A Note to My Readers:
The names used for the students and
their family members in this article are, in the manner of my typical practice,
data privacy pseudonyms.
Manuela,
Lucinda, and Anita Sandoval are three students of Ecuadorean parents and
grandparents whom I have known for many years and who are very active current participants
in the New Salem Educational Initiative.
Manuela was
in grade 5 at Sheridan Elementary in the Minneapolis Public Schools when she
enrolled in the New Salem Educational Initiative; Lucinda was in grade 4; Anita was in grade 1. There is an unusual nuance, though, to their
tale of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative:
The trend
for many years now has been for my students in the New Salem Educational
Initiative to enroll very early in their K-12 years and then study with me
until graduation from high school and beyond.
In the case of these sisters, though, residential shifts and familial
struggles resulted in a two-year interruption as students under my
guidance. Anita studied with me from
grade 1 through grade 3, then after the two-year interruption we reconnected
when she was in grade 6; Manuela and
Lucinda reconnected after the same time lapse, resuming study with me at grade
9 and grade 10 respectively.
For all
three of these students, this was precious time lost; their skills had atrophied in many areas by
the time we began our weekly academic sessions anew. For Manuela and Lucinda the struggle became
very arduous to recover foundering basic math and reading skills and to attain
the academic goals that they and their parents, Carlos and Marcia, had for them
as high school students aspiring to attend a four-year college or university..
………………………………………………………………………
When I can
start with a student very early and sustain them under my academic instruction
throughout the K-12 years, I typically move them into high school with excellent
chances to attain an ACT score in the mid-20s or above. When they do not begin until the middle
school years, even at grade 6, the struggle becomes more difficult, and
thereafter students must be highly focused to approach the level toward which I
always want to guide them.
The reason
for this is that students get such inadequate instruction in their K-12
experiences in school that I must provide most of the key knowledge and skill
sets that will truly prepare them for collegiate and university experiences. Students learn very little in the way of
subject area knowledge prior to high school.
Even in math, the strongest instructional component in the classrooms of
the Minneapolis Public Schools, students have frequently not mastered
fundamental concepts to the point of automaticity in such a way as to provide
satisfying experiences in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, or
calculus. Students learn to read
reasonably well in kindergarten through grade 2, but their poor vocabulary
development and lack of encounters with challenging reading material thereafter
do not give them the skills or habits necessary to comprehend the increasingly
complex material descriptive of the legitimate high school or college student.
I can
improve a student’s chance for college or university success at any time, even
for those who do not connect with me until the high school years. But at the latter point, my efforts with a
student typically become a salvage operation.
The K-12 education provided in the Minneapolis Public Schools do not as
a rule prepare students from economically challenged circumstances, frequently
in the context of familial dysfunction, in such a way as to give them the
academic foundation necessary for collegiate or university viability.
Stride up to
any student from such circumstances, who otherwise is just as bright and full
of intellectual potential as young people with residences in Linden Hills or
Lowery Hill, and ask them what they got on a practice or actual ACT, and they
in the overwhelmingly typical case will cite scores somewhere between 12 and
15.
This is the
reality.
And also the
reality is the fact that an ACT score of 21 or above is predictive of
collegiate or university viability. A
score of 25 is necessary for acceptance to most selective colleges and
universities. National Merit Scholars
who have recorded near-perfect PSATs generally go on to attain scores in the 31
to 36 (perfect) range on the ACT, and even such scores do not guarantee
entrance into the most elite schools of the United States.
Young people
from challenged circumstances, then, having matriculated in K-12 systems such
as the Minneapolis Public Schools that have never been organized to get
anywhere close to meeting their needs, face daunting challenges as they aspire
to college or university attendance.
………………………………………………
The
foregoing observations indicate strongly why once a student comes under my
academic instruction and guidance, I never let go. I typically have multiple familial cell phone
numbers memorized and am prepared to shift my pick-up-for-transport-to-New
Salem point as circumstances require.
Many of my students have multiple residences at which they might lay
their heads for any given overnight sleep (or lack of much thereof for gunshots
in the night or numerous personages coming and going).
And all of
my students have moved at least twice in search of cheaper Section 8 housing.
All of them.
So I am
always prepared to follow students wherever they go, and a change of residence
or continuing familial challenges do not deter us.
The Saldovar
sisters fit the profile of my typical student in many ways but in others they
differ. In their case, the familial
challenges that threw them off their schedule and their rescheduling with me
were mostly in their extended family, not those of their nuclear
residence. But a series of circumstances
involving severe discord, desertion, divorce, immigration problems, and too
many angry voices in the family broadly construed provided so many distractions
that it was all that they and their family could do to get the sisters to school
during the week and into church on Sunday for the solace that for a biennial
was otherwise lacking.
The girls’
parents (Carlos and Marcia) did not get very far in school back in
Ecuador. But they are smart,
industrious, strict, loving, and caring.
Carlos has mastered English at a high conversational level and Marcia
has done passably well in this regard.
Carlos makes a decent living driving a truck, but the sisters have
always qualified for free and reduced price lunch. Manuela, Lucinda, Anita, and their parents
eventually moved from the Northeast Minneapolis home that they shared with
members of the extended family who were facing such dysfunctionality, to a
duplex in Columbia Heights.
They chose
the latter location in search of better schools, but in this aspect their move
was not favorable: The Columbia Heights
schools are no better than those in Minneapolis. This is true of most near-suburb and charter
school options that inevitably disappoint the seekers of better education among
my students and parents: Most locally
centralized school systems and most educational delivery systems in the United
States suffer from the same flaws that I have detailed in many places on this
blog.
Faced with
economic conditions just a little better than most of my students and similar
challenges pertinent to dysfunction in the extended family, Manuela, Lucinda, and
Anita nevertheless had to their advantage two presiding and co-residing (even
married) parents with strong personal ethical systems who imparted superlative
life values to their daughters. Since I
ordinarily have to expend herculean effort to get my students focused beyond
their life problems, the situation in the nuclear family of these sisters
helped enormously to maximize the use of our time together to address mainly
academic problems. By the time that we
reconnected, they had seen all too much of the circumstances that were so
wearing on the extended family.
Manuela,
Lucinda, Anita, Carlos, and Marcia embraced our reconnection as if the prayers that
they lofted each week toward the Divine object of their Sunday worship had been
answered.
We went to
work, and we succeeded mightily.
………………………………………………………………………..
Manuela’s
grades rose in her algebra II, FST (combining functions, statistics, and
trigonometry), and pre-calculus classes as I led her through exercises designed
for efficient recovery of fundamental mathematical skills and then proceeded to
master each concept from her pre-homework assignments. Her vocabulary and
general reading skills improved as she poured through the advanced reading
challenges that I gave her. We practiced
the ACT exam in a very strategic way; we
had no time to go through the practice exam as exhaustively as I prefer, but we
gave her enough confidence and skill mastery to give her a good chance for a
score acceptable to the colleges to which she was applying.
I had a
little more time with Lucinda, but when I first reconnected with her in her
grade 9 year she was not as relentlessly diligent as Manuela, so recovery and
progress went more slowly. But by her
grade 11 year, Lucinda’s study habits had improved greatly, her confidence was
rising, and she was following the pattern of skill and knowledge mastery that
had described Manuel’s ascent.
Anita was a
precocious young child when I worked with her during grades 1 through 3, and
when I reconnected with her at grade 6 she was just as apt if considerably less
well-established at grade level. She
quickly recovered, stabilized academically, then began to appear on the “B” and
then ”A” honor roll at school. She is
now still just in grade 9, so that I have had and will have the time ahead to
develop in her the academic weight and ballast that is my mission, my goal, my
abiding effort to give to my students--- the sort that leads to the very best
experiences at the college and university level.
……………………………………………………………………..
Now, in this
academic year of 2016-2017, Manuela is in her first year as a student at
Augsburg College, with aspirations to become a registered nurse.
Lucinda, now
a senior, is struggling a bit in pre-calculus, but we are addressing the
remaining issues, and otherwise her grades are all at “B” or better. She is contemplating a range of colleges that
fall at a tier similar to Augsburg, including in addition to that institution
St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota at Mankato. She, too is considering nursing but is
keeping her options open.
Anita is
making all “A’s” and “B’s” as a grade 9 student at Columbia Heights. She is confident and ambitious, very seriously
and with very keen prospects in my tough judgment, setting her sights on
becoming a neurosurgeon.
Among many
other accomplishments, these three sisters, who speak only Spanish at home,
have enacted the parts in the Shakespearean productions that we perform each
year of the witches in Macbeth and in Julius Caesar the parts
of Portia (Anita), Calpurnia (Lucinda), and Mark Antony (Manuela).
Manuela is
still meeting with me as a college student, which has become the norm for my
students and me. The three sisters and I
meet each week to read chapters in my nearly complete new book, Fundamentals
of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education; thus far they have covered, in the
thorough manner upon which I insist, the chapters of Economics and Psychology.
Anita has excellent
prospects for completing all fourteen chapters in the book, practicing in the
meticulous way that I prefer for the ACT, scoring at a high level on the
latter, putting together an excellent financial package at an upper tier
university, and becoming the neurosurgeon that she aspires to be.
Manuela will
earn good grades at Augsburg, and Lucinda will do the same at a comparable institution. In continuing to study with me, they will
continue to add to their academic weight and ballast, advance their skill and
knowledge sets, and via their reading of Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education go forth as culturally enriched, civically prepared, as well
as professionally satisfied adults.
I will
continue to prepare my students for such lives, of the kind that all human
beings deserve.
And in that
conviction, I will continue to work incessantly to induce the transformation of
the Minneapolis Public Schools into a model for other locally centralized
school districts, so that students of all demographic descriptors have the opportunity
to experience this one earthly sojourn at the level occupied by Manuela,
Lucinda, Anita, and the other students of the New Salem Educational Initiative.
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