A Mother of a Student Becomes a Student in a Recurring Pattern of Life Transformation in the New Salem Educational Initiative

[Note:  Names used in these and other such articles on my blog are data privacy pseudonyms.]


A chief tenet of the New Salem Educational Initiative is my permanent relationship with students once they have entered my academic and personal universe.  Now, a particularly satisfying phenomenon is gaining multiple manifestations as numerous parents of my students request their own two-hour weekly academic sessions of study with me.


Just last evening (Sunday, 7 February 2016) as I write this, I got home (at 9:30 PM) from a remarkable day of small-group tutoring.


As usual, I departed sanctuary services at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church about 1:30 PM, then drove over to the apartment building occupied by the economically poorest students whom I have ever taught, keeping in perspective that my whole teaching career has been dedicated to teaching the most impoverished and historically underserved members of our society. This is the residence of Damon Preston (Grade 7) and Javon Jakes (grade 1), whom I followed through four different living units in (mostly North) Minneapolis before they moved to their current bedbug-ridden apartment on the East Side of St. Paul.


I had actually worked with these boys the day before (Saturday, 6 February) and on this Sunday of the day after was making this trip back to St. Paul, acceding to a request from their mom, Evelyn Patterson, to admit her to my small-group program for the purposes of studying toward her associates degree.


Evelyn is thirty-three (33) years old and the graduate of a high school in one of Chicago’s roughest South Side neighborhoods. She actually rung something approaching an education out of the teachers at that school and proceeded upon graduation to attend community college. She did this while working over a five-year period and apparently amassing almost a year and one-half worth of credits.


But her education was disrupted when her mother died, a cataclysmic event in Evelyn’s life since after several years of estrangement this young woman and her mom had just begun to reestablish a relationship. Soon thereafter, Evelyn committed time to helping her ill and convalescing maternal grandmother who had raised her during a late childhood and adolescence of estrangement from her mom. But then other members of the family transported the elderly woman from Minneapolis (to which Evelyn had moved from Chicago) to Atlanta; soon after the move southeastward, this beloved grandmother died, causing in Evelyn an array of emotions grounded in guilt and a sense of loss.


It was about this time that Damon entered my program as a six year-old at Grade 1;  Javon was just a newborn in arms at the time. I have thus known Evelyn, her significant other (Marcel Gifford), and the boys for six years now. These are highly intelligent people from families to whom history has been unkind. But the boys are thriving academically in the New Salem Educational Initiative, recording accomplishments more typically associated with children of upper middle class parents.


Now Evelyn, who for many years has been so very thankful and proud of the success of her children--- but for whom life had sent her on a personal descent into drug abuse and mental illness--- has gathered the courage to put her life back together, continue her education, and get her boys out of that cheapest rental unit in the poorest area of St. Paul where bedbugs sidle up to children in the middle of the night.


I appeared at Evelyn’s apartment at 2:00 PM, I drove her over to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in North Minneapolis, and as we drove we reviewed both the gloomy past and a prospectively better future. Then we went into two hours of intensive math review. Evelyn needed review of all basic mathematical operations involving addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; but these came back to her quickly. We went as far as three digits top and bottom in multiplication after reviewing multiplication tables with my quick-learn method; then we went on to decimals, the relationship of fractions to decimals, place value of mixed numbers with decimals, and all operations with both decimals and fractions.


This was astounding, even by the standards of my efficient methods that I have developed for skill acquisition and recovery.  Evelyn is whip-smart and highly motivated. When I told her that we had just risen through the mathematical ranks from lower elementary school to a level approaching Grade 7, she beamed. When I told her that with two more weeks of two-hour academic sessions we would rise into high school for a study of algebra and geometry, I could see life transformation in Evelyn’s eyes. When I walked Evelyn up to her apartment at 4:30 PM on that Sunday, 7 February, she thanked me profusely, wiping tears from her eyes but wearing a broad smile on her face.


As soon as she closed the door behind her, I could hear her proclaiming to Damon, Javon, and Marcel:


“I climbed seven different grade levels today--- and next I’ll be in high school, then back in college!”


How many Stacey’s are there in our society who have been abused by lousy schools and historical circumstances--- but whose children and personal lives could be transformed by the power of better K-12 education?


Legions.


The revolution that must come in K-12 education is our most profound domestic duty for public policy in the United States.  This is the next, long-delayed, Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement.


I must not fail.


You must not fail.


We must not fail.