Article #4 Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor Myers, and Orlando Martinez

Article #4


Fourth Article in a 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




Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez







The imperfections witnessed in the performances of Felicia Benitez and Raul Sanchez-Ruiz (see immediately preceding article) are absent in those of Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez. As good as Felicia and Raul are, as high as their native intelligence is, however piercing their intellectual drive--- Felicia and Raul have at times been high maintenance students. To get them positioned as prospectively successful four-year college and university students has taken a lot of effort on my part, effort deeply rewarding, but requiring hours and hours of an additional sort of energy expenditure nevertheless.


I use the phrasing, “an additional sort of energy expenditure,” because I expend the same aggregate energy for each one of my students, with the sort of energy expended differing from student to student.


With Monique Taylor-Myers, almost all energy expended has been to take a child who was languishing below grade level upon enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative at Grade 3, superintend a rise to grade level by the end of Grade 4, deal with a few remaining issues in Grade 5, witness a rapid rise above grade level in Grade 6, observe near-genius intelligence respond to the highest academic instruction with magnificent results in Grade 7, place her on a very advanced college preparatory course of study from Grade 8, and make adroit decisions regarding her own best trajectory from the end of her Grade 10 year.


This is a truly felicitous case that has made me even more aware than I have always been of the great potential waiting to be tapped in the academic soul of many an impoverished but abundantly talented urban youth.
             
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From the very beginning, Monique manifested a vibrant spirit, in love with life, excited about the world of learning. When New Salem Missionary Baptist Church was located at the corner of Lyndale Avenue North and 26th Avenue North (two blocks east of its current location), I would hold my academic sessions in a large room on the third (top) floor at the eastern extent of a long hallway. I would give Grade 3 Monique her math and reading assignment, she would smile and go to work with alacrity, finishing quickly, asking for more.




At school, Monique’s teachers would fret over an occasional lapse of performance on a reading comprehension exercise, or over some apparent failure to grasp a math concept at desired swiftness. I counseled Monique’s very attentive mother (Lana Taylor) to stay calm. “What I am witnessing in my own academic sessions with Monique,” I would tell her, “indicates strong ability, a perfect disposition, and an intense desire to learn.”


And so it was. Monique mastered her multiplication tables, a classic Grade 3 task, ahead of most of her class, and she began to take on mathematic tasks typically identified with Grade 4 before her first academic year (2005-2006) of enrollment in the New Salem Educational Initiative had ended. She worked through a Grade 3 level reading skill development book without difficulty, and I gave her generous amounts of classic reading material (Norse mythology, “The People Could Fly,” “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”), as well.


At the end of our sessions, Monique would rise from her seat, go to the big, broad window looking out on Lyndale to the east, peer at her reflection, and do a ballerina’s spin with great joy and pride. This child was joy. This child was life. This life was the embodiment of potential for great success.


By Grade 6 Monique’s rise was meteoric, seemed without bounds. She had great success as a student during her first two years at Olson Middle School, so that by Grade 8 her teachers were scrambling to keep her productively occupied. By this time, I had placed Monique in a special Sunday evening advanced session of the New Salem Educational Initiative with two other highly adept Grade 8 students, Felicia Benitez (highlighted in the immediately preceding article) and Lana Okoye.


All three of these young women were and are highly talented. They would each focus with great intensity in academic sessions in which we studied, deficit and debt, minimum wage, the Wahhabi sub-sect of Sunni Islam, domestic violence with the relationship of Rihanna and Chris Brown as points of departure, the phenomena of falling asteroids and meteorites--- and many, many other topics, even as we trained toward mastery of mathematical, reading, grammatical, and scientific material directly germane to the ACT.


At the end of their Grade 8 year, these students read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its entirety, then traveled with me to Winona the following summer (2011) for the first of what would become our annual trips to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. The play of Shakespeare that we read and witnessed in summer 2012 was King Lear, which these students again read in its entirety; then the following spring, I assembled a compressed version of the play, maintaining all Shakespearean (Elizabethan) language, for performance at the June 2013 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet. I performed the part of King Lear, with Monique appearing as my daughter Regan; and Felicia and Lana portraying my daughters Cordelia and Goneril respectively.


And indeed I loved these three students as if they were my own daughters. But one of them was clearly excelling at a more rapid rate than the others, lifted into the academic stratosphere by a mighty work ethic in tandem with native intelligence and six years of the challenging liberal arts course of study in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
     
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Monique had become frustrated that Felicia and Lana had not always done their reading assignments in a manner consistent with her own ethic of diligence. I could tell that she was restless, that even these very talented students were not up to Monique’s performance level, and that they were holding her back. So in mid-June of 2013, Monique and I sat on the steps of her dad’s house (she splits residential time with dad, mom, and grammy) in the 2300 block of Thomas Avenue North. I gave her advanced study materials, including her own copy of an ACT preparatory book, and several newspaper articles.


“I know that you have become frustrated in the Sunday evening class," I told her.  "That’s understandable. The other students are talented, but they don’t have your drive; you are much more the self-starter.”


“What you have to remember,” I continued, is that you are not just any student…” I paused. Monique nodded affirmatively.


“…even as I am not just any teacher…”   Monique smiled and nodded in the same way.


“So I’d say that the time has come for us to meet together in the manner of an Oxford/ Cambridge style tutorial--- we’ll sit across from each other and discuss and learn an even greater amount of material than has thus far been the case. You’ll carry the whole load, and the reading will be heavy in substance and quantity. Would you be willing to do that?” I finished.


“Yes, I would.” Thus were Monique and I off on a fabulous tour through the works of August Wilson; the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Ramayana of the Hindu tradition, Dao Dejing of the Chinese tradition, select Buddhist sutras, oral accounts of Creation from Africa and Native America, and overviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; history of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas; fundamental constitutional principles; Civil Rights Movement with reference to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee--- and many, many, other subjects and topics.


At the 5 June 2014Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, Monique performed the lead role in my adaptation of the great work of Shakespeare as (given the change in gender for the title role) Hamlet, Princess of Denmark, absolutely commanding the stage in delivering the great soliloquies that begin “I have of late, lost all my mirth…” and “To be or not to be, that is the question…”


And now, in July and August of 2014, Monique and I are bearing down on additional ACT preparatory materials as we aim for a top-tier performance at a score in the 28-36 range. Monique Taylor-Myers is the best student I have had in more than 40 years of teaching in all possible circumstances, including students of widely varying ethnicities, economic statuses, and in most available educational settings (K-12, university, overseas, prisons, many urban and a few rural and suburban settings). Teaching her has been one of the greatest joys in my life.


As Monique enters her Grade 12 year and prepares to go off to an excellent four-year college or university, how wonderful for me that I have been graced with a couple of students, poised for entry into Grade 5, who are showing the kind of promise that Monique has shown and is fulfilling.


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Monique’s little sister, Ginger, was a babe in arms when I first started picking Monique and cousin Marcia Johnson up for their weekly academic sessions. I have watched her grow up, and she has witnessed the older members of her family go off with me each week for as long as she can remember. She would often be at grammy’s in those early days, at whose house in the 2200 block of 6th Street North I would pick her up and hold her way over my head as she squealed in delight.


Ginger Taylor-Myers entered the New Salem Educational Initiative formally when she was in Grade K (kindergarten). She would overhear members of her family reading and practicing college preparatory words, learning them along with them, so that at the June 2010 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, Ginger stunned the crowd by perfectly defining words such as quintessential (“the essence of the essence, the absolutely most important thing”), lassitude (“laziness”), and mercurial (“puzzling, mysterious, unpredictable”).


Ginger knew her multiplication tables by the end of Grade 2, was performing all basic mathematical operations in multiple digits and in the context of real-life situations during Grade 3, and by Grade 4 was figuring percentages, proportions, and ratios. At the end of Grade 4, she and I sat one day while she quickly memorized her part as Osric for our performance of Hamlet at the 5 June 2014 Annual New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet, and in addition memorized one-fourth of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” By the time of the banquet, Ginger had all of the great work of oratory memorized and delivered it to the audience with great passion and expression.


So this summer of 2014 I have paired her with my other most precocious young student, Orlando Martinez. Early on, Orlando seemed even more advanced for his age than did Ginger. He entered the New Salem Educational Initiative at Grade 1. I took him through standard addition and subtraction exercises for that grade, proceeded to multiple digits, carrying and borrowing (“regrouping”), and when Orlando took those tasks on without breaking a sweat, I said, “Okay, well, let’s see what he can do with multiplication tables.”


Thus it was that Orlando did memorize multiplication tables for numbers zero through nine (0-9), demonstrating this conventionally Grade 3 skill by the spring of his Grade 1 year. By spring 2014, Orlando’s Grade 4 academic year, I decided that he, too, was ready to perform in our Shakespearean production and assigned him the part of the murdered king (paralleling the scenario whereby the elder Hamlet was murdered) in the play within the play at which Hamlet “catches the conscience of the king.” This summer of 2014, Ginger and Orlando are now attending a weekly academic session together, moving through mathematical tasks that more typically describe Grade 7 and 8 skill levels. They are reading the full version of Hamlet with me and will travel to Winona as part of the second group that I will take this summer to the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Ginger and Orlando are remarkable prodigies, and their talent is being fully captured and developed as students of mine in the New Salem Educational Initiative.


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The discovery and nurturing of the marvelous talent of Monique Taylor-Myers induced me to raise the already high expectations that I have for all students, regardless of demographic descriptors. The fact that she put me on heightened notice of the power and potential waiting to be tapped in urban youth has worked to the benefit of Ginger and Orlando. How wonderful to be fully developing such precocious young brains whose cogitations will now rise far above their Grade 5 level of enrollment.


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Locally centralized public school systems must be our chief units of K-12 educational delivery in the United States.



The district of the Minneapolis Public Schools under the leadership of Bernadeia Johnson has great potential to address the longstanding underperformance of students of color, and those from families of low economic wherewithal. The road to true excellence will not be easily traveled, for there is much repaving and improvement to be done on that road. The road must feature carefully sequenced gradations leading to the acquisition of advanced skill and knowledge sets across a rich and well-defined liberal arts curriculum. The knowledge and skill sets must be delivered by teachers of great knowledge and pedagogical ability, with a passion for learning that inspires similar emotions in students.


This is what has happened in the New Salem Educational Initiative in the cases of Monique Taylor-Myers, Ginger Taylor-Myers, and Orlando Martinez. I feel so blessed every day that my feet hit the ground for the way that these young people have responded at the very apex of the strong academic structure that is the New Salem Educational Initiative. These students, all of my students, have enriched my life abundantly, and they move forward each day knowing that the prospects for their futures are excellent. On some level they know that they will be the ones to end generational poverty that has endured for too many cycles. They know that they have the power to do that, because the enormous latent talent that they had at birth has been tapped and now pours forth ineluctably.


So it should be for all of our precious children in a revolutionized system of K-12 education.