NYU FIVER Update!

We have 22 students in our program and 9 Coaches (includes 1 substitute coach). We are associated with the Fiver Children's Foundation and we hold all of our classes at their offices. In general, our location and our site-partner, Shola are awesome! We do have a few space issues, but nothing that has been too much of a hindrance on our classes. In the past couple weeks we have been working on getting all of the students registered for the December SAT as well as drafting copies of their College Application Essays. Two weeks ago our program attended a SUNY College Fair at the Javitts Center where students were able to talk to representatives from colleges they are interested in and also be put on admissions mailing lists. A recent day's activities usually include the following: dinner/social time for about 15 minutes. During this time we take attendance and put stars on our attendance poster (students also receive a star for completing their homework). Then we split our students up into four groups for either Math or Verbal depending on the day. The students are there for about 2 or so hours - going over the current topics, reviewing homework and taking the corresponding quizzes. Finally, for the last half an hour to forty-five minutes each class does College Choice individually. Recently this schedule has been modified to allow each student a certain amount of computer time for online registration. But besides that we have been reading over sample College essays and working on each students personal essay. Finally, we clean up our things and head out!

Penn Mid-Program Report

The Penn LGR site works with 36 motivated and lively high school juniors and seniors from all over Philadelphia. Our program runs at Sayre High School, through the Sayre Beacon, which is managed by Penn's Netter Center for Community Partnerships. We are one of several programs at the Sayre Beacon, which is a community hub for students and families open nights, weekends, and holidays. The staff at Sayre and the Beacon have been very accomodating and helpful, allowing us to use their auditorium, cafeteria, and computer lab..

Our ten critical reading/writing and ten math coaches are absolutely incredible, and they are relating extremely well with their students. It's not rare to walk into a classroom and see the students smiling and engaged with the material. However, boredom and frustration creep in a little more often than we would like. The coaches try to combat this with incentives, breaking up the lesson, and giving the students individual attention. Attendance has also been a bit of an issue, so we are implementing some raffles to students with the best attendance and award a "scholar of the week" to a prepared and motivated student.

Our students are moving along well and the ones who completed the second diagnostic exam imrpoved as much as 100 points from the first exam! On Monday's class, the students completed the Great Things About You activity, spoke with their coaches about interview skills based on a packet created by our College Choice Director, and signed up for mock interviews. The interviews will be conducted by the directors and head coaches over the next two weeks. We are very excited and hope that the students will gain a lot from it. We are also in the process of planning a night at Penn for our students, during which we will take them on a tour, speak with a panel of student representatives of various campus groups, and have a financial aid presentation.

Barnard Mid-Program Update

Despite some bumps in the road early on in the program, Barnard LGR has been a great time that is proving to be extremely useful to students and coaches alike. We have 8 CR/W coaches and 9 Math coaches that are all deeply committed to the program and show up excited and prepared to every class. With an average of about 40 students on each day, the youth center is brimming with high schoolers twice a week who are also committed to LGR and its benefits. OPTIONS, our site partner, has been truly great, providing not only support but much-needed supplies such as white boards and markers to coaches who had been stranded without them.

The past two weeks have been busy ones, splitting the time during each class between College Choice and SAT prep. Last week, students completed their lists of colleges they are going to apply to in the upcoming months. This week, coaches have started talking to their students about the personal statement, and drafts will be coming in next week for editing. We have a practice SAT scheduled for November 17th on Barnard's campus for those students who wish to practice what the test will actually be like. We are also planning a college trip to Barnard/Columbia for the second week of November, complete with free dinner and talks with admissions officers/financial aid advisers.

With such a large program, there have definitely been some anxious moments trying to organize things and keep track of all the necessary elements that go into this program. But the coaches only have positive things to say about their experiences with their students, who are not only bright and extremely dedicated, but fun and nice to be around. It is really reassuring to see friendships forming between some students and their coaches--if they leave LGR with nothing else, the students at least have these relationships.

Mid-Program Update

Currently, we have four classes left before our students take the December SAT. On November 10th, we are having strictly a college choice day in which we are going to have our college visit to New School University, look at specifics for the colleges the students are considering, start applications, and being to finalize college essays. We just finished grading our second diagnostic, and there has been a definite increase in grades, which we can only hope means they will carry over to the SAT's. We are still struggling slightly with the essays, there are serious grammar issues, but we have brought all of that to the CR/W coaches, and hopefully they can hammer it into the students a little more! We are definitely confident however, that they students that consistently attend, will take positive strategies from this semester and apply it to their December SAT's.

Let's Get Ready Lawrence!

Val and I are both extremely excited to be working at the the Lawrence site. As a Lawrence native, it is especially rewarding for me to help our students in such a meaningful way. Our program has 6 math coaches, 6 verbal coaches and 3 substitutes, including Val and myself. Our program is slightly larger than the Summit program. We have 33 students, 75% of whom show up for class 85% of the time or more. Our site partner, the Lawrence HERC has been especially generous with their donations and their time. They constantly check in on the program to see how everything is going and to offer their help. We've run into some difficulty with our site location. Our time is limited to exactly three hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and our host leaves little room for flexibility. The janitor literally kicks us out of the building at 9:00 on the dot! Despite these limitations, Val and I have tried to capitilize our time and space by printing out weekly announcements for our studenst and coaches and holding our coaches' meetings in the parking lot while our students wait for a ride home.

As for the College Choice portion of the program, we just had our first college trip on Wednesday. We went to UMass Amherst with 15 students and 5 chaperones. Val is a UMass graduate and one of our coaches, Stephanie, is a current graduate so their insider information proved very valuable for the students. They all expressed interest in the school and are very excited for our next college trip to Boston College, Northeastern, and Boston University. All but 6 students have completed their SAT registration and we are scheduled to have our seniors begin the common application on Wednesday evening. The students are a little nervous about their college essays but with the help of Jessie Hill, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale, they all have essay topics that they've been working on for the past week. To allay their financial worries, we held a scholarship panel last week exposing our students to the MLK Scholarship, Stephen Phillips Scholarship, Posse Foundation, etc. I've composed college choice folders for all of our students that contain all the information provided in our workshops along with personalized college lists. I'm very looking forward to the one on one counseling sessions with the students that I have scheduled for next week.

For the most part, things have been going well in our program. We have some typical logistical kinks that need to be worked out but Val and I are both committed to having the program run as smoothly as possible.

Summit LGR

Well looks like we are going to be the last ones to post. Our program is going well for the most part. We have 30 students, of which around 26 attend regularly. The Summit program is smaller than the others. We have 6 full-time coaches for each subject and 3 substitutes. Our site is a Youth Center, which has 1 big room and 2 small ones. Unfortunately this is often distracting to the students in the large room, where 3 groups are going on simultaneously. Last week, we tried putting 2 of those groups together and using 3 coaches. This did not seem to work well either. The students were still easily distracted. So we are still working on the best way to deal with the situation. If anyone has any ideas, please share. We have also put coaches together if one group has only 2 students. This seemed to work well. Although all our coaches went to the same high-school and have known each other for awhile.
Very few of our students seem to be interested in going on college trips. They seem to appreciate the idea, but don't want to give up the time to go on them. Many of our students though have been to college-trips through other organizations, which might be the reason they aren't interested. The last trip we offered only 2 students wanted to go. A few coaches even volunteered to come along, but it didn't seem worth it for only 2 students.
I guess that basically covers our site. See you guys next week!
Nimi & Katie

New Rochelle Midprogram Update

Hey fellow Fellows!
Adrienne and Jake here to give you a brief summary of the many reasons why our program is better than yours. First of all, we've got 53 of the coolest, hippest students around, which almost doubles last year's program total of 32. And to teach them, we've got none other than the 23 "Hottest Teachers in America" according to a recent Time magazine. Not only are our coaches hot, but they can teach up a storm, as well. For instance, this Tuesday our nominee for coach of the week, Meredith Keyser, ran an incredible class from start to finish. From the first perfectly-prepared diagnostic review workshop, in which she had the students write problems and concerns on the board anonymously while she gave each of them individual attention, to the stimulating conversations about the college search they had while eating pizza and wandering around the school, she held the students' attention while helping them gain confidence that they can go some of the best schools around. The best part is, she's planning to meet her students outside of LGR to give extra help for the Common App essay.
Don't be too jealous, though. Even though it seems like everything's been too easy, we've had our fair share of difficulties with the administration. The biggest issue has been obtaining access to the computer lab. Although we registered for a building permit nearly a month in advance, and reminded our Site Contact several times, he failed to inform the Principal of the school and we weren't able to get in...three weeks in a row!. The kids came to class with the materials necessary for registration, three Thursdays in a row, and we were made to look unprepared because of the forgetful nature of the administration. We ended up giving students everything they needed in order to register at home, and and made bringing the confirmation of their registration a mandatory homework assignment.
But even with that small setback, the kids love the program and are learning lots. Attendance rates have been fantastic, hovering around 93-94%, and the coaches are taking quite an interest in helping their students. Two of our students have increased over 200 points in the last three weeks, and we're going on a joint trip up to SUNY Albany with White Plains on Monday.
If you'd like to switch programs, spaces are all filled up, but you can submit your resume and hope for an opening. Have a great summer!
Adrienne and Jake

"What's Happening" at Stamford LGR - 2007

Hey LGR friends,

I'm kind of new to this blogging thing, but I'll give it a try...

Currently we have 41 students in our program, 10 full-time coaches (one who comes twice a week), and 3 substitute coaches, excluding myself and Zeina.

Interesting things about our site:
- Our attendance only gets better! We had perfect attendance (minus a pre-arranged vacation) for the past 2 classes, and we only had 1 student miss our second diagnostic! We've worked really hard to keep students engaged through keeping the program fun and dynamic. We have required games (large or small) to be integrated into every class period, and we bring candy regularly and make the kids do different things to get it (ie. tell us something they've learned, or define every word on their verbal quiz)... It also helps that Zeina and I are amazingly cool and fun. :)
- We have free dinners every program night! A student's mother found out that we had a small budget, and told us she would "take care" of the food.. I hate to say it, but I didn't believe her. Well, through some letter-writing and proactive solicitation, we've received food donations for EVERY program night (from high end restaurants, to catering, to Stop and Shop gift cards.) We had SUSHI last night.. it was amazing. Furthermore, she got us a $600 donation from Walmart, which we will be using for graduation logistics, food (if necessary), and prizes. So, if you have the chance, get your parents/guardians involved! It'll pay off, for sure...

Other than that, everything is pretty normal... college choice is going well, as are math and verbal classes. We just had our first coach reflection session, which was not well attended, so we're working to catch everyone up. We're taking trips to Connecticut College on Wednesday, August 1st, and Fordham University on Wednesday, August 15th... We are requiring our coaches to come on at least one trip (including Career Day, excluding the coach picnic). I would recommend that strategy, it's an easy way to get chaperones!

That's all for now...

Hilary and Zeina

Mid-Program Update Long Island City

Hi everyone,
This is Spencer with an update on how things have been going at LIC so far. I'm very glad with how the program is running up to this point. We are working with an amazing group of kids, and though it took many of them a little time to come out of their shell and open up to their coaches, we are starting to see good relationships being built between them. Our coaches have been working incredibly hard, calling students and preparing their lessons before class, and this is no small feat as many of them are working full time jobs this summer. We are trying to incorporate new ideas and activities into our lesson plans to keep the classes fresh and maintain a high energy level in our students for the whole 3 hours.
We have implemented the attendance game that the Boston group used and it seems to be working fairly well at motivating students to come to class. Our regular attendance is about 50 students, and I think all of them are going to see the program through to its finish. Because attendance at the second diag is often very low, we told our students that those with the 5 highest score increases will get a free movie ticket (the Astoria Cinema was kind enough to donate them to us).
College choice activities have been going well also. The kids are eager to both talk about the schools they are interested in, as well as ask their coaches various questions about college life and the application process. We ran our extracurricular activities workshop on monday, and I was amazed to hear some of the students' long lists of clubs and organizations they are involved with outside of school.
It wouldn't really be fair for me to end without listing some of the challenges we've faced, however. For one thing the turnout on our first college trip to Stonybrook was rather low. We are hoping that our trips this week to Hunter and City College are better attended. Also, it has been difficult to get students to come in to our extra help sessions on Tuesdays despite the fact that there is no lack of students who could use extra help. We are planning on offering some sort of extra credit to those who do show up. Finally, we need to do a better job of ensuring that all of our students are participating and learning in class. It has been the case in many of our classes that a few more vocal students tend to dominate, leaving us unsure of whether the more reserved students are fully grasping the material. We have addressed this concern with the coaches and will continue to work on improving this situation. If anyone reading this has faced any of these challenges in their program, we would really appreciate any advice and ideas that you might have. Hope everyone is having a great summer so far,
Spencer

BROOKYLN LGR UPDATE

Hey All,

Just a few quick words from the Brooklyn program and the fantastic Julia and Amreen.

The SITE: The program runs at the Secondary School for Research with 9 Math and 8 Verbal coaches with 40 regular attending students and 4 who attend based on their daily mood. Attendance has been good, considering that most of the students also work and attend summer school on a regular basis. Josh Steckel, the site contact at the school has been very involved with the college choice activities and has been helping us deal with security issues. The site has been accomodating to the needs of the program such as opening up rooms before the program and providing a refrigerator for food storage. One negative thing that I would have to point out is that not every room that we use has air conditioning. The only way that we have been dealing with that is by switching the rooms of the coaches mid program so as to make it fair.

DIAGNOSTICS: We had 42 kids take the first diagnostic and only 23 take the second. Attendance at the second one is always expected to be low because the students know that only 2 out of 3 diagnostics are mandatory and it is always the third one that everyone wants to take. As an incentive, for those who came to the second diagnostic, we held a raffle where we gave out prizes such as tickets to the National Comedy Theatre and the Official SAT Question of the Day Calendars. The students seemed to be excited about those prizes.

The TRIPS: On July 18th, 24 students visited Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. All of the students who attended the trip said that they loved the school and were enthusiastic about other college trips. For many, Muhlenberg College can definitely be a good choice because it is a very nurturing environment that provides a lot of support to the student body and gives great financial aid packages. We are hoping that many students will apply. This Thursday, July 26, we are going to visit Columbia and Barnard. We will have a quick lunch, hopefully if it's not raining, on the steps or on the lawn. There is also a third trip that's coming up during the first week of August and we are finalizing the destinations as well. The students are not very enthusiastic about Career Day but we have been pushing it as something very fun and very educational.

COLLEGE CHOICE: So far, the students have spoken about advantages from going to college, have researched schools that they liked and have drafted their college essay. We are also in the process of registering every single student for the SATs, however, we are not doing a college choice workshop. Instead, we are registering students individually. There is also a financial aid session coming up on August 2, for students and parents, with Susan Lee (go Barnard!). A Scholarship workshop will also take place on Tuesday and we are hoping that the students will find at least two scholarships to apply to.

We have also started planning the closing ceremony, primarily because I am leaving early and I do not want Amreen to be overwhelmed the last week. This includes figuring out the raffle prizes and other details.

This seems to be it so far. Hope all of your programs are going well!!! Have a great remainder of the summer!!!

Juliya and Amreen

ERDA-Bryant HS Update!

Hey everyone!

The ERDA-Bryant LGR program is in its third year and has been enormously successful so far this summer! We are lucky to have a dedicated group of 7 CR/W coaches and 10 Math coaches who oversee classes for about 45 regularly attending students. Though each passing year at Bryant has helped LGR become a more smoothly-run program, there are a few site issues that seem to persist. We have had some difficulty getting a hold of our site contact, the overworked Assistant Principal of Guidance, on a regular basis. This has created some scheduling difficulties, including permits being granted for the wrong periods of time and certain rooms being unavailable to us when we requested them (mostly the computer lab). Thankfully, our students, coaches and site partner, ERDA, have all been enormously flexible with these problems and have been able to adapt their schedules in order to fulfill to our expectations. This has included ending class earlier than we would like (8:50) in order to appease the security guards, trekking to the ERDA office to use their computer lab during Wednesday or Friday afternoons or helping us make phone calls to habitually absent students.

One of the best features of our program this summer is the number of college trips we have been able arrange for our students in conjunction with the LIC program. By the end of the summer, our students will have had the opportunity to visit Stony Brook, CUNY Hunter, CUNY City College, CUNY Queens, Pace Pleasantville and Fordham Rose Hill. Our students are really enthusiastic about the college trips and though some seem a little hesitant to ask questions during info sessions and tours, we have been able to cater to their needs, concerns and questions! Several of our coaches have also been able to come on our trips, which really makes them a lot of fun for everyone involved. Our Stony Brook trip last Friday was a huge success and we are hoping that more students will attend our trips for the rest of the summer!

All in all, we are happy with the way everything is running this summer. Students seem to remain motivated through our attendance game (we are giving pizza parties to our best CR/W and Math classes this week!), but it seems that many of them are very self-driven, which is wonderful. A quick example is one of our students, Bajro, who e-mailed us after the first week to tell us he had gotten a night job and could no longer attend classes. Now he comes to our weekly office hours and we give him assignments, check his work and answer any questions. He still comes to the diagnostics and our other events and even told us he didn't think he should get his deposit back at the end of the summer because that was cheating!

WHITE PLAINS LGR

WHITE PLAINS: The first summer of the White Plains Let’s Get Ready program is off to a great start! We have 60 students and 24 coaches (including 2 substitutes)! We have 11 verbal classes and 11 math classes (2 of which are team-taught by 2 coaches). Attendance is usually good, with over 50 students at most class sessions. We have given out our first round of incentive prizes (T-shirts and CDs) to students with perfect attendance. Our coaches come from all around Westchester, including 3 coaches from White Plains.

SITE: Our classes are held at Pace University in downtown White Plains. We were not able to hold the classes at White Plains High School because the school is inconveniently located for many of the students. Although we were only assigned 6 classrooms, we tell coaches to find any available room so they don’t have to share their classroom. We have a wonderful partnership with the White Plains Youth Bureau (WPYB). Tapp, one of the staff members at the Youth Bureau, attends every class session and goes on trips with us. Whether he is making extra photocopies or helping us carry snacks upstairs, Tapp has been an invaluable resource for our program.

TRIPS: Last Thursday, 34 students, 2 coaches, 2 directors and Tapp went to a college fair at Columbia University. The students received information from over 100 colleges and universities! After the fair, I took the students on a tour of Columbia and then we ate pizza on the steps of Low Library. Although it was a humid day, the students seemed to really enjoy the trip. The students, however, were exhausted during class that night. I definitely recommend scheduling college trips on non-class nights! We are looking forward to trips to SUNY Albany, NYU (for career day) and CUNY Hunter.

COLLEGE CHOICE ACTIVITIES: Our students have completed a college list, activity sheet, common application, and college essay draft. We also brought in 2 guidance counselors to do individual college list counseling with the students. Tonight, we have a professional essay-reader coming to review college essays with the students. We hope to have the guidance counselors and essay readers return so they will be able to see all of the students in the program. Each student has a college choice folder where they keep all of their college choice activities. There is a checklist in the front of the folder and the coach or one of the directors goes through the folder periodically to make sure all the assignments are in the folder. We are using this Thursday’s college choice time as a catch-up session, so students can work on whichever college choice assignment they are missing. We are now trying to figure out the best way to register for the SATs since we have very limited computer access at Pace.

Overall, Nicki and I are pleased with the way our program is running. Both coaches and students seem to be learning a lot and having a great time.
-Emily