Salient Student Academic Sessions on Thursday, 10 June 2021
I am grateful for the many ways I have
for unsettling the education establishment, with my multiple venues, tactics,
and strategies. My ability to tell
members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education that my work with
students ensures that I will ever be ”the guy that you will never fool” gives
me leverage that others working (much more nebulously and ineffectively) for
change cannot match.
One of the poignant realities of
public education is the phenomenon of so many parents living at the urban core
who opt to send their children to suburban schools (especially to schools in
the near suburbs [Robbinsdale, Brooklyn Park] or to parochial or charter
schools, assuming that they will get a better education. What they get is less drama but no better
education in terms of curriculum and teacher quality. Most of the parents of my students have very
little awareness of how shortchanged are their children by the teachers and
administration at the Catholic school of Ascension or at near suburban schools
such as Cooper High School and Armstrong High School.
Consider three such students >>>>>
Celine West is a grade 8 student at
Ascension. She and others in her
household started studying with me in October of this academic year
2020-2021. She had been a very good
student at grade 7 and prior years but was not thriving under Covid-19, online
conditions. Celine has a propensity to fall asleep whenever there is any sort
of lag and even when the matter at hand is fairly engaging; her overnight sleep
habits are also not good. Even under the
conditions of study with me, with my constant banter and utterances designed to
bring a smile to student faces and to keep them focused, work with Celine on
certain days was a battle first to keep eyes open to engage with the assignment
from school (so busy was I catching her up on homework that we rarely got to
the preferred material of my own design) before her and then use her
considerable intellect to get the task accomplished.
My first work with Celine focused on
Math (actually fairly ambitious as a curricular matter at Ascension but
terribly taught), her assignments for which she quickly caught up and
mastered. Thereafter we tended to
concentrate on English/Language Arts and Religion, the latter of which is an
important part of the curriculum at this Catholic K-8 school. Catch-up work for English/Language Arts
matched the pace of our work in mathematics, so that in the course of time our
work has concentrated on Religion.
Celine’s grade 8 Religion assignments
featured a wide gap between quality of assignments and level of
instruction. The assignments were of
very high quality but the teaching was wretched. Celine would have an assignment, say, that focused
on Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus as conveyed in Apostles of the New Testament, then offered selections from Romans and Corinthians I
and II that emphasized Paul’s message.
Happily, the passages tended to be Paul at his best, with discussion of
love and community, rather than his abysmal takes on social class and gender.
But Celine never had any context for
any of this. Her teacher had not
discussed any details of the life of Jesus as conveyed in the Gospels and thus the message that
literally hit Paul like a flash of lightning;
nor did Celine have any knowledge of the Christian communities around
the Mediterranean to which Paul traveled, in which he preached, and to which he
wrote his Epistles.
The shame of all
of this is that Celine is an apt thinker and a good heart; once she understood the passages and the
material, she came up with thoughtful responses that spoke to how she could
live an enhanced moral life and give more love to her own family and friends.
After eight
months of study with me, Celine is in good position as to math, and she has a
much better appreciation for the structure of the Bible, the key teachings and events of the Gospels, and broadening vocabulary and knowledge base.
She got none of
this at school--- no more than she would
have in the Minneapolis Public Schools.
…………………………………………………………………………………
Celine’s grade 4
brother Rayshon (Ray) West also began studying with me in October 2020. He is enormously bright but is given very
little at school that challenges his intellect.
I have zoomed Ray
on ahead to grade 6 mathematics, introducing fairly intricate operations with
fractions, decimals, and percentages. I
also have engaged him with books that activate his considerable imagination,
broaden his knowledge base, and increase his vocabulary, the latter of which is
underdeveloped for all students based on the level of reading that they do at
school. At every slight excuse, I hop to
the world map in my room to give Ray a firm grasp of the continents, the
nations within those continents, the oceans and the seas, and some feel for the
languages, religions, and cultures of people across the globe.
Ray gets none of
this at school.
None.
Zilch.
The
Mediterranean, China & Japan & the Koreas & the nations of
Southeast Asia as part of that continent, any sense of the states of the USA
& their capitals & their physical & cultural features, any
knowledge of Paris & London & Rome (not to mention Bangkok/Khrungtep or
Cairo or Teheran--- all this is as lost
on Ray and other students at Ascension as they are to students attending the
lousy public schools of Minneapolis.
…………………………………………………………………………….
At 6:00 on
Thursday evenings I meet with Victoria (Vicky) Ballard, an absolute kick of a
grade 9 student and a person who spends way too much time on social media, with
little informational remediation at Armstrong High School in the suburb of
Plymouth.
Vicky’’s most
driving immediate need has been in her geometry class, for which she had poor
preparation after a terrible experience in Algebra I. Under my tutelage Vicky has received a bevy
of information on pre-algebra math fundamentals (early use of calculators had
left her bereft of multiplication tables, division was a foreign species, and
the meaning and constituent elements of decimals with correlates in fractions
and percentages were much stranger to her than the mermaids and subterranean
communities she encounters on social media);
and then we have gone forth to master the theorems and properties of
plane geometry, the Pythagorean Theorem, the unique qualities of the 30-60-90
triangle, and all manner of applications regarding perimeter, circumference,
area, and volume.
Vicky has also
gained from me the historical context and governmental background information
into which to situate her many opinions as to race and gender and class. She has been confronted with the need to
better consider her social media sources and to seek out quality websites such
as CNN, New York Times, Washington
Post, Bloomington News, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. I have introduced her to the physical
newspaper via the Star Tribune.
Vicky is that
type of student for whom I have long had a particular liking. She expects the worst from teachers and
brings forth many bad habits learned from atrocious school settings.
Then she meets
me.
She is for the
first time in her life having to engage with a teacher whose knowledge base
runs the gamut across mathematics and the liberal arts. She comes to understand the impoverishment of
her vocabulary and the dearth of her knowledge and how far she has to go to
reach her goals for university education and law school.
One evening I said to Vicky:
“Kiddo, I really like you. I understand where you’re coming from. I have always liked those students who
challenge teachers and call them at their debased game. Tell me this, how many times have you had a
teacher say to you, either in precisely these or effectively these words:
‘Vicky, sit down and shut up’---
and then you look
at them as if to say, ‘Okay, what you gotta say, what you gotta teach me?’”
Vicky’s eyes
shown bright and her smile suggested the breadth of Lake Superior.
And her face told
me, “Oh, my goodness. This is something
different. This guy knows the
score. I got a lot to learn from him.”
And in her ritzy
Plymouth school, to which she buses from North Minneapolis, none of her
teachers had ever offered any of what I was offering to her.
No comments:
Post a Comment