The names used for the students and
their family members in this article are, in the manner of my typical practice,
data privacy pseudonyms.
My longtime
readers will remember that a bit over four years ago I wrote a series of
articles, based on a most remarkable Saturday in my life in the New Salem
Educational Initiative. I worked with
six different small groups (3-5 people) in the course of that day, beginning at
9:00 AM and finally turning my beat-up Honda Civic homeward at 10:00 PM that
evening.
I put these
articles together in a compact book and entitled the series, Just
Another Day at the Office: A Day in the Life of the New Salem Educational Initiative: The Remarkably Unremarkable Events of
September 29, 2012.
One of the articles featured a student by the name of Kamal
Richardson, whose mom (Shameah Hutchinson) had gotten my name from one of my
fellow church members at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, where I direct
both the New Salem Tuesday Tutoring Program and my seven-day-a-week program of
small-group academic instruction.
Shameah was frantic because Kamal, then in grade 8 at
Sanford Middle School and having spent three years in the Minneapolis Public
Schools SPAN program for students with severe emotional difficulties, was not
acquiring the academic skills that she felt her son should be mastering. Shameah explained to me that Kamal was not
being challenged enough at school and needed additional help and sufficient
challenge to get up to his grade 8 level, especially in reading and math. The SPAN program had helped him some
behaviorally, but she feared that he was falling farther and farther behind
academically.
There was no surprise in any of this for me. Virtually all special education programs in
the Minneapolis Public Schools undervalue the capabilities of the students, effectively
placing them on a track that is even less worthy to be called educational than
is the mainstream course of study that sends the general student population
shuffling toward a diploma. I told
Shameah that I understood her concern and that we would work out a schedule.
…………………………………………………………..
A worked Kamal into an already packed schedule on Saturdays,
meeting with him weekly at 5:00 PM. Occasionally
I would find no one at home--- usually
because of some disruptive circumstance but occasionally due to forgetfulness
on the part of people whose lives are disordered in the extreme. Shameah and Kamal moved three times during
the eight months that I have known them. For awhile they had no home of their
own and had to shuffle among friends and family members. Nevertheless, Shameah tried to keep contact
with me by using the cell phones of friends or the new ones that she would get
from time to time. And, because I knew
so many people in the family, I was able to utilize those contacts to keep in
touch.
I worked with Kamal on math skills that he should have
mastered by this juncture in grade 8.
Demonstrating no learning disability, he quickly mastered fundamental
math through concepts such as fractions, decimals, percentages, ratio,
proportions, and simple probability. We
then began to work on algebraic equations and got as far as those of the
simultaneous type whereby two variables must have the same values in two
different equations.
Kamal’s vocabulary was underdeveloped and he had had little
experience writing essays or research papers in school. At that time, students in Minnesota were
still required to pass a writing skills exam at grade 9. Kamal and I read a variety of fictional and
nonfictional materials together, and with the grade 9 writing exam looming put
a lot of energy into the organization of essays.
I modeled an introduction to an essay in response to the
prompt, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” This was similar to the kind of question
asked on the grade 9 writing test. Kamal
chose Jamaica and identified understanding family life, trying a variety of
food, and learning more about holidays and customs as three topics around which
to order internal paragraphs. I modeled
the introduction, he wrote the second paragraph, I straightened this out for
him and explained the importance of keeping on topic within a paragraph, then
left him with the task of doing the remainder of the body (paragraphs three and
four) on his own. I then modeled a
conclusion for him. We refined the
essay, did this for three additional essay assignments, and soon Kamal was
writing an essay that would earn him at least the necessary “3” and maybe even
a “4”out of the “5” rating necessary to pass the exam.
Kamal was polite, soft-spoken, and eager to learn in my academic
sessions with him. I observed him for
one school day, and his behavior was fine.
But I fully understood that when presented with unchallenging material
he got bored, and that there are components of his psyche at this point that
lead him to act out in given situations on certain school days. So I counseled Kamal to make the most of his
weekly academic sessions with me. I
promised to keep him challenged, give him a well-rounded education, prepare
him to pass the exams necessary to graduate, and to give him most of his substantive education
with me during our weekly academic session.
I asked
Kamal to behave himself at school.
He said that
he would.
And he did.
………………………………………………………..
Kamal passed that writing exam as a grade 9 student at
Washburn High School.
Kamal and I continued to work together throughout his grade
9 year. He worked his way out of the
SPAN program with a display of much-improved behavior. He and I read a bevy of sophisticated
articles as we look toward his next testing challenge, the reading exam at
grade 10.
But a series of unnerving episodes shook the family. Shameah sent Kamal to live with relatives who
had settled in Salem, Oregon. In Salem, he
finished high school in the standard three years and graduated on time, in
spring 2016.
……………………………………………………………………………………………..
Two months into academic year 2015-2016, I got another call from
Shameah, similar to that which I had gotten in her quest for academic help for
Kamal. Her daughter, Alicia, was now
living with her, a transfer from residential quarters of relatives on her dad’s
side. Alicia was struggling as a grade 6
student at Ramsey K-8 of the Minneapolis Public Schools. Her grades in mathematics were particularly
bad, but her performance in general threatened to yield failure and a repeat of
grade 6.
I went to work immediately with
my logically sequenced exercises in math.
Alicia knew few of her multiplication tables at the time of our first
academic session, but I ran her through my efficient method of multiplication
table mastery, building confidence with the easy ones that are essentially self-evident
(“0’s” and “1’s”), can be easily counted (“2’s,” “5’s,”and “10’s”), have a
trick (the “9” trick), or have a sound indicator (“six times four is
twenty-four,” “six times six is
thirty-six,” “six times eight is forty-eight”)--- then working our way from the “3’s” and ”4’s,”
to those in the ”7’s” and “8’s”that tend to give students the most difficulty
(6 x 7, 7 x 7, 7x 8 and 8 x 8).
With similar logical rigor and efficiency, Alicia moved conceptually through
multiplication up through three digits top and bottom, division with five-digit
dividends and two digit-divisors, graphing, tabulation, fractions and mixed numbers with all operations,
decimals, and percentages.
Alicia turned a failing grade in math into a “B” and also began to
complete and turn in all homework in her other subjects, for which we also
reserved time. When the homework load was
light, Alicia and I read selections in history, literature, fine arts, and natural
science from the What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know volume in E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge series and kept meticulous
vocabulary lists.
Now, in grade 7 and still at Ramsey, Alicia is making all “A’s” and “B’s.”
She and I are now reading extensively about African American history
and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, of which her knowledge was very
slight. Alicia now knows the essence of
the Compromise of 1877, Plessy v. Ferguson, Northern
Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Sleeping Car Porters Strike, Brown
v. Board of Education, Memphis Bus Boycott, Little Rock Nine, the
murder of Emmett Till, the lunch counter sit-ins, formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), and the series of
events that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965. Aside from the Emmett Till murder,
Alicia had learned very little of these events, so that she had little
contextual information for Fanny Lou Hamer’s courageous stance in the 1964 Democratic
National Convention, for which she was doing a project for Black History month.
………………………………………………….
Shameah smiles when she sees Alicia and me working together.
I looked up one day to see her beaming and said, “Shameah, you have a
very smart daughter here. She is doing
so very well in all subjects.”
“It’s all because of you, just like how you got Kamal on the right
track.”
“I pointed the way, and your kids learned where to go.”
“Well, then, we sure need more teachers who can point the way,” she
said.
“I’m working on that one,” I returned.
“Well work hard, ‘cause those schools need a lot of work.”
No comments:
Post a Comment