The Unusual Trajectory of Sofia Ruiz: The Importance of the Enduring Relationship as a Principle in the New Salem Educational Initiative

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


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I first met Sofia and her sister Elena when the former was in Grade 5 and the latter was in Grade 4 at Nellie Stone Johnson K-8 in North Minneapolis. Sofia and Elena were standing on the steps leading to the doorway of three of their friends, siblings who were students of mine in the New Salem Educational Initiative.


These students introduced me to Sofia and Elena. I asked the two of them if they, too, would like to participate in my academic program. I thought that Sofia’s smile would light up the sky on what was otherwise an overcast day.


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Mathematical competency was easy to impart to Sofia. Although not as intellectually gifted as her sister, Elena also responded with alacrity to my instruction in math. The two sisters also loved to acquire sophisticated vocabulary items, but Elena did not read much on her own, and they both spoke only Spanish at home, so progress in reading came slower. We worked together for two academic years before these two demonstrated grade-level proficiency on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) in reading.


But at about that point, when Sofia was in Grade 7, I began to consider Sofia for entry into an advanced college preparatory class, for inclusion with two other similarly talented Grade 7 students. Sofia loved to read selections that I brought to her and Elena from the What Your (Preschooler, Kindergartener, First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth) Grader Needs to Know series of Core Knowledge Foundation progenitor E. D. Hirsch. And she and I would have lively discussions moving in transit to and from New Salem Missionary Baptist Church and the home where Sofia and Elena lived in North Minneapolis. Sofia loved to hear about current events and geographical settings about which she learned little in her classroom at Nellie Stone Johnson.


By the end of Sofia’s Grade 7 year (spring of 2010), I had decided I would include her, Adisa Layeni, and Monique Taylor-Myers in a highly advanced college preparatory class during their Grade 8 years (academic year 2010-2011).


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The notion was an inspiration and was quickly rewarding. I began training Sofia, Adisa, and Monique at what at the time seemed many years in advance for the mathematics, reading, English usage, and science reasoning parts of the ACT. We read all manner of articles: treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, the travails and triumphs of Pakistani heroine Malala Yousafzai, archaeological digs producing evidence of new hominids, the trajectory of meteorites landing on Russian soil, evidence for the causes of Alzheimer’s, the candidacies of Barack Obama and John McCain, biographical information on William Shakespeare.


Sofia, Adisa, and Monique played my daughters (Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan respectively) as I took on the role of King Lear in our annual production of a Shakespearean drama. They performed speeches by great African American leaders; Sofia presented a speech by Sojourner Truth and another by Frederick Douglass. This was high-powered academic training and the three students seemed to be thriving.


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Unbeknownst to me, though, Sofia was actually flailing at Edison High School. I eventually found that she did not like the environment, claimed health issues that kept her out of school (even though she never missed one of our academic sessions), and had all manner of appointments that similarly interfered with her class attendance.


This for me was unknown territory. Sofia was recording off-the-charts achievements with me in a very advanced college preparatory experience on Sunday evenings but doing so poorly in school that she was not earning all of her credits.


For academic year 2011-2012, Sofia switched enrollment from Edison High School to a North Minneapolis alternative high school. I was not pleased, because alternative schools are credit mills at which students learn very little. But I knew that Sofia would continue her actual education in her studies with me on Sunday evening.


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In the course of time, though, Monique Taylor-Myers distinguished herself from both Sofia and Adisa. Her willingness to read great amounts of material on her own, her commitment of time for taking notes on such material, in conjunction with what I knew was a superior performance in high school (first at Roosevelt and then, for Grade 10 until graduation at Fridley this past June 2015) all led me to establish a one-on-one Oxford/ Cambridge-style tutorial for Monique at a separate time of the week from our Sunday meetings.


Monique continued to train for the ACT with me, we sat in academic sessions that ran as long as four hours at a time covering a wide range of literary material and subjects across the liberal arts curriculum, and she finished with a 3.7 GPA at Fridley. She is now matriculating at St. Cloud State University on the strength of a financial aid package replete with grants and scholarships.


Adisa went through a period of lackluster school performance in Grade 9 but eventually, upon my steady encouragement, righted her course, recorded a 25 on the ACT, graduated from Henry High School, and is currently matriculating at the University of Minnesota/ Twin Cities.


Sofia, though, never came close to matching the high school performance of Adisa and Monique. Oddly, Sofia has the most driving intellectual interest of the three. I’ve always called her Mentes Grandes [Big Brains] for her sheer intellectual acumen and pure interest in knowledge and thought. With me, she comes alive and gets all kinds of things accomplished in our academic sessions together. But she has lots of work to do on her organizational skills, attention to academic endeavor in her own space, and becoming a more selective reader across an abundance of subject matter on her own time.


Sofia graduated from her alternative high school on time, as in the very different cases of Monique and Adisa. We have agreed that she will continue to train academically with me, continue to build her vocabulary and strengthen her academic reading skills, and to become more of a self-starter in her quest for knowledge at the upper levels of academic challenge.


I have discussed with Sofia the possibility of going to St. Cloud State University (SCSU) for autumn 2016 through the Connections program, which brings promising students onto campus who still need to prove that they are bona fide university students.  The program allows these prospective students to live in SCSU residence halls and attend regular classes at St. Cloud while maintaining official enrollment and paying the lower rate of tuition at a community college such as Minneapolis Community and Technical College or St. Paul College.


Meanwhile, Sofia is excited about the knowledge acquisition and college readiness that she will gain by reading my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education as she continues to work on those habits of scholarship that will allow her to thrive.


Although Sofia’s trajectory has been unusual for one of my students, the principle of the permanent relationship that has always undergirded my approach in the New Salem Educational Initiative has been and will continue to be hugely important in the case of this fascinating student.