On numerous occasions I have concluded my typically first-up Public Comments at monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education by telling Superintendent Ed Graff and board members,
“Now when I walk out of here and then when you see me stroll back up the aisle on my way back in, I want you to say to yourselves, ‘There’s the guy that we will never fool’-- because I am heading over to New Salem to heal the students that you academically abuse during the daytime.”
My reference is to my departure to go run the Tuesday evening program of the New Salem Educational Initiative, attended by mostly children of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church who are or have been students at the Minneapolis Public Schools. The Tuesday program is one of two I run under the aegis of the New Salem Educational Initiative; the other is my seven-day-a-week individual and small-group program for which I serve as the only teacher. On Tuesday evenings under pre-Covid-19 conditions, I would make my comments, depart, and then return after my Tuesday evening program concluded; now I record my comments by phone for Graff’s and the board’s aural intake at virtual meetings.
I try to keep students in the Minneapolis Public Schools, telling them and their parents that I will give the young people their knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education in my two hours a week with them while I wage the Revolution for overhaul at the school district. Some agree and continue to endure the terrible education that they receive in MPS classrooms; but, despite my efforts many parents just cannot bring themselves to endure classrooms out of order; the endless group projects in the absence of any background subject area preparation; the bevy of videos shown to waste time, unrelated to any subject matter pertinent to the course; the universally weak curriculum and the low teacher quality.
When students first come to me, they inevitably manifest skills two, three, or four grades below level of school enrollment, depending on how many years the child or adolescent has been academically abused by the schools of the district.
Students frequently cannot multiply, divide, work with fractions, decimals, or percentages, or grasp ratios and proportions; at relevant grade levels, students do not have pre-algebra skills in positive and negative integers and order of operations and in high school are woefully unprepared to take on algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus.
They do not understand that the 19th century refers to the 1800s, have little understanding of the events and important personages of United States history, and having appalling lack of knowledge as to the history and current state of affairs in China, Japan, India, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Balkans, and the other nations of Europe and the Americas. They can find virtually no nations and even states of the United States on a map. They have little fundamental knowledge of biology, chemistry, or physics; visual and musical arts--- anything.
So I go to healing.
I get my students quickly up to grade level in mathematics and reading, then put them on a college preparatory track in mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, history, government, economics, world religions, classic Western literature, world literature, ethnically specific literature, and the fine arts.
Within very short spans of the day, I’ll be working with an early grades students on multiplication tables; a middle school student on pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry skills; explaining the importance of the Compromise of 1877; world imperialism as relevant to the genesis of World War I; the difference between theoretical communism and communism bearing the label in practice; the difference between deficit and debt and the importance of Gross Domestic Product; the fundamentals of Freudian psychoanalysis and Skinnerian behaviorism; the nature of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the organizational principles of the periodic table, the Einsteinian relationships of energy, mass, and velocity; the genius of Shakespeare and August Wilson; differentiating sonic elements in classical, romantic, and baroque music; the origins of hip-hop in work songs, blues, jazz, and rhythm ‘n blues.
Students come to me knowledge-bereft and skill-deplete.
They gain an education in two hours a week with me.
They gain little in the intellectually vacuous classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
My students are brilliant and full of potential.
They are academically abused in the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools.
They come to me ready and asking to be healed.
I heal them, love them, fill their abundant imaginations and supple neurological receptacles with knowledge.
They respond with alacrity.
They and their families give me more love and appreciation that any man should want in a lifetime.
Thus, perpend:
I am the guy that Ed Graff and the abominable MPS Board of Education will never fool.
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