The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

A YES Prep Visitor Reflects on a Campus Visit

December 07, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

I have the honor of getting to meet pretty much everyone before we hire them either by interviewing them or actively recruiting them.  Below is an email that I recieved from a teaching candidate that interviewed with us and then visited the YES Prep Gulfton campus.  I was a really special email to get and I thought I would share it with everyone.  If you are interested in visiting a campus, please let us know by sending an email to teach@yesprep.org

I wanted to let you know how my visit to the Gulfton campus went today. I honestly could not have been more impressed with the students, teachers, facility, or administration.

I was able to meet several of the teachers as well as Jake Schmitz. I was also able to sit in on Jennifer Green's 8th grade class and Hugh Guill's 9th grade World Geography class. I was incredibly impressed with the students in the Geography class. They were studying apartheid in South Africa and going over a reading exercise to help them learn how to read and prepare for college discussions. One of the students pointed out that the article was similar to what they had learned about with Rwanda but it did not fit the definition of genocide. As the former TA for a senior-level college course on Comparative Genocide- I was thrilled! These are such advanced concepts and the students had a very good grasp of them. I had college students struggle with that. YES Prep, based on my observations today, is equal in education to the expensive private schools I have been substituting at this semester.

I was also thrilled by how the goal of a college education is so stressed to the students. Even their homerooms are named after universities so that the students get a sense of what education opportunities are available to them. Furthermore, the homerooms are based on the school the teacher attended making the association tangible and personal rather than abstract. I personally was a first generation college student and did not know about what schools were available to me.

The visit to Gulfton today solidified for me that this is defiantly an organization I want to be a part of. Bridging the achievement gap is a difficult task and I watched a group of people dedicated to bridging that gap and doing it well.
 

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