Jul 19, 2021

Article #4 >>>>> >Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota Volume VIII, No. 1, July 2021

Article #4 

The Enormous Importance of Loving Young People in Imparting Knowledge-Intensive, Skill-Replete Education:  Illustrative Experiences Every Sundday in the New Salem Educational Initiative

 

I love young people.

 

I consider imparting knowledge-intensive education to yong 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 pie3ce of paper that is a diploma in name only.

 

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Two of the four 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 with her 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 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 hsndicappefor 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 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, took longer.

 

But as always in nsuch 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.  With the nine trick, half of the table involving single digits numbers has alreday 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?”  She would 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, 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 grea 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 Fayes 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 yong people who are his sacred responsibility. 

 

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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 school, 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 a 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.

 

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 qnd literature;  the role or plebeians and patricians in the Roman Empire and the satiric symbolism of Alice in Wonderland gave him a 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 has 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 psirits 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 slo coverd a bevy of other topics, often acquired through reading the Sunday addition 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 wnt him home with summer reading from back issues of the newspaper. 

 

Jeremiah knows that I love him, have confidence of 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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