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.

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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.

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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.

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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.