GJ Remembers LaKeesha

Yesterday's post that mentions math compels me to state the case of LaKeesha. It must have been about 20 years ago. I was a part-time teacher at a Jacksonville (FL) charter school. I was hired to see if I could help a handful of fifth graders who were seriously behind in math. One of them was a shy little girl we'll call Lakeesha, and she had a physical handicap. She was missing some fingers on her left hand (as I recall) and one or two fingers on her right hand were bent or permanently curled inward somewhat. The class moved along about as one might expect, and I wasn't sure I was earning my money. I had several chats with the principal and we agreed that maybe there wasn't much we could do to improve. (It seemed, at times, that whenever I tried something new or "creative," one of the kids would groan and say it had already failed!) One thing began to occur to me, and that was the messyness of Lakeesha's papers on occasion. I asked her if she would mind using a pencil, rather than a ball-point pen. She told me that the edges of a pencil caused blisters on her finger, that it was very sensitive skin. What could I do? Then I just happened to be in a school supply store one day and on the counter was a display of small rubber "sleeves" for pencils! I bought a couple and gave them to LaKeesha, and asked her to give them a try. She said she could do that. After a few days, I noticed that her pencil no longer had a sleeve on it. She had come to the conclusion that her finger wasn't all that sensitive, after all. (And maybe she had been teased?) Finally a day came when the principal asked me if LaKeesha could stay in the room during a second class each day. (Normally her study hall.) I said it was OK, but I wasn't sure how long she would care to simply repeat a lot of stuff. I'm not sure how it came about, but one day I asked her if she would like to help grade papers. She seemed delighted, so she became a sort of "assistant." Pretty soon she was asking questions about some things a little ahead of our class. I then gave her some practice sheets at the next level and let her work on those during that extra class. She was beginning to make splendid progress and soon just "took off" on her own. At end of term, we were supposed to give an exam and we were allowed 90 minutes for it. (What would Lakeesha do with 180???) I pulled out a giant stack of worksheets from my files and gave them to her. This was to be her private exam, I told her. She bent over that stack and worked like a demon. When I took the papers home to grade them, I was anxious to see how far Lakeesha got. (Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.) Turns out there were about 25 pages totalling about 700 problems up to triple digits. When I saw that she had completed them, I was so amazed that I just had to check them all. Shy little, "assistant" Lakeesha had a score of 698! Seems to me that the necessary score for an A in those days was about 93 - 95%. Hers was 99.7%!