I love young people.
I consider imparting
knowledge-intensive education to young people to be my sacred responsibility.
I find the sense of
responsibility for the impartation of knowledge to be absent among teachers and
administrators in the public schools and affection for the young people served
to be wildly varying from teacher to teacher, often missing, and sometimes
replaced in fact by a dislike of the students who take their seats in the
Minneapolis Public Schools (as well as at charters schools, parochial schools,
and many school districts in the near suburbs).
Thus are the two most
fundamental characteristics of the excellent teacher too often absent in our
classrooms, going a long way toward explaining why we have such an ignorant
citizenry, with too many people who either never graduated from high school or
who trudged across some stage in May to receive a piece of paper that is a
diploma in name only.
……………………………………………………………………………………..
Two students with whom I
work on Sunday afternoon and evenings provide examples of how these
characteristics of a teacher are so important.
Right after church
service at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, I work with Faye Chapman, who
this past 2020-2021 academic year was a grade 4 student in a St. Paul charter
school. Like so many students with
residence on the Northside, Faye does not attend the public schools of
Minneapolis, where the drama is high and the quality of education poor. Unfortunately, the alternatives to the
Minneapolis Public Schools also offer lousy education, so that less drama
becomes the only real advantage.
Faye came to me as a
very academically unconfident grade 3 student;
she had a low attention span and a propensity to fall asleep. She carried homework with her in the form of
a bevy of worksheets, sometimes for spelling and reading but especially in
mathematics. A salient example of her
assignments featured exercises in pre-algebra skills, finding the unknowns in
problems such as x + 4= 11 and observing the relationship of this problem to
the construction x - 4 = 7. Inasmuch as
Faye was in grade 3, she was also asked to construct and interpret number trees
for multiplicative factors, a task in which she was handicapped for having
little grasp of her multiplication tables.
In the examples given
above, for the unknowns I treated the task as a detective enterprise, a mystery
to be solved. Since much of Faye’s
struggle lay in the fact that much of her homework was given in the absence of
instruction of the concepts at school, the task was easy. All I needed to do was to show how addition
and subtraction involving the same number in different arrangements relate to
and serve as checks on each other, and how addition can be used to find unknowns
(solve the mystery) in a subtraction problem and vice versa. Exercises involving number trees and factors,
though, while alo eventually easier once the fundamentals wre mastered, took
longer because the fundamentals in this case lay in multiplication tables and,
starting from ground zero, required more time.
But as always in such
situations, I demonstrated to Faye how easy mastery of multiplication tables
really can be. She soon saw that the
zeros, ones, twos, and fives have easy ways to get the products. By applying the nine trick, half of the table
involving single digits numbers had already been mastered. As she succeeded and gained confidence, I
amplified that spirit by asking her,
“What are you, the
smartest girl in the third grade?” Faye
would smile with delight, even as she humbly said, “No.’ But she understood that I considered her
smart.
I showed her that 6 x 4
= 24, 6 X6 = 36, and 6 x 8 = 48 have a rhyming resonance to them, and at that
point there is not too much left to do but to count by threes and fours and to
memorize 6 x 7= 42, 7 x 7 = 49, and 7 x 8 = 56.
This academic year of
2020-2021, with Faye at grade 4, we have continued to practice the
multiplication tables until she now has those to the point of
automaticity. She takes great pride in
being among the (lamentably) few in her class who know all of their
single-digit multiplication tables.
One day Faye told me,
“You make math fun!”
I always experience a
little shiver when that happens, because in fact what I offer is straight ahead
instruction, devoid of the excessive manipulatives and time-consuming games
advocated by mathematics education professors and utilized by their teacher
acolytes.
What I do instead is
communicate to students that I love and respect them. I use a constant banter that brings a smile
to their faces as they do computations in the absence of calculators,
responding to my efficient jottings on my yellow pad. In Faye’s case, I told her to say, “scooba
dooba” every time she got an answer right.
Soon she was saying “Scooba Dooba” so many times that I told her that I
was going to start calling her “Scooba Dooba.”
She delights now that most of the time I call her by that name--- another mirthful way to get a child’s
attention and bring a smile to her face while practicing very efficient, skill-replete
exercises.
I make mathematics fun
for Faye and my other students by building a sense of confidence and using
humor in such way as to communicate love and amiability.
Faye and I have written
stories together, read books on topics across the liberal arts, and shared
observations on life issues. She is
primed for grade 5 now, alert, engaged, confident, and full of knowledge,
imparted by a teacher who values knowledge and loves the young people who are
his sacred responsibility.
……………………………………………………………………………………..
At 6:30 on Sunday
evenings I work with Jeremiah Stevens, a great 6 student during academic year
2020-2021 who lives on the Northside and attends Ascension Catholic
School. Among the several lackluster
teachers at this overrated institution, Jeremiah had a teacher at grade 6 who
is the worst in the school. This
teacher, Mr. Jacoby, regularly sends students out of the classroom for merely
asking a question, treats requests for clarifications during his brief moments
of rendering instruction as if such inquiries are intrusions on his time, and
consistently displays a gruff and coarse bearing that communicates that he
would rather be many places other than a grade 6 classroom at Ascension.
Jeremiah is a personable
young man, who at only 12 years old, has a vision of going into entertainment
law and making enough money to own an NBA team, rather than hoping for the
longshot of becoming an NBA player that is the fanciful future pondering of so
many inner city youth. Jeremiah has an
extended family network that offers strong support for Jeremiah; he lives with an uncle and aunt in this
network, because his own parents are both in prison.
The circumstance of
mother and father both being incarcerated and derivative concerns has led the
school administration to arrange for counseling for Jeremiah. These counseling sessions occur twice a week,
during class time. But Mr. Jacoby is not
helpful in getting Jeremiah caught up on what he misses during time out of
class. Jeremiah regularly piles up
uncompleted assignments for lack of explanation as to the pertinent concepts,
and sometimes he is not even aware of the assignments that he is supposed to
do. Jeremiah’s very attentive aunt and
uncle have repeatedly asked Mr. Jacoby to apprise them of Jeremiah’s academic
progress and, especially, if any of his grades fall below passing, to let them
know when particular problems arise.
Mr. Jacoby has been
unresponsive to such requests.
The shame is that
Jeremiah is a naturally talented math student and grasps concepts quickly when
properly explained. He also is engaged
when I convey to him factual matter relevant to history and literature; the role or plebeians and patricians in the
Roman Empire and the satiric symbolism of Alice
in Wonderland gave him delight during my animated accounts that he had not
gained in class: As is often the case
for students at the Minneapolis Pubic Schools and its alternatives, the
presiding teacher had merely distributed (shudder) packets of worksheets and
told his vocabulary-bereft students to read the material for themselves.
To be sure, Jeremiah
needs to read more on his own. But he
needs inspiration and spirit and love from his teacher. Under my guidance, Jeremiah is now confident
in all of the mathematics skills that he needs to move from grade 6 to grade 7. In addition to drawing the necessary factual
material from his history and literature concepts at school, Jeremiah and I
have also covered a host of other topics, often acquired through reading the
Sunday edition of the Star Tribune,
including sports but also science, business, the arts, and news of the state,
nation, and world.
I bought Jeremiah a
physical dictionary and sent him home with summer reading from recent issues of
the newspaper.
Jeremiah knows that I
love him, have confidence in him, and have much to teach him.
Thus is giving him a
promising future just that easy--- or
hard--- according to teacher emotional
conveyances and in view of the knowledge and skill base of the teacher.
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