Every Day a Transformation in the New Salem Educational Initiative: Witness the Experience of Evelyn Patterson, Damon Preston, and Javon Jakes on the 9 July 2017 Trip to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota

Every Day a Transformation in the New Salem Educational Initiative:  Witness the Experience of Evelyn Patterson, Damon Preston, and Javon Jakes on the 9 July 2017 Trip to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona, Minnesota

Note to My Readers:  As with all of my articles referring to participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative, names given are data privacy pseudonymns.

In waging the K-12 revolution, my ongoing effort is to transform the lives of individuals via everyday experiences in the New Salem Educational Initiative, while applying unrelenting pressure on the system of public education to serve all students with a close approximation of my dedication and philosophical vigor.  This is the commitment to the lives of flesh and blood human beings in the context of a strategy entailing  1) the best program in the United States for direct academic instruction;  and 2) the most unrelenting activism in the nation impelling overhaul of our current system of K-12 education.

On 9 July 2017, Evelyn Patterson and her sons Damon Preston and Javon Jakes participated in a daylong sojourn that furthers the transformation in their lives that has occurred over the course of eight years of participation in the New Salem Educational Initiative.

I have issued many updates on the progress of Evelyn and her sons.

Recall some of the most essential elements in their life story and years as participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative:

Evelyn grew up tough on the Southside of Chicago, saw her father very little and from her late teens into early adulthood was estranged from her mother.  Just as rapprochement was occurring for Evelyn and her mother, the latter was killed in an automobile accident.  This and other jarring life circumstances threw Evelyn’s psychological constitution out of kilter for many years.  Matriculation for a successful year and a half at a Chicago area community college was interrupted and a plethora of bad habits led to contraction of the HIV virus before Evelyn sought more favorable turf in the Twin Cities.

Evelyn moved initially to St. Paul but soon found her way to the old, venerable, but now rundown area on the southern edge of North Minneapolis near Glenwood and Newton Avenues North.  She came to the Twin Cities with a fellow Chicagoan, Marcel Gibbs, a gangsta trying to live better but only with great difficulty engaged in extricating himself from his own bad habits.  A stormy nine-year relationship that found Evelyn moving a total of six times blessedly ended just a bit over a year ago, at June’s conclusion, 2016.

Having lived mostly in North Minneapolis and for a year in far South Minneapolis near the Crosstown Minneapolis-Richfield divide, Evelyn lived for two tumultuous years in East St. Paul before resourcefully gaining institutional support for housing in Coon Rapids.

Throughout all these years, Damon has thrived as my student in the New Salem Educational Initiative.  He will be a Grade 9 student at Coon Rapids High School during the coming academic year 2017-2018.

Javon was just six months old when Evelyn moved to the Twin Cities;  he grew to Grade K age watching his brother go off weekly to academic sessions with me, then Javon himself became my very precocious student.  He enters Grade 3 functioning at Grade 5 level in both math and reading.

I moved the family to Coon Rapids on 30 June 2016 because Evelyn was in the hole eight dollars and otherwise had no monetary resources to her name, making any search for $200 in moving services as remote as Never-Never Land.  

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For five years now I have taken five-to-six students per summer in two groups for trips to the Great River Shakespeare Festival in Winona.  Just yesterday as I write this on 10 July 2017, Evelyn and her sons went with me to see Comedy of Errors.  This event thus occurred on Sunday, 9 July;  the day before, Evelyn, Damon, and Javon sat with me for two hours reading my compressed version of this magnificent comedy.  Typically I cull the Bard’s work down to 12-15 paged compressions for presentation at our annual banquet.  Most of the time I read the whole play, with meticulous word-by word, line-by-line analysis rendered to my students who are going with me to Winona;  this year, with forays to Dallas to give time to my nearly 96 year-old mother, time just did not admit to the full reading, so I did as I did once before in doing a compression similar to that done for short-notice attendance at the Guthrie to see Othello:  I produced a longer, 20-paged compressed version and read this in my meticulous manner with students traveling this summer to the Great River Shakespeare Festival.

Evelyn and family loved the reading, the trip through the countryside and along the Mississippi to Winona, and they basked in the honor that I gave to them at the noon picnic and in the Chinese meal of my preparation in visit to my house on the way back from attendance at Comedy of Errors, at which they had the chance to converse at length with Barbara.  Damon was riveted as usual, Stacey was weepy in her elation over her experience (and seeing the family reunions that occurred at the end of this masterwork), and most impressive of all was Javon---  just on the cusp of entrance into Grade 3---  who stood with laser-like attention to the actors, in awe of the energetic presentation given by the most talented Shakespearean actors anywhere in the United States.

Great River Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Doug Scholz-Carlson and Comedy of Errors Director Melissa Rain Anderson have much about which to be proud in accomplishing what they do for Winona, for Minnesota, for the USA, and for audience members such as Evelyn, Damon, and Javon in giving full-throttle effort and talent to making these experiences so rich.    

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Evelyn called me this morning with expressions of gratitude.  She also gave me an update on her sons’ successful 2016-2017 academic year with top grades for Damon and extended accomplishment for Javon. 

We will stay in touch throughout the summer via texts and emails.

Participants in the New Salem Educational Initiative are family to me, almost as important as my beloved Barbara Reed and treasured son Ryan Davison-Reed.

If all families are not as functional as we would have them, we must understand that there abide love and high hopes in all parents for their children.

We must know and get in our gut an understanding that if all families do meet acceptable standards of functionality, then any person of conscience will treat all families as her or his own.