October 6, 2016
My Beloved Ryan---
What a great conversation was ours this past Monday (3 October). There is no one in my personal universe with whom I have such conversations: No one else has the sort of information base on the topics that we covered, and very few aside from My Love have the analytical capability and brainpower to range over and ratiocinate upon the matters of politics, history, economics, psychology, philosophy, literature, and religion that suffused our discussion on this particular and many other occasions.
I do appreciate you, as does your paternal grandmother:
Na said that you and she had another super conversation, full of laughter and love--- those two very important qualities of life well-lived life. Na loves your calls; you, Barbara, Dennis, Beth, Judy, Gloria, and I have especially in these last couple of years provided plenty of reasons for her to persevere through the aches and pains of 95 years on the planet to take considerable joy in the hours of each day.
I love you all for the contributions that you have made and are making to the endurance of what has become Mom's truly remarkable journey.
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Two of the young people with whom I worked today are particularly interesting cases; rather than transport them to New Salem, as I do for most of my students, I work with these two students one on one for one hour each rather than two hours but right in their own residences.
At 3:00 PM, I go to a subsidized (by Volunteers of America) high-rise a few blocks off the southern extreme of Nicollet Mall where Alisha Carlson lives with mom Tanya Webster. Alisha came to my attention via the auspices of Shana Lyle, mother of Nita Bolton, the other student to whom I refer above. The concern when I started working with Alisha during school year 2015-2016 (when Alisha was in Grade 2) was behavioral, but with some extension to her academic progress--- so that she had been given an Individual Education Plan (IEP) by the end of her kindergarten year.
My image of Alisha as I rode the elevator to her 11th floor apartment for the first time about six months ago now was that of a student who may have some level of biological damage and dysfunctional deportment.
In fact, she was a delight.
Alisha was the essence of sweet and smart from the time I first started sketching out math problems and vocabulary on my yellow pad to assess her math and reading level--- smiling all the while in pride and gratitude. By the end of that academic year 2015-2016, Alisha was off of her IEP, demonstrating math and reading level at Grade 3 while still in Grade 2, and working enthusiastically through a book of readings that I gave her.
At the New Salem Educational Initiative Banquet this past June 2016, I awarded Alisha and two other strikingly adept youngsters the Precocious Young Scholar award, calling upon Alisha and the others to demonstrate their skill in arithmetic mental calculation, knowledge of multiplication tables at only Grade 2, and advanced reading capability. Alisha basked in the attention, beamed with pride and accomplishment---and loved the fried and barbecued chicken, tossed salad, mashed potatoes, macaroni & cheese, spaghetti, and lasagna that I prepared for the students and families in my mode as cook and caterer.
Today Alisha easily zoomed through a ridiculously easy homework assignment that called upon her to write and then spell orally a dozen one-syllable words. We then went to a book of advanced readings that I gave Alisha, today focusing on an article about the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Alisha learned how in the world an ancient Roman casket ended up at The Met and how other items of interest draw three million people to this great cultural institution annually. In doing the reading, Alisha mastered the meaning and spelling of new vocabulary terms valuable, casket, businessman, businesswoman, businessperson, and magnificent.
I then sketched out several conceptual arithmetic problems calling for decisions as to whether to employ addition, subtraction, or multiplication. At just this juncture at early Grade 3, Alisha can utilize carrying and borrowing (regrouping) for three digit numbers and perform multiplication operations with two digits top and bottom.
At the end of our academic session, Alisha and I showed Tanya what her daughter had accomplished, as mom and off-spring radiated joy and pride.
I could see in Tanya's eyes a vision of a better life than she had considered possible for herself--- and we are now talking about a redress of the latter situation as Tanya herself plans to become my student in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
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I next zoomed over to work with Nita in the 33rd block of Chicago Avenue South. Alisha and Nita present cases of downtown and Southside students who were referred to me via a parental pipeline running from North Minneapolis.
I had helped Shana's son Donnie nurse wounds inflicted in the SPAN program for behaviorally extreme cases, working with him from his Grade 8 year four years ago up through Grade10 before he moved to live with relatives in Seattle for attendance in and graduation from high school.
I met Nita when she was a tyke but did not start working with her until I got an emergency call from Shana at the beginning of her daughter's Grade 6 year at Ramsey K-8. During that academic year of 2015-2016 I launched Nita on an aggressive program of skill remediation and she finished the year making mostly B's.
Today Nita had no homework, so we went over a reading that I had left her focused on the life, intellectual trajectory, and political and social activism of Malcolm X. Along the way, Nita mastered the elements of my background history lesson, provided--- as is typical with all of my students enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools--- because she had learned nothing of this in school.
Contextualizing the article, I conveyed to Nita the meaning and significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; Lyndon Johnson (with reference to his relationship with Martin Luther King), the Union versus the Confederate States of America; the Civil War; Reconstruction; the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; the Compromise of 1877; Jim Crow; sharecropping; the meaning of centuries (that, for example, the 19th century runs from 1801 through 1900--- astoundingly, students from the Minneapolis Public Schools never know this until I tell them); Islam by comparison and contrast with the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims); Saudi Arabia; Mecca; and pilgrimage.
We covered more African American history, and for that matter United States history, in an hour and a half (we went longer today than my usual visit to her house) than this Grade 7 student has ever learned in school.
Nita was raptly attentive.
Students hunger for knowledge.
Thus the importance of Alisha, Nita, all of my students, and waging of the K-12 Revolution.
Shana asked me if I was headed home.
I said "No, when I leave here I head to work with many other students."
She asked me when I'd finish.
I told her 9:00 or 10:00 PM.
Shana smiled with expressive eyes that exerted a bit of fatigue in my behalf, even as I bounded down the steps from her apartment.
How wonderful to love what one does in life, as I do--- and there so much teaching, research, public speaking, and advocacy to do.
Waging the K-12 Revolution impels me forward in the most important endeavor imaginable--- achieving excellence of education for all of our precious children, especially those who have been waiting for even a modicum thereof for a very long time.
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I have my passport renewal in expeditious mode, to arrive in three weeks--- by the end of October.
With that document renewed and on the way, we can continue to move toward a union of itineraries for the trip to Taiwan.
We'll also continue our discussion concerning the Thanksgiving trip to Dallas--- and so much more--- in that ever-looming conversation.
I love you so very much, my dear son---
Gary
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