[Note: Names of all students and their family members of reference in my accounts of interactions in the New Salem Educational Initiative are data privacy pseudonyms.]
I have known Carlos Benitez (now in grade 9 at Henry High School) and his younger brother Oscar Benitez (Grade 7, Folwell K-8), for nine years, and I witnessed their little sister Rosa Garcia (Grade 5, Folwell K-8) appear as a newborn baby in one of the six homes in which they have lived (mostly in South Minneapolis but now on the Northside) since I have known the family. Their mother is Felicia Benitez, who despite being highly intelligent was academically abused at Green Central Community School in that typical K-12 public schools way--- and ended up dropping out after grade 8; she has now joined her children as one of my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
I picked Carlos, Oscar, and Rosa up at their home near Dowling and Lyndale in North Minneapolis, within 30 minutes after I departed the home of Eveylyn, Javon, and Damon (see immediately prior article) in Coon Rapids and spun back over to the Northside; we reviewed their Thanksgiving holiday and status in classes at school as we drove over to New Salem Missionary Baptist Church for our weekly two-hour academic session.
Oscar and I got busy on a math assignment involving ratios and proportions that he said his teacher had not explained very well. He scooted through the assignment of ten problems after immediately grasping my explanations and responded superbly as I would check back in every few minutes.
In the meantime, I scratched out some problems for Rosa that involved getting common denominators for adding and subtracting fractions. Rosa is making a “4” (highest on a 1 – 4 grading scale for grade K-5 students) in math at Folwell. Her teacher commendably gives Rosa extra, challenging assignments. Rosa typically gets all of her assignments done at school, so we proceed to move along the advanced track on which I have positioned her for college preparatory study. Rosa wanted to work more on these fraction problems, which we did--- then I put an advanced reading comparing the social movement led by Cevar Chavez organizer of migrant farm workers) with that led by Martin Luther King.
Checking back with Oscar and Rosa every so often to explain concepts and define new vocabulary, I in the meantime helped Carlos with his assignment, a history project in which he was to choose a topic on migration experiences of people from a list that included the post-world War II Jews, the 1849 Gold Rush, the Middle Passage of slaves bound for the Americas, the Hmong people from Laos, Somali refugees headed for East African camps and thence to Europe or the United States--- and many others on a list of approximately 20 such migrant experiences.
Carlos’s teacher had provided no background knowledge whatsoever. Carlos had no idea which migration experience he would find most interesting. I gave Carlos twenty (20) mini-lectures on the experiences given on the list. He was fascinated with them all but took only a brief moment for pondering before settling on the 1849 Gold Rush as the focus of his project.
Oscar finished with his ratio and proportion assignment and then asked me for material on Greek mythology. Oscar knows that I have an enormous library of books and articles and can usually give him anything he wants to read and study. I handed him a fifteen-page reading from the Core Knowledge series of E. D. Hirsch that provides an excellent rendering of the essence of Homer’s Illiad. I discussed with Oscar the snatching of the beauteous Helen by Paris that sparked the Trojan War, and Oscar was off and reading.
…………………………………………………………
Carlos, Oscar, and Rosa are interesting student cases. Carlos and Rosa are high-IQ types. Oscar is a more stolid scholar, but he is very dedicated and over time has built up an enormous amount of knowledge. Just as E. D. Hirsch explains is often the case, over time an enormous knowledge base substitutes for high intelligence, providing ready information for quick retrieval without the necessity of learning everything on the spot--- as the “You-can-always-look-it-up” fact-detractors irresponsibly maintain.
Not too many people in sordid presidential campaign 2016 took time to “look’ up the history of immigration and interactions between the United States and Mexico.
Nor did they take time to “look up” the history of trade and diplomatic relations with nations of Europe and Asia.
Nor could they tell a Shi’ite from and Sunni; or in many cases even find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map in under a minute, if at all.
And our lousy K-12 schools had surely not provided potential voters with any such information.
It is a conceit that facts can always be looked up for any acceptable degree of mastery on the spot--- and exceedingly insidious to fail to provide students such information.
Left to their own devices, people make judgments based on emotion and are susceptible to the rantings of demagogues.
Education professors gave us the presidency of Donald Trump.
Carlos, Oscar, and Rosa are prepared via participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative to be culturally enriched, civically prepared, professionally satisfied citizens. They will all take my compact courses on economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American History, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, advanced mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics--- as they move through my Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.
For Carlos, this is especially important. He through hard study is building the same knowledge base as the more innately gifted Oscar and Rosa. He can retrieve facts and information to make astute inferences and comments just as well as can they. He is building the knowledge and skillsets that will give him a chance to score in the mid-to-high 20s (a very good scaled score out of a possible 36) on the ACT.
On the strength of such knowledge bases, people of middling IQ can think and respond as quickly in most circumstances as can a person of high IQ who is similarly well-informed; and knowledge-full people of middling IQ will typically respond much more quickly than a high IQ type who had little in the way of knowledge or skill sets.
Thus does a person of high knowledge become the genius.
Almost all people could be functional geniuses.
What a shame, then, it is that our K-12 system produces such ignoramuses, manifestly apparent and lamentably rampant in the spectacle that brought Donald Trump forth even as a candidate, how awful that he could be a nominee, how degrading that he will soon preside in the world’s most prestigious elective office.
……………………………………………………..
When I returned Carlos, Oscar, and Rosa to their home, I checked over an assignment that I left for Rosa, who like Evelyn Patterson (see, again, the immediately previous article) has become my student along with her children.
Oscar went off into a corner to read the compact version of the Iliad.
Rosa with great excitement told her mom what she had learned about Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King.
Carlos showed me his current academic report as a ninth grader nearly at the finish of his first semester at Henry High School. He has a 3.4 grade point average, which he knew would please me, so often had I told him that for college scholarships his GPA and ACT scores would loom large.
Dashing off for my fourth and final academic session that I would run during the 7:00 – 9:00 PM slot in a day that began at 9:00 AM, I smiled while thinking of the young man of modest IQ who often thinks and responds so quickly and takes such pride in his academic record. I said out loud to myself as I got back in my car:
“Now that’s genius.”
No comments:
Post a Comment