Article #3: Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz

Article #3


Third in a Five-Article Series:  The Essence of the New Salem Educational Initiative in the Expanding Mission to Revolutionize K-12 Education, Summer 2014



Human Relationships:   Enduring, Loving, Substantive


Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz





Consider the challenges confronted by the student who does not speak English at home by reflecting on the following passage from an ACT practice test:


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Gaspar Ruiz, condemned to the death of a deserter, was not thinking either of his native place or his parents, to whom he had been a good son on account of the mildness of his character and the great strength of his limbs. The practical advantage of this last was made still more valuable to his father by his obedient disposition. Gaspar Ruiz had an acquiescent soul.
But it was stirred now to a sort of dim revolt by his dislike to die the death of a traitor. He was not a traitor. He said again to the Sergeant: “You know I did not desert, Esteban. You know I remained behind amongst the trees with three others to keep the enemy back while the detachment was running away!”
Lieutenant Santierra, little more than a boy at the time, and unused as yet to the sanguinary imbecilities of a state of war, had lingered nearby as if fascinated by the sight of these men who were to be shot presently--- “for an example”--- as the Commandante had said.
The sergeant, without deigning to look at the prisoner, addressed himself to the young officer with a superior smile. “Ten men would not have been enough to make him a prisoner, mi tenente. Moreover, the other three rejoined the detachment after dark. Why should he, unwounded and the strongest of them all, have failed to do so?”
“My strength is nothing against a mounted man with a lasso,” Gaspar Ruiz protested eagerly. “He dragged me behind his horse for half a mile.”
At this excellent reason the sergeant only laughed contemptuously. The young officer hurried away after the Commandante.
Presently the adjutant of the castle came by. He was a truculent, raw-boned man in a ragged uniform. His spluttering voice issued out of a flat yellow face. The sergeant learned from him that the condemned men would not be shot till sunset. He begged then to know what he was to do with them in the meantime.
The adjutant looked savagely round the courtyard and, pointing to the door of a small dungeon-like guardroom, receiving light and air through one heavily barred window, said, “Drive the scoundrels in there.”


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The text above represents one-third of a Reading Section passage on an ACT practice test, for which there are a total of four passages. The passage given constitutes challenging reading (taken from Joseph Conrad’s short story, “Gaspar Ruiz: A Romantic Tale”) for most high school students. For students from families the members of which are not well-educated, do not own many books, or do not themselves read very much, the challenges are hugely greater. And for students of immigrant families wherein English is seldom if ever spoken, the hurdles in the way of a good performance on the ACT can be Herculean.


Professionals in the public schools should be alert to the need of children from challenging circumstances to be very aggressive in their vocabulary development, so that from a very young age students should be reading a great variety of materials, explicitly developing an extensive vocabulary, and with great intentionality keeping pace with young people from better educated families. But the public schools have never instituted an effective program for engaging all students with a college preparatory course in reading and literature across the liberal arts curriculum.


In the New Salem Educational Initiative, students are now reading Shakespeare as early as Grade 4, they are similarly introduced to the Iliad and Odyssey in elementary school, they read a wide variety of traditional African American, African, Native American, Latin American tales, and they learn to appreciate the drama of Lorraine Hansberry, as well as the poetry of such authors as Langston Hughes, Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. They love this literature, never shrink from it. They know that I love great literature, and that I love them, so we come to love many of the same books and subjects for study--- just as happens within families.


And this latter follows naturally according to the processes of the New Salem Educational Initiative, which delivers an abundance of academic content of heavy substance, dispensed with a fervent love that never goes away.


And so it has been for Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz.


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Felicia enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative as a Grade 5 student at Nellie Stone Johnson K-8 School in North Minneapolis. From that time forward, she and her sister have attended a two-hour session on Wednesday evenings. As a Grade 8 student during academic year 2010-2011, Felicia also began attending on Sunday evenings, along with two other students whom I had identified as having the ability and the intellectual drive to pursue a course of very advanced study, whereby I started to train them in the kind of skills required to do well on the ACT, to position themselves to receive good academic scholarships upon applying to colleges or universities, and to thrive once ensconced in a collegiate setting.


Raul enrolled as a Grade 6 student struggling in all ways at school. He had serious anger management issues, and he was failing every subject at Sheridan K-8 (now K-5) School in Northeast Minneapolis. By the end of that academic year (2008-2009), Raul was passing all of his classes. During the following academic year, he was consistently on the “B” honor roll. By the end of his Grade 8 year, Raul was making “A’s” and “B’s” in every subject, even in math, a subject that had been a perennial problem for him through his late elementary school years.


Felicia and Raul are now both in Grade 11. These students, because of their half-decade of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative, have an array of skills necessary to succeed at the four-year college or university level. Since academic year 2010-2011 Felicia and Raul have read numerous Shakespearean plays, performed roles in our annual Shakespearean production, and traveled with me to Winona to see performances in successive years of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. They also attended another production of Hamlet at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis Uptown and Othello at the Guthrie.


Felicia and Raul are very keen intellectuals who often seem as if they are going to stare a hole in my face when I am telling them something about history, government, economics, literature, natural science, and mathematics. But (in adaptation of the Bard) the course of love for academics does not always run smooth.


Despite undertaking a very advanced course of study with me, Felicia did not engage well with her high school teachers as a Grade 9 student. She was sloppy about turning in assignments and compiled a GPA far below her knowledge and skill level.


Felicia recovered considerably at Grade 10 and Grade 11. Having been blindsided at the point in Felicia’s Grade 9 year when I realized how unexpectedly haphazard she had been in her studentship, I began to grill her weekly as to whether she was turning in assignments, getting to class on time, and doing all of those nitty-gritty tasks necessary to make grades earned match knowledge and ability. As Felicia continued to accumulate vast knowledge across the liberal arts curriculum in the sessions with me that she found so much more engaging that the worksheet-DVD approach of so many of her teachers at school, she also began to develop better skills necessary for elevating her in-school academic record.


Raul’s chief challenge was focused on the particular area of math. During his high school years, Raul has continued to manifest good study skills and to be good about turning in assignments. But, disappointingly, especially since we had worked so hard to get his math skills to grade level by the end of his middle school years (Grades 6-8), Raul received some bad advice from a high school counselor and was enrolled in a mathematics course that was over his head. Raul had not had enough basic algebra to be ready for geometry, the course in which he was enrolled. Raul and I have been in a constant scramble ever since that time to keep Raul’s grade in math at a strong passing level, even as we prepared him to pass the Minnesota Grade 9 Writing Exam and the Grade 10 Reading Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment (MCA), and to engage with a range of subjects across the liberal arts curriculum, building vocabulary and the knowledge base to take on challenging college preparatory readings.


Thus does the love that endures become so important in the lives of students who come from impoverished families of low educational levels. Just as caring parents take action when their children show signs of floundering, so do I assume this role with my students. Felicia now is a good high school student, as well as a brilliant and scholarly person. William is performing acceptably in mathematics, even as he earns top grades in all other subject areas and continues to manifest a level of curiosity about the world around him that makes him one of the most genuinely intellectual people I have ever met.


Without the love that never goes away, and that comes with heavy doses of college preparatory content, it is entirely possible that at certain junctures either Felicia or Raul might have become discouraged, dropped out of school, or relegated themselves to a position from which attendance at a four-year college or university would not be a viable proposition. After spending half of their academic lives attending weekly sessions of the New Salem Educational Initiative, though, Felicia and Raul have engaged with the best literature the world has to offer, acquired vast stores of knowledge from across the liberal arts curriculum, and developed a skill set that gives them a chance, with further explicit training, to aim for an ACT score that would put them at about the 75th percentile, which would in turn give them the opportunity to attend a selective college or university.


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Most high school students would not know the meaning of many of the words from the opening passage from Conrad that appears on a practice ACT college preparatory exam. Heading the list of unfamiliar vocabulary would be the words, “deigning,” “sanguinary,” and “truculent.’ So these words would either have to be learned from context or explicitly taught. An ACT exam is a good place to put the skill of vocabulary acquisition from context as necessary, but given the fact that a student only has 35 minutes to complete four passages in reading (one each for the categories of prose fiction, humanities, social studies, and natural science [the latter is in addition to a complete section entitled, “Science Reasoning”]), students likely to score at the highest levels already have an enormous vocabulary ready to apply to the art of reading comprehension.


Many other students, especially those from homes wherein adult members are not well-educated or speak little English, furthermore are very likely not to know the word, “acquiescent,” and may also need explanation for the following vocabulary items:  "condemned," "disposition," "imbecilities," "mounted," "lasso," "contemptuously," and "scoundrel."


I compile vocabulary lists for all reading assignments that my students undertake, and for the ACT practice reading section now under discussion, found 176 words that from my over 40 years of experience teaching students from impoverished and ill-educated families I know may cause difficulty. Notable among these are words that might give even fairly adept adult readers pause.


Those words include the following:


alacrity
evanescent
indolent
copious
capacious
ineluctable
ingenuous
ingenue


Whatever smugness the better readers among you may now be feeling if you yourself know the meaning of all of these words, do step outside your own ego to understand that for most students from impoverished and ill-educated families (and for many high school students from across the demographic continuum), these words are effectively foreign. They must be taught, either from context, explicitly, or both.


I do a lot of oral reading with my students, and in the course of reading challenging material out loud, we combine contextual and explicit vocabulary instruction. We compile vast lists for ongoing review in a process that focuses a great deal of attention on explicit vocabulary acquisition.


Vocabulary acquisition is hugely important for students who do not speak English at home. Remember that Felicia Benitz and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz have been studying on an advanced track with me for a long time. They have read many Shakespearean plays and other classical literary works, fully comprehending works that are daunting to much of the American public. But this is because Felicia and Raul consciously acquire the needed vocabulary that I teach them. With all of this reading that they have done, for all of the sophisticated vocabulary that they have in their mental files, they can still leave my mouth agape at words that they do not know, because no one speaks these words at home, and because they have not learned them at school.


So, in addition to those most difficult vocabulary items given above, understand that when teaching the student from impoverished, ill-educated families; and those that speak little or no English at home; they very likely will not immediately grasp, know at all, or know completely, the meaning of these words, just a few examples from that list of 176 items compiled from the practice ACT Reading section:


disposition
adjutant
inference
folklore
spur
zeal
garrison
discretion
indelible
placidity
sentry
intercession
moral
morale
paradox
contravene
bestirr
prudence
quintessential
par excellence
detachment
insolence
behest
paragon
prodigious


Again, those are just 20 items from a list that includes 176 words that I predicted (very correctly) students would not know. And often, we end up adding 25 to 50 words for which students did not have perfect understanding.


If students who are most likely to need explanation to comprehend fully the words that they are reading include Felicia and Raul, who have been under my wing since they were in late elementary school, how much more will this include students of similar demographic descriptors who have done nothing but attend classes in the Minneapolis Public Schools?  


I know if I ask a Grade 11 or Grade 12 student who has taken either a practice ACT or the actual ACT what she or he scored, that person--- even one who has been given mostly “A’s” and “B’s” in high school courses--- is likely to tell me that the score was a 13 or 14. This is an objectively wretched score that indicates the atrocious education that even the best of our children of impoverished, ill-educated, or immigrant families receive.


Thus Felicia and Raul have quite an advantage in being able to undergo rigorous academic training with me, regularly reading challenging material and undergoing training specifically focused on the ACT.


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This is the power of love that never goes away. Felicia and Raul know that I love them. I tell them so. I walk the talk. I have credibility. Therefore, they know that I’m for real, whether I’m praising them or letting them know that they’ve screwed up. In the latter case, they will scramble to get their acts together, because they don’t like to disappoint me, just as one does not like to disappoint a loving and caring parent whom a young person respects.


Felicia and Raul have a legitimate chance to score a 25 on the ACT. If they do this, they will double the scores of students who bear similar demographic descriptors.


If we as a society cared more deeply; if we revolutionized our systems of K-12 educational delivery to fill them with challenging liberal arts curriculum sequenced for acquisition grade-by-grade, imparted by excellent teachers who by definition possess broad and deep subject area knowledge in history, government, geography, literature and language, fine arts (music and the visual arts), natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), and mathematics; we would give all of our precious children an equality of social terrain on which to achieve their deepest aspirations.


Why do we not do this?


As Ross Perot once asked me in the context of an interview concerning his gifts to and his interest in an inner city school in Dallas,


“Where are our guts? These are our children. What could be more important?”


Why, indeed, don’t we get moving to establish the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be?