Moving from Impoverished Immigrant Status Toward a Life of Cultural Enrichment, Civic Preparedness, and Professional Satisfaction

Note  >>>>> The names used in this article are data privacy pseudonyms.


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Just a couple of blocks off Cedar Avenue near the junction with East Lake Street in South Minneapolis, Grade 9 student Edwardo Rosario Hernandez appeared at the front door of the duplex where he lives upstairs with his mother and her significant other. The time is 7:00 PM on a Friday evening in November 2015, so that we are following a ritual that began when Eduardo was in Grade 2.


At age eight in that second grade year, Eduardo had just returned from a year back in Mexico, from which his mother, Belinda Hernandez, had emigrated from the city of Puebla in 1998. Family exigencies impelled Belinda to return to Mexico, where Eduardo attended first grade after having begun his school years as a kindergartener at Anderson K-8 in South Minneapolis.


Eduardo always demonstrated an admirable knack for picking up colloquial English conveyed orally, but his writing and reading skills were typically ragged for a youngster who had attended first grade in Mexico and heard only Spanish at home. Math during the early years was also something of a struggle for Eduardo, who strove mightily but had a hard time in the effort to keep up with Roberto Mendez, his academic session mate for many years.


Eduardo was ever eager to escape the home front, where his mother dispensed great love and concern for him but had the habit of connecting with men whose tempers flared more vigorously than their achievements in life. Eduardo told me that on those rare occasions when I was not able to conduct our weekly meeting, he would cry for the lack of an interaction that for him was a bright spot in a life too often spent hiding in the shadows.


With practice and my provision of a rich body of children’s literature, Eduardo began to manifest the reading ability with the written word that he had always shown orally. His math ability improved, but he had a hard time during his K-5 years mastering multiplication with numbers 0-9 to the point of automaticity, unusual with my approach that enables most students in the New Salem Educational Initiative to master multiplication (conventionally a Grade 3 skill) by the end of Grade 2. But in the middle school years (grades 6-8), Eduardo did show an aptitude for abstract mathematical thought, excelling in world problems requiring a decision as to what mathematical skill to employ. And, as algebra and geometry were introduced, Eduardo revealed considerable interest and mental ingenuity in solving the pertinent problems.


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Now, on this November evening, Eduardo walked down the steps from his duplex and entered my car. Fellow student Roberto had a family event this week, so we conversed one-on-one. We proceeded to discuss all manner of things:


We talked about his week at Cristo Rey, where his mom sought placement and Eduardo gained acceptance upon passing entrance exams at the end of Grade 8. He is on track to attain a 3.5 GPA or better for his first semester in Grade 9 at the private Catholic school in South Minneapolis.


Eduardo confided that his mom and her significant other had been arguing a lot lately, and that this made him even more anxious to get out of the house. I gently probed for any signs of true danger but found none, as expected. Belinda loves Eduardo ferociously and is quite protective, actually maintaining strictures on Eduardo’s time spent with friends to which Eduardo accedes but feels are too rigid. So Belinda argues with her males of interest but holds her own and eventually brings matters under control. There is no danger on the home front, just more noise than the thoughtful and very rational Eduardo would prefer.


Eduardo and I also discussed how he is doing on his medication for a mild but abiding condition with depression-like symptoms. I have a decided bias against medicating for mental disturbance, preferring environmental adjustments; but in Eduardo’s case, the meds seem to be prescribed in low dosages and are carefully monitored. He vows that he feels better since taking the medication, and I must concede that he does seem to be in better spirits since undergoing counseling and getting the medications from his psychiatrist.


And Eduardo and I reviewed many of the concepts in economics that we had been studying via my new book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, which Eduardo loves and with regard to which he was very eager to proceed to the chapter on psychology.


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And so we did, upon arriving at New Salem and after finishing going over some math homework. This homework involved equations that were fairly challenging, calling for a strong sense of order of operations, operations with positive and negative integers and fractions, and requiring skill in manipulation to isolate the variable for solution. Eduardo, who did by the end of Grade 6 master multiplication tables and other fundamental skills in which he had lagged but demonstrated persistence, expressed to me his gratitude for my patience in imparting these fundamentals to him, as we both noted how important they were in the algebraic manipulations that he was performing at present. And, ever the abstract thinker, Eduardo is now at the head of his class in Algebra I at Cristo Rey.


As much as Eduardo loves math, though, his real delight this evening was in learning about Sigmund Freud’s concepts of Id, Ego, and Superego; conscious, unconscious, and subconscious states of reality and behavior; and the constructs of the Oedipal and Electra complexes. He was fascinated, too, by the derivation of the names for these psychological conditions from plays in the Oedipus trilogy of Sophocles and the character of Electra from plays of that name from Euripides and Sophocles, as well as from the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus.


Having finished writing ten of the projected fourteen chapters of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, I am in general waiting to give my students copies of the whole book, rather than parcel out advanced-draft chapters now. Eduardo wanted a copy of the psychology chapter, so riveted was he by my discussion of Freud’s concepts. I told Eduardo that I was so very sorry, that I would run a copy for him, but that for the day I was going to have to use one of my two copies with another student. He said he understood, then put a big smile on my face by taking a picture of the whole 16-paged (single-spaced, with an extra space in between paragraphs) chapter with his cell phone.


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I love all of my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative and have warm relationships with their families. Eduardo is one of those especially strong connections. The relationship that I have with him, now maintained over a seven-year period, is one of both student-to-teacher/ mentor and friend to friend. The relationship is very important to us both; for Eduardo, there is something of a life-raft quality about it in the context of his home situation, which is physically spare and at times psychologically disturbing.


So I take great satisfaction in having nurtured this young life and guided it in preparation for success at an excellent university upon graduation from high school.


There is very great likelihood that Eduardo is on course to move from the status of an impoverished immigrant, toward a life of cultural enrichment, civic preparedness, and professional satisfaction through the power of K-12 education.