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.