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?