A Note to My Readers:
Names used in this article, as is the case with all references on this
blog to my students in the New Salem Educational Initiative, are data privacy
pseudonyms.
Full momentum has now been
reestablished in all aspects of the K-12 Revolution since my return from
Dallas.
I have had particularly
superb interactions with my students over the course of these past two
weeks. To a person they are highly
responsive, ranging from very young children (one student at New Salem Tuesday
Tutoring is just four years old) to three students now working at the college
level. All of these young people are
eager to learn, ready to advance, prepared to accept all of the challenges that
I put before them.
The Hernandez sisters are
such class acts, and their recent accomplishments have been a joy to behold:
Eva is the middle sister,
now attending Anoka Ramsey Community College as a first-year student, aspiring
to become a registered nurse. She is the
student whom I helped rally from way down in a math class that combined aspects
of trigonometry and algebra II last spring;
I also helped her with poetic observations on some very fine photos that
she took for a fine arts class. Our work
on these classroom challenges solidified our relationship and helped her turn a
corner toward greater dedication and discipline as a student. She is off to a good start in college.
Anna is the oldest sister,
in her second year at college, having transferred from Augsburg to Anoka-Ramsey
Community College after changing her major from elementary education to
nursing; she decided that Anoka-Ramsey
would be cheaper and offer a more efficient sequence of courses leading to full
entrance into a nursing program. Anna
and Eva both aspire to move on to the well-regarded medical program at the
University of St. Catherine in St. Paul once they have completed the first two
years of study. Anna’s maturity as a
student is now rapidly catching up with her extraordinary maturity as a
person: She is allotting more time to
reading and diligent study, turning out very good research papers and essays,
and gaining confidence in expressing herself orally.
When I returned from
Dallas, I found that youngest sister Maria, a grade 9 student whom I have
dubbed along with grade 10 student Andre Sanders to have potential to attain elite
academic level under my guidance, was adrift in dissolute study habits and in a
quandary as to how to clear up certain points of confusion in her classes. She has now righted her course, written one
of the best first-draft essays that I have ever read from a student, and is
accepting the challenges that come with the course that I chart toward elite
status.
Young students Carlos Silva
(grade 2 ) and Javon Jakes (grade 3), and Delilah Boston (grade 4) revel in
their math and reading achievements on material substantially above grade
level; the latter two students, Javon having
lived in five different subsidized housing situations during his eight years of
life, Delilah now residing in the Volunteers of America tower at the southern
end of Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, are among the economically most
impoverished children I have ever taught in a career teaching the poorest of
the poor. Yet they and Carlos are off to
academic starts in school as rapid as that of many children with upper middle
class home lives.
Middle school students
Deborah Mitchell and Antonia Simpson are surviving the circumstances of early
adolescence and have visions on successful academic performance in high school
and college.
Andre Sanders (grade 10) masters
all of his academic tasks at North High and greatly anticipates the additional
challenges that I put before him each week.
This is true also of Damon Peterson (grade 9), now having landed in Coon
Rapids after riding a residential whirlwind through North Minneapolis, South Minneapolis,
and East Saint Paul.
Adult students Maya
Saldivar and Evonne Franklin know that they did not get all that they should
have from their high school teachers, but they are catching up quickly and
expressing gratifying sentiments of appreciation.
And so it goes, for
students throughout the program of the New Salem Educational Initiative, quite
remarkable achievements and responses from children, adolescents, and young
adults hungry for the knowledge that their classes do not provide, eager to master
the skills that they see clearly lead to further mastery for the challenges
ahead and better lives than familial histories
of cyclical poverty have ever made possible.
……………………………………………………………………………………….
The fact that I have to
work so hard to provide these children, adolescents, and young adults with the
knowledge that they are not getting in their school-based classrooms drives me
all the harder to produce high-quality editions of Journal of the K-12
Revolution: Essays and Research from
Minneapolis, Minnesota; to
present every Wednesday at 6:00 PM on Channel 17 in Minneapolis the most
fact-intensive program on education to be found anywhere across the United
States; to churn out daily articles for
the blog, many of them snippets from my nearly complete books, Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect and Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education; and to make my
first-up appearances at the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools
Board of Education.
Yesterday I had another
excellent conversation with Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Chief Financial
Officer Ibrahima Diop in my effort to master details pertinent to the finances
of the district. As I left his office,
another Davis Center MPS staff member saw me and yelled out,
“Hey, Gary: How’s the book coming?”
“Oh, it’s coming, to be sure,”I
tossed back.
MPS Board of Education Chair
Rebecca Gagnon was standing close by, looking like she had just swallowed a
toad.
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