Article #3
Importance of
Well-Established Body of Knowledge as Witnessed in Student Academic Sessions of
11 June 2021
This coming Sunday, 20 June, I am
going to present certificates to all of my students who attend New Salem and
can be in attendance at sanctuary service that day. As I wrapped up my sessions for academic year
2020-2021, I presented each student
and family a banquet-like array of food of my preparation (oven-simulated
barbecue chicken [tastes quite like off the grill with my alternating of
high-heat baking and brief, intense broiling in a meticulous sauce of hickory,
honey, lemon, molasses, garlic, salt, and pepper]), macaroni and cheese, and a
sweet ‘n’ sour cucumber & carrot salad);
along with personal notes written to students and to their families (at
least two notes, then, in each case).
Although we have not been in a position to perform my compressed Shakespearean
play or the individual displays of student knowledge and skill, with the
presentation of the certificate I will have achieved much of my goal of
honoring students nearly as fully as when we were able to stage the banquet.
One student who does not attend New
Salem but lives just a few blocks down from the church may be in attendance,
either this Sunday or a later date when I will honor some other young people
from the church who cannot make
service this Father’s Day Sunday. In
all, five or six students and their parents will be honored this Sunday, and
approximately the same number at a later date.
That will leave a substantial number of non-church students; in their cases, I reviewed with them their
accomplishments when I presented them with the notes and food, and made sure to
convey my appreciation to their parents personally.
Thus, in all, as was the case last
year, I have achieved much of the banquet effect, have honored the students
appropriately, and have gotten abundant expressions of love and gratitude (and
excellent reviews for the food) in return.
………………………………………………………………………….
Among the students who will be
honored, one on 20 June, another at a later date, are two students with whom I
work on Friday. I have known each of
these students since they were in early elementary school (I bring smiles to
their faces by telling them that I remember them when they were “Ga-ga-goo-goos”).
Sherisha Mallard will be out of town and thus will receive her certificate at a
later dat; Carl Bedford and his mom are
members but not frequent attendees---
who I have convinced that this would be a very good Sunday for one of
those infrequent appearances.
I never take lightly what my
presenting certificates highly specific to a student’s performance and
conveying my personal appreciation for their particular achievements means to
the students and their families. I was
very poignantly intrigued when I visited the home of four multi-year
participants and found that their mom had framed and hung all of their awards
(including hers--- I give certificates
to supportive parents) on the living room wall.
As with all of my students, Cheri and
Carl represent individually notable and illustrative cases:
Sherisha (Grade 7) attends Ascension,
a Catholic private school, the deficiencies of which I detailed last week. Sherisha will come to me on a given Friday
wanting to know more about the Spanish-American War or World War I or some
such, having been introduced to these conflicts and been given (chills up my
spine) packets of worksheets but not having gained any factual content that she
could comprehend from class (much of the time, the teacher’s knowledge base is
slim in the extreme, and what is presented is done in such a cursory manner as
to render comprehension unattainable).
So I launch into one of my
mini-lectures that inevitably demands side ventures into political concepts and
background information not in the student’s store of knowledge. Think of each of the conflicts mentioned above
and the bevy of information pertinent to European imperialism and the myriad
vocabulary and terms needed to comprehend the forces driving the powers into
one of the most brain-boggling stupid wars of the 20th - 21st
century phase of human endeavor.
And then there is math, for which Sherisha
has natural talent and an abundant of foundational knowledge of my provision
but which her teacher manages to make abstruse. Thus do we cover order of
operations; positive and negative
integers; factoring and applications of
the distributive property; equations and
inequalities; and many other topics from
the grade 7 curriculum, which is quite acceptable at Ascension despite being so
poorly taught.
Sherisha has been frustrated enough at
Ascension to contemplate a move to Franklin Middle School in the Minneapolis
Public Schools for grade 8. I rarely
counsel a student to switch schools but neither will I dissuade her:
The drama at Franklin is not as great
as was once the case, and I can give Sherisha the education that she should
have.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Carl Bedfor provides one of the best
examples I have ever had of the E. D. Hirsch premise that with a strong
knowledge base and a store of facts available for instant recall, to the point
of what he terms, “automaticity,” a person of average intelligence can perform as
well as a person of high intelligence quotient (IQ). Whatever formal testing would show in Carl’s
case, I assign him an IQ of 100 for being right on average; I by now have such a strong feel for
individual natural intelligence that I have very high confidence in the similar
designations that I have given for other students, who in my assessment feature
IQs ranging from 95 to 135 (maybe higher in the latter case, who I am
conceptualizing at the moment at very high but not genius level intelligence,
but will continue evaluating as the months and years roll by).
I have worked with Carl (grade 9,
North High School/MPS) since he was in grade 2, inculcating an understanding
and full mastery of the four basic operations, fractions, decimals,
percentages, ratios, proportions, and simple probability; multiplication table mastery was a multi-year
exercise, even with my refined technique, but by grade 6 he knew the
fundamental table as well as he knew his name.
Such foundational knowledge and disciplined learning became, then, the
basis for learning all of the pre-algebra and Algebra I skills necessary. Carl finished with an “A” in Algebra I and
was a fixture on the “B” honor roll; he
has a 3.2 GPA. At North High, this means
very little, except that Carl is doing what he needs to do for school and
getting his real education from me.
Carl likes geography. I have taught him the major items from the
world and national maps and led Carl through a chart of the 196 recognized
nations (UN) that includes capitals, population, land area, GDP/capita,
literacy rate, and life expectancy. Carl
also likes reading the newspaper with me, preferring articles that have to do
with race & ethnicity, school issues, or other community issues
recognizable in his personal universe. I
springboard from those to weighty national and international issues.
Carl possesses very much less than a
driving intellect, a desire to know. But
I will make sure that he will have viability at any post-secondary option he
selects. He may very well go a
vocational route (and has mentioned being a chiropractor)--- but whatever he decides, his strong knowledge
and skill base built over numerous years will give him very high chance of
success--- academically, vocationally,
and as an informed citizen.
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