Education Edge: My Uncle is a Learned Man
7/19/2005
This past Sunday we celebrated the "graduation" of students from our "Education Edge" program, which works with high school students about to enter their junior year. It provides ACT test preparation, especially in math, reading and writing, as well as financial aid information and interviews with admissions counselors to help get students thinking about how to search for the right college. We don't pressure them to come to Dominican but instead try to give them the tools to find the right fit for themselves. The program runs four intensive weeks. It has worked primarily with students from Spanish-speaking families whose parents did not attend college, and next year we're opening up the program to students from other ethic and racial backgrounds. It's an amazing program and I was privileged to meet with the students and their proud parents on Sunday. These young people gave up a month of summer to work on essential academic skills because they want something more for their lives, and they have families who support and encourage them in these aspirations.
It reminded me of something that happened 26 summers ago. I was working at a factory in the months between college graduation and the start of graduate school. One of my co-workers, a young Mexican immigrant I'd gotten to know pretty well, asked me during our lunch break if I'd do him a favor. His uncle in Mexico had sent him a book — Bulfinch's Mythology. My friend's English reading skills were not so good and so he asked if I'd read some of the book and tell him the stories. "My uncle is a learned man," he kept saying. He wanted to discuss the myths of Prometheus and Pandora, of Troy and King Arthur and so much more with this uncle he loved, this learned man he so wanted to impress and emulate. I was about to enter graduate school, pretty sure I wanted to be a college professor some day, and here was this guy, about the same age as me, who wanted to spend his summer learning ancient and medieval mythology. My God, I thought, if I ever do become a teacher, I hope to find students with this motivation, this desire to learn. We had such great talks that summer! Near the end he gave me an Aztec sun stone and told me his grandmother's fascinating stories about Jaguar and Rabbit, about the Fifth Age and the kind of "cosmological map" the stone constituted. None of these stories were in Bulfinch's. I hope he knew how much I learned in that whole exchange. I promised myself I'd remember what real students were like, as I entered the hallowed halls of my doctoral program. I would emulate him.
Today I see this kind of hunger to learn and yes, to teach, in so many of our Dominican students, and I saw it so clearly in the faces of our Education Edge graduates. I wish them and their uncles Godspeed.
This past Sunday we celebrated the "graduation" of students from our "Education Edge" program, which works with high school students about to enter their junior year. It provides ACT test preparation, especially in math, reading and writing, as well as financial aid information and interviews with admissions counselors to help get students thinking about how to search for the right college. We don't pressure them to come to Dominican but instead try to give them the tools to find the right fit for themselves. The program runs four intensive weeks. It has worked primarily with students from Spanish-speaking families whose parents did not attend college, and next year we're opening up the program to students from other ethic and racial backgrounds. It's an amazing program and I was privileged to meet with the students and their proud parents on Sunday. These young people gave up a month of summer to work on essential academic skills because they want something more for their lives, and they have families who support and encourage them in these aspirations.
It reminded me of something that happened 26 summers ago. I was working at a factory in the months between college graduation and the start of graduate school. One of my co-workers, a young Mexican immigrant I'd gotten to know pretty well, asked me during our lunch break if I'd do him a favor. His uncle in Mexico had sent him a book — Bulfinch's Mythology. My friend's English reading skills were not so good and so he asked if I'd read some of the book and tell him the stories. "My uncle is a learned man," he kept saying. He wanted to discuss the myths of Prometheus and Pandora, of Troy and King Arthur and so much more with this uncle he loved, this learned man he so wanted to impress and emulate. I was about to enter graduate school, pretty sure I wanted to be a college professor some day, and here was this guy, about the same age as me, who wanted to spend his summer learning ancient and medieval mythology. My God, I thought, if I ever do become a teacher, I hope to find students with this motivation, this desire to learn. We had such great talks that summer! Near the end he gave me an Aztec sun stone and told me his grandmother's fascinating stories about Jaguar and Rabbit, about the Fifth Age and the kind of "cosmological map" the stone constituted. None of these stories were in Bulfinch's. I hope he knew how much I learned in that whole exchange. I promised myself I'd remember what real students were like, as I entered the hallowed halls of my doctoral program. I would emulate him.
Today I see this kind of hunger to learn and yes, to teach, in so many of our Dominican students, and I saw it so clearly in the faces of our Education Edge graduates. I wish them and their uncles Godspeed.
