Dec 9, 2017

Multiple Efforts in the K-12 Revolution Are Now in Full Momentum after My Return from Dallas: Eager Responses of My Students Have Been Particularly Rewarding and Inspire Me to Work All the Harder (Or How MPS Board of Education Chair Rebecca Gagnon Appeared to Have Swallowed a Toad)


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.

 

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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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