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.

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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.

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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.

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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.