MOTIVATING 5th GRADERS (Biographical)

In view of the Freddie Gray case concerning a poor neighborhood in Baltimore, I had an experience with poor people in Denver, CO, in the mid 1960s.  In Denver, there was a high-rise complex of low-cost housing comprising about 90% Hispanics, 5% African Americans, and 5% other (Caucasians, Asians, and maybe a sprinkling of others).  The idea was hatched that it would be good to get a group of "successful" people together and see if they could motivate some students after school.  In spite of the heavy weighting of Hispanics in the complex, about half the students who showed up were African Americans.

There were a few teachers who volunteered to participate after doing their teaching during the day.  Now I didn't have much respect for people with education degrees because I thought they did it to escape mathematics.  Somewhere along the way, however, they had learned something about children and were much more successful than I in stimulating the children.  I certainly gained respect for teachers.  One of the teachers looked to me like she was always on the verge of a nervous breakdown and children flocked to her and would tell her all their problems.  So far as I know, the teacher never broke down and must have been a source of great comfort to the students.

Even though the complex certainly housed more than a thousand people, there were about 20 mothers who brought their children because they would do anything for their children to have a better life than they did.  Of course there could have been more mothers that didn't show up for various reasons.  I don't recall a father ever showing up in the five years I participated in the program.  The period, however, was one of a construction boom in Denver so jobs were plentiful and there was an overall rise in optimism in the community of poor people.

I soon learned that these 5th graders had trouble working their algebra problems because they didn't know their multiplication tables or how to divide.  So I tried to explain fractions to them buy using common words like the "thingee" on the top and the "thingee" on the bottom, but much to my surprise they knew about numerators and denominators.  That gave me a sigh of relief.  So I bought some multiplication flash cards and we would warm up doing little contests regarding the multiplication tables up to 25 times 25 (It was harder to do division except with whole numbers).  As the years went by, everyone who participated in my warm up got better, but the African Americans were always the best.  They could whip out the answer to 23 times 21 like it was nothing.  What happened was that the older siblings went home and taught the younger siblings.  In other words, they developed their own contests at home.

I also would take a couple of the students and  build a paper mache volcano and paint it.  Then I would bring an empty Campbell soup can and some dry ice I had swiped from work.  I would put a bit of water in the can, drop the dry ice into it, and lower the volcano over it so the children could see the smoke coming out of the volcao.  They really seemed to get interested.

The year of Martin Luther King's assassination, not much was accomplished as the students were very restless, but maybe their experience with a white man who didn't hate them had some value.

We were told that under NO conditions were we to let students who graduated from the 5th grade enter the group the next year.  It seemed like over the summer, these students who graduated from the 5th grade,found out about discrimination and were troublesome.  I had the case of two African American girls, big girls, who wanted to come back, and said "Please, please."  I was tempted, but there was a small African American boy behind the girls who was messing around.  One of the big girls, wheeled around and kicked him in the stomach.  "No, no."  I said, "You can't come back."

During the years of the demonstrations over Vietnam, the students were pretty restless.  One night after the class, I went to leave the school and saw maybe 100 children mulling around and shouting various things.  Two girls that I previously had in class came up and said, "We are going to riot, Dr. Ford.  We really are going to riot."  Whereupon I said, "Any where you girls are, there is a riot."  They fell on the ground laughing.  Well, I thought, I had over the years quite a few of these children in the motivation class, and I felt they certainly didn't hate me, so I stepped out into the mob with some trepidation and made my way to my car, without incident.  As I recall, there was no damage to the school building that night either.

Someone had the bright idea of including some high school students in the class.  The feeling was that the 5th graders could probably relate to them better; however, the high school students tended to be a bigger problem that the 5th graders in my view.

One thing I took away from my experiences was that whatever the problems the African American children had, the Hispanic's problems were worse.

In October of 1968, I was transferred to Switzerland for a year.  This was followed by my organization loaning me to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., for 15 months to help set up the Lunar Sample Program.  When I came back to Denver in mid 1970, the motivation class no longer existed.  In addition, the construction boom in Denver was over, workers were laid off, and pessimism had set in again in the community of poor people.  My heart sank.  It turned out that the high school children who participated had some troubles coming to or leaving the class.  I was never told what the troubles were, but the class was discontinued.