I’m the guy whom officials at the Minneapolis
Public Schools (MPS) will never fool.
I often remind them of this in my monthly
Public Comments at meetings of the MPS Board of Education.
Specifically, in the midst of the academic
year, when the New Salem Tuesday Tutoring Program is in full motion (remember
that I coordinate two programs: the
Tuesday evening program and the seven-day-a-week small group program), at the
end of my comments I frequently say:
Now
when I walk out of here to go coordinate the
New
Salem Tuesday program, I want you to say to
yourselves,
“Now there goes the guy whom we will
never
fool, because he is departing to run his
program,
where he administers to the students whom
we
academically abuse during the daytime.”
Remember, dear readers, that I have taught
at every level and in all situations that you can imagine: mostly in high schools, but along the way
also in a prison (GED curriculum), in Taiwan (English as a Second Language),
four and a half years in university and college settings (East Asian history), and
in my current programs of the New Salem Educational Initiative, in which I
teach students of all ages and levels, most of whom are or who began as
students enrolled in the Minneapolis Public Schools. I get students up to grade level in
mathematics and reading, mostly doing the latter by putting them on a
track that envisions college attendance and speeds them toward accumulation of
university preparatory knowledge in mathematics, natural science (biology,
chemistry, physics), world literature, history, government, economics,
psychology, and fine arts (visual and aural).
I am now teaching this curriculum to my
K-12 students and have a number of college, university, and other adult
students, as well.
……………………………………………………………………………
Some of my most rewarding experiences of
the last few months have been with Maya Cardenas (data privacy pseudonym), a
student who matriculated at the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities (therefore
the flagship university for the state of Minnesota). She received both a bachelor’s degree and a
master’s degree in elementary education.
But courses in elementary education are the lightest weight on any college or university
campus. So, now, pay attention to this:
This
highly intelligent student, who attended schools of MPS and Columbia Heights
and then went on to the University of Minnesota, graduated with woefully
deficient knowledge and skill sets from both high school and the state’s
putatively best public university.
Needing to pass two mathematics
exams to secure full licensure to teach elementary school (already teaching
second grade, though, on a provisional license), she came to me (as others in
her family had done previously) for assistance in acquiring the knowledge and skill that she did not obtain in
high school or at the university.
So we dug in and went to
work. Maya had to be reminded even of
fundamental processes in subtraction (borrowing or regrouping). She had to master her multiplication
tables. She needed to learn for the
first time how to do extended long division operations. We had to work on all skills pertinent to
fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, and proportions. Then we had to tackle a bevy of skills in
algebra and geometry; we worked, for
example, on solving linear equations and inequalities, area and volume respectively
for a multiplicity of two and three dimensional figures, permutations,
combinations, and applications of the Pythagorean Theorem and the Quadratic
Formula.
Maya completed her crash course
in K-12 mathematics with me and went on to master a number of knowledge and
skill sets preparatory for trigonometry and pre-calculus. She took one of the exams for licensure in
June and another just yesterday (Tuesday, 21 August). She passed them both and told me that
understanding mathematics for the first time has opened up a whole new world
for her that had been a mystery.
Maya is now going to study one
of my two nearly complete books and continue to meet with me once a week for
two hours to get the remainder of an education that she never received in high
school or in her bachelor’s and master’s programs. That book is Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, covering in
fourteen chapters the most core principles and fundamental knowledge sets of
economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history,
American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine
arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.
Maya has also taken a keen
interest in my other nearly complete book, Understanding
the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current
Condition, Future Prospect.
She has expressed interest in
attending a meeting of the MPS Board of Education with me.
Maya Cardenas knows and wants to
assist me in explaining why I am the guy that officials at the Minneapolis
Public Schools will never fool.
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