The Mischievous Door Knocker
Jose Gómez
It is early afternoon of a hot, cloudless summer day in a little town a few kilometers east of Havana some half a century ago. We tie an invisible thread to Emilito’s front door knocker and hide diagonally across the street behind a large, old wicker couch in Adelita’s front porch. What we are about to do must be done very carefully to avoid a car getting entangled with the thread, breaking it and, with it, stealing our fun. We keep a close eye on the traffic and wait for a lull. Here it comes, and just as we had practiced in Grandma Rosa’s backyard, we pull the thread taut, give it two quick, short yanks and drop it. It should take no more than four seconds. Two knocks are heard and seconds later the inner door within the large colonial front door creaks open. Isabel has a greeting smile on her face and she seems to utter what may not be a full word as her expression transfigures to one of slight puzzlement. Raul, Pedro and I can barely contain our chuckles and the old wicker couch from shaking. Isabel closes the door. We let a minute pass, and once again watch for another lull in the traffic to repeat our act. Here it comes; two more knocks. A few seconds later Isabel opens the door. Once again we see a greeting smile on her face, but this time there is a pause and not even a hint of a greeting. Isabel leans forward into the bright sunlight, looks to the left and to the right, straightens herself, her gaze unknowingly meeting ours, pauses once again, and with a slow swing closes the inner door.
There is little doubt that our practice did perfect our procedure! We congratulate ourselves and can not wait to do it a third time. Two more knocks and Isabel opens the door swiftly. To our advantage, the afternoon sun is shining bright and hot on that side of the street, making the thin nylon thread, and our shaded porch, safely invisible. We can not see her face in detail, but judging from the speed of her movements, she looks startled. Just as swiftly, she turns around, her left hand swinging the door to a close. Then we seize the ultimate opportunity and yank the thread as fast as we can, managing to sneak one knock just before the door shuts. Isabel gives out a screeching cry, as she jumps away from the door. “¡Espiritus! ¡Espiritus!” (Spirits!) she screams. The old wicker sofa is now really rocking, our bodies jerking from the uncontrollable chuckling.
Three minutes go by… an eternity. Raul tells us to keep an eye on the door that has remained cracked open. As we begin to wonder what could be going on, the inner door of the old colonial front door opens suddenly. It is not Isabel’s figure we see through the wicker grid. It is her! Doña Dolores Urquídez y de la Fuente, in pure white afternoon regalia, straddling the full opening, looking just like a Botero sculpture. In a flash, her eyes angle towards the bronze knocker with the lion’s head. She grabs the thread, breaks it, pauses, lets four seconds pass and howls: “¡Hijos de puta!” (Sons of bitches!) The thunderous roar angrily echoes down the hot pavement with an ever dimming power. Towards the edge of the town it cascades into the earthen country road, by now just a rumble, scaring off the nightingale and the mockingbird. As it turns into just a tremulous sigh, disquieting the house of the grasshopper and the butterfly, it softly sways into the cooling breeze over the sugar cane field and the grand plumage of the royal palm.
From under the old wicker couch a bright, thin, yellowish stream runs from Pedrito towards the edge of Adelita’sporch, as we, with ever widening eyes, see the figure of Doña Dolores Urquídez y de la Fuente get ever wider, ever closer.
My Gómez
Jose Gómez
I have known since I was a chubby little boy that my family name, Gómez, came from that region of Spain we call Andalusía , or Al-Andalus, as it was named in Arabic during the second half of the first millennia. Grandpa Pedro brought it with him and his two brothers to a small town near Havana named Jaruco about one hundred years ago. In 2006, cousin Mirta and her husband did some homework and some roaming about Cordoba , Spain, and claim to have found the village and even some descendants of those who might have known Pedro Gomez before he and his two brothers emigrated to Cuba .
But what Gómez really means and where the roots of my Gómez truly lie, I still do not know. It could be an extraction, a derivative or an amalgamation of Arabic, Hebrew, Visigoth, Castilian or some other European languages of the dawn of the second millennia. But strictly speaking from personal experience, there is one thing I most definitely can attest to: Gómez is a very common surname in Andalusía. Some years ago, while traveling with my wife in a local train from Cordaba to Granada , five different men occupied the seat in front of ours as commuters got in and out at different stops along that enchanted route. To our content and amazement, every one of those fine Andalusian’s surname happened to be Gómez! And, yes, I have googled this matter for more minutes than I care to admit, and must report that it has not brought me much gain in clarity.
Just a few weeks ago I finished reading a most wonderful book by someone who, like me, was also born in that Caribbean island with a Taino name: “The Ornament of the World – How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.” Unfortunately, Gómez is not mentioned in that source, not even once, in spite of it covering a period of time spanning over 800 years of Spanish history. But it did reinforce my feelings of intrigue and excitement in trying to unravel this tempting, very personal, very little puzzle.
A Portrait of a Bilingual Middle Grade Program
Jose Gómez
Summer has just been called to a close and Labor day eases our transition to the new school year. I am a math teacher in a Bilingual program that services seventh, eighth and ninth graders in a inner-city junior high school of a district some miles north of New York City. The eighth grade math class of this program will serve as the guiding light for our portrait, for all its features are common to the math classes of the other two grades and it provides us with a good vantage point and sound perspective from which to compose the full portrait. By the way, do not be distracted nor distraught by the word Bilingual. It just means that the class is taught in the language in which all the students are most proficient and, in our case, it is Spanish. The curriculum taught and the curriculum maps followed in all classes class are identical to those in a mainstream, monolingual classes and all District and NY State assessments (of course, with the exception of the English Language Arts assessments), are exact translations into Spanish of their English counterparts.
So let us get our portrait started and greet a typical eighth grade math Bilingual class as the students enter the classroom on the first day of classes and, perhaps because our class teaches math, we first hit the canvas by presenting you with a simple arithmetic challenge. It is the fifth period of the day and only 14 students of the 21 listed in the roster are present. The missing 7 would have entered by the end of the second week of classes. And since we are dealing with numbers let me add that by the half way point of the academic year 2 in the original list would have left and 6 new students would have joined the class, and by the last day of classes the enrollment would have been 26. So, returning to the challenge, please compose (that is, write out) a “word” problem whose answer is: the first day population of this eighth grade Bilingual class would have increased by approximately 50 percent by the last day of classes. Similar exercises are presented to these students throughout the school year, for they help introduce literacy into the math curriculum.
It is always difficult to know with certainty the forces that mold the lives of these students, but we do know they come to us from every Spanish speaking country in our hemisphere, from some countries in larger numbers than from others, and most of them from families that migrate to our country fleeing poverty, and, as we all know, there is no schedule for escaping abject poverty. Not only the not-first-day-arrival students are significant in numbers. We also see some mid-year-arrival students who come to us from countries south of the equator where summer, and with it the end of the school year, comes when our winter snows arrive. And still others arrive from other areas of our country at random times. So much for numbers and geography, we must keep our eyes on our portrait and to add richness and expressiveness to it let us add the portraits of some of these students.
Alberto, a tall, lanky, just turned fifteen years old boy, came to us directly from Mexico at the end of our first week of classes. When asked what math topics he has most recently studied (or rather, done, since we prefer doing math over studying math) he apologetically explained that he had not been to school for the past three years and that the last time he did attend he had finished the sixth grade in Mexico City. His placement in our class was determined by the District based on the fact that he brought with him no scholastic records , ours is the only school in the District that offers a middle grade Bilingual program and, perhaps most critically, his age. Had he been a few months older he would have been assigned to our ninth grade math Bilingual class that teaches the NYS Integrated Algebra Regents course. Alberto’s guardian is his 21 year old brother.
Luz, a quite, smiley, soft spoken, eleven year old girl with great social skills, came to us directly from Honduras into our seventh grade math Bilingual class the first day of classes. Two weeks into the school year it was clear that her knowledge of math was at best that of a good fifth grader and her science teacher had stated that perhaps she should be moved to the eighth grade. Luz’s mother was contacted and apprised of the situation. She promptly stated that Luz was a very bright girl (by the way, Luz had lived with her grandmother for the past five years) and she could do well in eighth grade. The Principal, her guidance counselor, the teachers and the mother discussed her case for a few days and by the start of the forth week of the school Luz had been reassigned to the eighth grade and, of course, our eighth grade math Bilingual class. Luz’s guardian is his single mother.
Ricardo, a spunky, short for his age twelve year old boy from Peru entered our seventh grade math Bilingual class in the middle of the last academic year. He is one the brightest, most hard working students I have ever had and he has also shown a very positive attitude at lending a hand to those who need help. I have been able to give him an algebra book his father used when he was in high school in Peru, so he will do some independent work and share the results with me at his own pace. All I can say is that Ricardo walks fast, accurately and assertively! Ricardo’s guardians are his father and mother.
I know, you are already wondering how many more students I am going to pull out of my sleeves and may have begun to confuse profiles and to imagine what the next student might look like. Will the student be too young, of the right age or too old to be in eighth grade? How much math would the student have been exposed to in the past? How does that exposure compare to the standards for teaching math that New York State expects its teachers to follow? How much math will the student be able to do? When was the last time the student attended school and in what grade? Well, here is a new arithmetic challenge, think in sets of three possible categories for appropriateness of age (too young, just right, old for grade), of math ability (challenged, average, advanced), of soundness of academic foundations (poor, average, superior), of grade placing( below, at and above grade level), and of parental understanding of the student academic situation (little, adequate, significant). And, just to increase a bit more the arithmetic fun, allow also for three additional categories of time since arrival to our country: newly arrived, one to two years in and more than two years since arrival. Have you counted yet how many profiles one could possibly compose?
Unfortunately, the diversity of the student body of my typical eighth grade class is affected by still many other factors. For example, the school teaches the Bilingual students population English as a Second Language (ESL) in five different classes: beginners, advanced beginners, regular, advanced regular and advanced (the advanced regular and advanced levels take some of the core curriculum courses in mainstream, monolingual classes to ease their transition to full mainstream academics).
This has a bit to do with how the eighth grade math Bilingual students may do math, for research, as well as one’s personal experiences tell us that there exists a positive correlation with the student’s level of cultural adaptation, general wellness, level of ESL placement and degree of academic adaptation. Should we throw in this 5 new differentiators into our challenge to find the total number of possible types of profiles? Why not!
I know you are going to kill me for doing this, but I am going to throw in still more differentiating factors: Special Education and Special Needs. Like all human beings some of these students experience more difficulties than others. The problem is that the process for Special Education classification and the time it takes to complete those processes require considerable parental involvement and at least have of these students do live with parents or, if they do, parents are not adapted enough to our “system” to carry on with all the required steps to completion. So let see what new quantity I am going to add to our challenge; how about 3?: students that need and achieve classification, students that need but do not achieve classification, and students that do not need classification.
So what is the answer to our second arithmetic challenge (you may wish to get yourself a little calculator)? Is it 3,645, 10,935 or even 32,806? But how futile of an exercise all this seems to be! When is one ever going to encounter these many cases? When and for what is one ever going to use this math? Sounds familiar? I know, after all we started with a “final” total of only 26 students. Well, I suppose that I was just trying to raise awareness of a situation, one that is linked to another much complex situation that is totally intertwined with the lives of all these students. But let us not go there, for we as a nation have not yet gained enough courage and amassed enough dignity to confront it face to face. To discuss it would take us into the real of… should I say the word?… no, let me just hush it… politics. Besides, I can not think of any decent arithmetic challenge that would ease this portrait into those realms at this time.
I am sorry but I think I must touch base with something you might feel diverges us from giving this portrait its fishing touches. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) regulations measure a school by the performance of its students in English Language Arts and in Math. How these measurements are actually made is beyond the intent of this portrait. But there is an important point that I can be made with one or two brush strokes. All Bilingual students belong to a category of students called English Language Learners (ELL). For a school to “pass” the yearly NCLB assessments it must make what is referred to as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). And here is the catch, for a school to make AYP each individual category of students recognized by Federal statutes that is present in the school must make AYP, and ELL is one of those categories. The administrators allow our eighth grade math Bilingual students to be taught by two math teachers with the help of one teaching assistant. Experience has led us to favor the model that separates the entire group into two distinct subgroups in two separate classrooms: the more and the less math “adaptable” subgroups. The assistant helps the class of the less “adaptable.” The diversity of needs is so large that we have not yet been able to apply successfully a differentiated instructional model to the entire group of students within one single classroom with two teachers and one assistant present.
As you would expect, New York State regulations mandate that our eighth grade Bilingual math students must take many other subjects. Some prior brush strokes already depicted how English is taught to ELL students. But what happens to science, social studies, Spanish language arts (this one is in itself a story worthy of its own portrait, of which I shall spare you), health, gym, and other subjects? Well, here the brush strokes get really impressionistic and are better perceived from a very long distance. From an arithmetic perspective, the related regions in the portrait are so “simple” that I have not been able create for you a last arithmetic challenge (forgive me for disappointing you). In fact, just as some of Velázquez’s depictions of hands are known to have been painted with one single brush stroke, allow me to finish this portrait “a la Velázquez,” with just a few words. The typical eighth grade Bilingual math group is joined by other ELL students ( say 5 additional students) to receive Science and Social Studies instruction in single classroom environments taught by one teacher and, at certain times, one assistant. All other subjects are taught by monolingual teachers with no assistants. And, just as you might have expected, the seventh and ninth grade Bilingual math population are very similar to eighth grade.. I almost said frightingly similar, but that would have tainted your perception.
The portrait has been completed. It is surely not in the style of Dutch renaissance paintings, where myriad visual details can be discerned. Many of you will see it at just a sketch. It may also be seen as executed in separate canvases. So I leave you with two non-arithmetic (some of you will appreciate that) challenges, one introspective and one artistic. The introspective challenge asks that you envision what a mainstream, monolingual, middle grade program looks like and compare that vision with the vision you have gathered from this reading. You need not write, nor say, nor communicate anything. The artistic challenge is to consolidate all these experiences into one purely abstract painting, to jpg it, and to email it to me at your earliest convenience. Let the artist in you speak (or should we say: paint?)!
