends academic sessions in the New Salem Educational Initiative with older relatives is that this younger student is exposed very naturally to highly advanced material. I go long and hard with my students on explicit vocabulary acquisition, some of which is tested and repeated orally.
Thus it was that Ginger would overhear Monique and then Talika and Daniel practicing words that even for them constituted advanced vocabulary, drawn from college preparatory material such as practice ACTs. As early as Grade 2, Ginger began to repeat such words as her older relatives learned and practiced them, so that Snodgrass was with great accuracy defining--- and recognizing by definition--- college-level vocabulary such as “malapropism” ( a rather easy one for my students, who recall my own intentional misusage), “adroit,” “amicable,” “propitiate,” and “serendipitous.”
For two years running now, I have given Ginger the opportunity to demonstrate her astounding gift for words at the Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet. Many a mouth popped open as this little, sweet voice chimed forth with “misusage of words,”” highly skillful,” “friendly and easy to get along with,” “to please by offering gifts and sacrifices,” and “occurring very fortunately and at just the right time” for malapropism, adroit, amicable, propitiate, and serendipitous respectively.
Honeycomb beamed, her family radiated joy, and her mother shed a few happy tears.
Honeycomb is now in Grade 4 and, in addition to manifesting her verbal precocity by easily learning college-level vocabulary to which she is exposed, she reads consistently with the comprehension of a Grade 7 student. She takes great pride in reading with expressiveness, paying close attention to exclamation points, sad or happy moods, plot quirks and twists, age and personality of characters, and setting in circumstances running the gamut from the ordinary to the mysterious.
Ginger is increasingly applying her reading skills to a wide variety of subject area material (history, biology, and the fine arts, as well as fiction and poetry), broadening both her vocabulary and her knowledge base.
Her advancement is superior to many young people who can afford to attend private schools and do so at tuition rates similar to those prevailing at today’s colleges and universities. This is the power of the highly focused approach of the New Salem Educational Initiative, especially for those students who have been associated with the program throughout their lives. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Power of Enduring Familial Relationships as Witnessed in the Case of Ginger Taylor-Myers
Having begun attendance in formal academic sessions three years earlier in terms of level of school enrollment than her magnificently talented and academically disciplined sister Monique, having interacted me throughout her lifetime, and having internalized values pertinent to education over the course of many years, Honeycomb is on a very steep upward trajectory.
Enduring commitment and strong relationships with the families of my students are important on many levels:
Affectively, I love my students and their families, and they love me--- the stuff of life itself.
Pedagogically, the benefits are numerous. Children imbibe my ethic of education over many years and adopt the mores of the New Salem Educational Initiative at the core of their beings, as did my son, Ryan. They race to my car each time I pick them up, as if they are going to the zoo--- They consider learning fun, not because of some contrived project designed to “make learning fun,” but rather because the accumulation of knowledge is its own pleasure, and becomes ever more the delight the more one knows.
The multi-year participants among my students (at this point, almost everybody) readily take reading and math material home for further mastery, because they are excited to get to the next step, learn the next new thing, not because I have given them “homework.”
In the midst of an academic session such as that of Ginger on Saturday morning, involving as many as five students who are relatives or know each other well, I can call on older students to take a break and help out with younger students:
Ginger has benefitted from such instruction under the tutelage of Monique, Talika, and Daniel; now she herself is turning teacher at certain moments, with great pride and skill helping cousins Walter and Amber learn math and verbal concepts, or animating their imaginations with her expressive reading. This reinforces what she herself has learned, makes her feel intellectually mature, and deepens her appreciation for education as something precious to be passed on from generation to generation.
I now have at least ten students who have come to me at such early ages through their family networks. These children have never known anything but association with the New Salem Educational Initiative. I have a special attachment to such students, as does a parent blessed with the opportunity to watch a young life grow from the time of birth throughout life.
In Ginger Taylor-Myers we have the great gift of a child who is among the cutest of God’s creatures, blessed with a magnificent brain, and venturing forth as if life and education are one and the same.
And isn’t that so, and isn’t it wonderful to behold at work in the life of Ginger Taylor-Myers?
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