March 26, 2008
On Education
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
MIAMI SPRINGS, Fla.
At 5:57 p.m., three minutes ahead of schedule, William Scott bent his lanky frame into the single chair at the front of Room 109. He clasped a set of grammar exercises, and he wore a sweatshirt with the M.I.T. logo. It was “Nerd Day” at Miami Springs High School, but he had chosen the attire with ambition in mind rather than irony.
William began to pass out the grammar exercises to the six classmates before him. The hallway outside the door stretched nearly silent and deserted, just the thin hiss of a janitor sweeping tile. In a school of 2,365 students, William and his comrades might have been the only ones left in the place; surely they were the only ones volunteering for 90 more minutes of class.
They had been gathering this way since early January, three nights a week, with the specter of June 7 on the horizon. June 7 is the day they will take the SAT, and they had made a pact to study for it together, to teach one another, to do it for themselves.
When William, a 16-year-old junior, began recruiting kids for the SAT class out of honors courses and the math club, he drafted a pledge for every participant to sign. “Dropping out is NOT an option,” the statement began. “Eternal shame on all quitters!!” The last item on the list specified: “No complainers, whiners, or excuse makers allowed. We have a job to do, so let’s just do it.”
William and his crew had their collective eyes on three prizes: a score of 700 on each part of the test, a scholarship to a major university and a white-collar career. The goals were both admirable and audacious in a blue-collar suburb and in a high school of modest aspirations.
Miami Springs provides its students some SAT preparation in math and English classes, and offers Advanced Placement courses to top students like William. But as a school struggling with chronic overcrowding and strained resources — where half the students qualify for subsidized lunches, 94 percent are nonwhite and dozens every year are newly arrived Cuban refugees — the major academic emphasis has been preparing everyone for Florida’s required basic skills tests. The school itself is rated “C” by the state.
Once every few years, a Miami Springs graduate has reached Harvard or the University of Chicago. More commonly, the immediate future holds community college or a four-year university within driving distance of home. So when Maria Medina, the assistant principal, first learned of William’s class, she had two reactions: relief that the school itself didn’t have to pay for it, and “a feeling beyond pride” about the students.
On a recent Monday night, in a borrowed social studies classroom adorned with a suit of armor and several cardboard models of the Parthenon, the work resolutely proceeded. As William led the lesson, periodically nibbling on his nails, Milagros Rodriguez, Ivette Vallejo, LaDonna Evans, Andrew Gonzalez, Roylan Marquez and Jessica Fadel drilled through page after photocopied page of deliberately flawed sentences.
Each student took a turn unmasking the misplaced modifier, the noun-verb disagreement or the lack of parallel structure. The group had an extended sidebar about the difference between “sit” and “set.” And when Jessica mistook “lay” for “lie” in correcting a particular sentence, the rest of the room groaned, giving everyone a moment of levity.
Some nights, as William and the rest made their way through the grammar and syntax, the reading comprehension and essay practice, the algebra and geometry, they wondered why the material looked so unfamiliar. Did Miami Springs not teach it? Had they themselves forgotten it?
“Have you ever heard of Ernest Hemingway?” Jessica asked on this particular night. “I had this alum from back in the day ask me, and I didn’t know.”
Andrew answered, “Read ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ ”
Then it was back to examples and practice. Jessica started passing out the night’s vocabulary quiz, two pages of “reprisals,” “cloistered,” “unfettered” and “askance.”
THE whole adventure began when William’s grandmother got Alzheimer’s several years ago, and his father, Steven, gave up his law practice to care for her at home. Craving something to engage his intellect, he helped his eldest child, Laura, study for the SAT. They pulled together a curriculum from newspaper clippings, online grammar tests, used dictionaries and sample test books that he bought for a buck apiece at thrift stores. Lauren earned admission to Wellesley.
William came next. As a sophomore, he took the Preliminary SAT exam and scored at the 67th percentile, which already put him near the top of his Miami Springs classmates. Still, his father insisted on supplying some homemade tutoring before William took the test again. He went up to the 94th percentile.
It was then, late last fall, when William began thinking about sharing his father’s method with other students. “Being a semi-rebellious teen,” Steven Scott recalled, “he wanted to do it himself. And every time I try to intervene, he stares daggers at me. I’m becoming more irrelevant by the day.”
William has always been his own person, playing French horn and water polo, watching the Discovery Channel instead of MTV, using words like “pariah” and “tessellate” in class discussions. Fortunately, he also had the feathery eyelashes that made him the heartthrob for the girls’ water polo team.
“I’m not snooty-smart,” William said of himself. “But I don’t hide it, either.”
He did not seek out straight-A students for the SAT class. His curriculum was built on redundancy and repetition, nothing gimmicky, all of it aimed at building both skills and confidence. “The commitment was that you should be in the class every day we have it,” William said. “It’s not some two-week thing where you can cram.”
Even a few parents found themselves shocked by the intensity.
“My dad constantly asks me, every day, is this worth it?” Jessica Fadel said. “And I tell him, of course. Why else would I put up with this? We have to pitch in. We have to depend on ourselves. We have to figure out how to make the lessons stick. In a way, we learn responsibility in this class.”
E-mail: sgfreedman
@nytimes.com
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