ACE Curriculum

We start out with the book The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay. It’s my favorite book. The story follows a young man going to boys’ schools and coming of age in South Africa in the 1930’s and 40’s, just as Apartheid was gaining its stranglehold. It is truly good literature, but it also has him being made fun of as a young student for being uncircumcised and later the whole masturbation thing adolescent boys often go through. He also wants to be the welterweight boxing champion of the world. In other words, there’s enough sex and violence to keep the attention of our clientele. The themes involve injustice as well as the power to fight it if you have focus and know what you want.

Next we read Watchers, by Dean Koontz. It’s a horror novel, not deep, but it has great character studies and lends itself to research projects about genetic engineering. Again, plenty of sex and violence. We are shameless in what we do to get these kids to read. Most of them haven’t read a book cover to cover since elementary school, often the primary grades. They read these and usually love them. I get a lot of, “Wow, I didn’t know a book could be good.”

For both of these they read along while they listen to me (Power of One—there’s no recording) or to a CD (Watchers). They come to us with a broad range of reading skills, from lower elementary level to above grade level, so this helps them all stay together for class discussions and builds fluency for the low readers. We work on decoding words and building comprehension through reading logs that require kids to deduce the meanings of unfamiliar words, predict events to build their grasp of plot, apply what they already know to what they’re reading, even do artwork to reinforce visualization of the writing. After this, they read the article from Outdoor Magazine that Jon Krakauer later turned into the book Into Thin Air. The article is much longer than your average magazine article. This they read on their own, and they do some group presentations and writing on leadership styles. From there we move to a series of short stories that they also read on their own and, finally, independent reading novels, adult level, 300 or more pages.

For the writing component, we do a lot of business writing—business letters, resumes, etc. We do a unit on directions where they make educational games with instructions, and then we take the games to an elementary school and play them. The great thing about this is that little kids don’t know that my kids are “at-risk.” All they know is that these are cool high school kids—gods. It’s great for the ACE kids’ self-concept, and it’s often their favorite memory from the whole year. We do a research project that’s a walking tour of various sections of town. They have to research the history of the buildings and interview people who work in them. They use this information to make a booklet combining research skills, writing skills, and desktop publishing skills. We also do tons of short, expository pieces. The kids usually come to ACE barely able to string a coherent sentence together. Really, I read their first writing assignment, and every year I just want to weep at the work ahead. Our culminating assignment is a five-paragraph essay, one worthy of at least a C in a traditional junior English class. This is so they can transition back to the traditional program the next year.

We do quite a bit of oral communication. The kids learn interview skills and then have real business leaders from the community come in and conduct interviews and give feedback. They do a research project on a career choice and do a PowerPoint presentation. We also have a unit on conflict resolution.

Once or twice we take them downtown at night to a play. We also have dinner at a nice restaurant. They must dress and behave like full-fledged adults. (I’ll tell you a secret, though—a couple of times that night we teachers arrange to be separated from the kids for about 15 minutes. You do NOT want to spend this many hours with a group of at-risk lambkins if they haven’t had a chance to satisfy their nicotine Jones, but we can’t let them smoke in front of us.)

Once each week we have a support group. The kids are divided up between the two teachers (and a counselor if one’s willing). This keeps us in touch with the rest of their lives. We also use it as an opportunity to teach some life skills and discuss issues that impact them—binge drinking, unprotected sex, smoking, that kind of thing. We have some great videos for this.

Those are the highlights, anyway. A snapshot. It keeps the kids engaged.

tags: education