Education – Page 10 – Memphis Flyer

Angel Perkins has been teaching chemistry and biology to high school students for 18 years. But in the past two years, she’s found herself working with a different group of students: other teachers.

“It all started with a colleague of mine. I thought he was an excellent teacher, but he was having problems passing the teacher’s exam,” she says.

After watching him struggle, she asked him if he wanted a tutor.

“He was very resistant to it at first,” she says. “People think they should know the material and be able to pass the test.” He relented and passed the exam shortly after they started working together. After that, she says, word just got around.

Since then, she’s credited with helping 50 teachers pass the Praxis exam, an assessment used by many states in their teaching certification and licensing, and she’s been hired by the University of Memphis’ Transition to Teaching program, a course that prepares people who have worked in other fields to teach.

The White Station AP biology teacher has also been named to the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Training Corps, spending last summer traveling to places all over the country — Boston, Seattle, and Santa Clara, California — to work with other educators. She also is the only teacher on the Department of Education’s national No Child Left Behind panel.

Perkins credits most of her successes to her technique of framing lessons around a story, learned from older relatives in rural Mississippi.

“A lot of them couldn’t read or write. You had to be very verbal with them and very expressive,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to learn and retain information if you can connect it to something.”

For instance, with her students in Memphis, she compares cellular functions to those of FedEx. Each FedEx department — the organelles, if you will — have a role to play within the organization, or the cell.

Of course, not all her audiences are as familiar with FedEx as Memphians, so she employs a variety of anecdotes, mnemonic devices, and analogical reasoning, as well.

When Perkins talks about photosynthesis, she compares it to a person converting their gold to cash.

“It tends to make more sense, because it’s so abstract. The kids are like, Why, why, why?” she says. “If they’re in possession of gold, they know it’s something of value, but they need to convert it to paper money to be able to spend it.”

One of the teachers who learned Perkins’ technique over the summer has already employed it with success — his students are averaging almost 30 percent higher on his tests — and Perkins is working on a biology supplement that other teachers could use to accompany their lessons.

As for teaching students versus teaching educators, Perkins says it’s a little different, but not in the way you might think. With her adolescent students, she knows what they should know. With other teachers, she has no idea.

“I have to be sensitive to the fact that I have a mixed bag of people,” she says. “Some just need a refresher. Others are missing the foundation. I kind of assess it as we go along.”

Prospective students eligible for the Distinguished African American, African-American Scholar, and African-American Enrichment scholarships at the University of Memphis may be out of luck next school year.

The scholarships, enacted as part of a settlement agreement dating back to the 1968 Rita Sanders Geier lawsuit, will cease to exist next fall.

Geier, then a professor at predominantly-black Tennessee State University, filed a claim in an attempt to end the effective segregation of Tennessee’s public colleges and universities. The state of Tennessee then established a series of programs, including several scholarships, designed for more effective long-term racial integration. The “other race” scholarships, for instance, would provide an incentive for minority students to voluntarily integrate schools without resorting to racial-quota legislation.

But more recently, two 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases out of Michigan — Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger — held that “other race” scholarships such as the ones stipulated by Geier are illegal.

“Based on the legal precedents set by the Michigan cases, we would be under scrutiny if we continued to offer ‘other race’ scholarships,” says Michelle Banks, Equal Employment and Affirmative Action officer for the U of M.

Exactly what effect the cancellation of these scholarships will have, however, is unclear.

“There is one group of people telling us that we’re going to get the money, and there’s another group of people telling us that we’re not,” Banks says. “Before, the recipients of African-American scholarships received the funds from their scholarships, thereby not competing for university funds. But now, everyone will be competing for the same money.”

Other school administrators, however, say that the changes will have “little to no impact” on how they award scholarships.

Rhodes College political science professor Marcus Pohlmann says that simply rerouting the existing money into need-based aid could maintain the spirit of the Geier scholarships. “It still may serve many of the same students and just proxy for race as such moves have done elsewhere,” he explains.

Still, eliminating the scholarships will probably carry some consequences.

“This might deter some African-American students from coming,” says University of Memphis junior William Terrell, who cited his Distinguished African-American Scholarship as the main reason he attended the U of M.

Pohlmann agrees. “Will it cost the U of M some of its better black students who are better off and have choices of schools? It may.”

“But,” he adds, “other schools are going this same route. It’s not that unusual.”

All 193 students currently receiving funding from the scholarships, however, will continue to do so as long as they abide by the guidelines of their individual programs.