Chicago State University and Illinois Institute of Technology Visits

Last Friday, a handful of Cabrini Connections youth joined me for a day of college visits across the city of Chicago. Rather than relaxing at home during a Chicago Public School holiday, the students met me at Cabrini Connections at 8:45am and we made our way down to the end of the Red Line at 95^th, where we hopped a bus to Chicago State University, a historically African-American State College. We spent the morning learning about their various programs, exploring the campus and meeting students so that the kids could get a better idea of what it would be like to be a student at Chicago State. We visited everything from the dorms, to the dining halls and workout facilities so that it was easy for the students to look into the not-so-distant future, and imagine themselves going to class, studying in the library, and relaxing in the dorm cafeteria with their friends and classmates. Tashara and Tiffany, both of whom are High School Freshman, were particularly interested in learning more about their pre-med programs, as they both want to go into the medical profession, either as nurses or physician’s assistants or as full-fledged M.Ds. It was especially beneficial for them to be visiting schools so early in their High School Career, since for them, High School is a blank slate, and if they have something to work for, like admission to a particular college, they can work with their mentors to develop short and medium-term goals that will help them achieve that end goal.

After checking out everything Chicago State has to offer, we again jumped on the Red Line and made our way down to 35^th, where we found themselves in the midst of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Bronzeville Campus. We enjoyed lunch and an in-depth explanation of IIT’s many programs and how technology permeates all of their course offerings. Manley Career Academy Junior, Melissa Hale was very interested by their “Business and Technology” offerings, as she is in a special business track in her high school that emphasizes information technology.

We were then taken on a tour of campus, where the students noticed many differences from Chicago State. Since it is a private school, parts of the campus are very opulent, such as some of the newer dormitories that we visited and their new student center, complete with a Rem Koolhaas designed elevated train tunnel that muffles the sound of the green line as it whizzes mere yards above. The kids also picked up on the diversity of the student body, which is much more international than Chicago State’s predominantly African-American student body. This was immediately apparent since as soon as the students walked into the student union, they were inundated with the sights and smells from the nearly 100 countries represented on campus; It was the day of one of IIT’s multicultural festivals.

One thing that impressed the students at IIT was that, though tuition and fees are more expensive at IIT, being that it is a private school, they have a special scholarship for CPS students that pays for full tuition, books and fees! This caught the students’ interest in a big way. Hopefully this will encourage the kids to keep their grades up and study hard for the ACT, as the average student at IIT had a high school GPA of 3.89 and scored between a 25 and 30 on their ACT.

As the students returned to Cabrini Connections, cold and exhausted from the rapidly declining temperatures and a full day of college tours, one couldn’t help but detect a spark of possibility being lit in the students’ minds, one we at Cabrini Connections help fuel and guide, until they can light their own way.

Bridging Social Capital

Last week my boss Dan Bassill, Founder and CEO of Cabrini Connections, blogged about "bridging social capital" and how providing a means by which kids growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods can gain access to new social networks is perhaps the most important resource we can provide to our youth. You can find his post here. Indeed, at Cabrini Connections, what we do is to bring together successful working professionals with kids in economically disadvantaged communities and offer a structure for them to develop deep and lasting relationships, opening up the mentors networks, (personal, workplace, faith-based, community...etc) to their mentee (student) so that the youth can benefit from these contacts when seeking employment, internship experience, college admission and a career.

Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam has defined social capital as: "the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other". Considering the dearth of economic resources in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods such as Cabrini Green, it can be argued that kids in our target population have less developed and supportive social networks than their counterparts in more affluent areas of Lincoln Park or the Gold Coast and that this contributes to their increased risk for negative outcomes such as: dropping out of high school, entering the prison system and teen pregnancy. In fact, a landmark study looking at over 24,000 public, Catholic and other private school students found that social capital in students' families and communities attributed to the much lower dropout rates in Catholic schools compared with the higher dropout rates found in public schools (Coleman and Hoffer 1987).

In a recent book, Bowling Alone (2000) Putnam posits that "Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital" and continued "presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education". He argues that positive youth outcomes are primarily a result of a parent's social capital in their community. This crucially includes the relationships that they have with their childs' teachers and educators and more generally the strength of their relations with other individuals who determine their childs development both at school and in the community. However, in high-poverty communities where single mother-led households are the norm and numerous factors converge to requre these lone parents to work multiple jobs, leading to less time spent with children and their educators, it is difficult to accrue the high levels of social capital, that help catalyze a child's success.

This is where tutor/mentor programs like Cabrini Connections step in and help "bridge" this social capital. For instance, in our program mentors like last weeks' volunteer spotlight Carolyn Grunst work with both their students and their educators, meeting with school counselors, teachers and administrators to ensure that the child is receiving the resources they need at school while also developing trusting relationships with the child's primary caregivers. Mentors thus serve as bridges between often disparate communities, between school and home life, between student life and the professional world and between Cabrini-Green and the mahogany trimmed offices of elite law firms around the city. In this way, mentors help to develop networks of support (i.e. social capital) around the youth that increase their opportunities for success, ensuring they stay on the right track through junior high and high schools, continue with higher education and enter a career by the age of 25.

Depaul College Visit

On Columbus Day (or as the Venezuelans call it, the Day of Indigenous Resistence) my Tutor/Mentor Connection colleague Nicole and I accompanied a group of potentially college bound students from Cabrini Connections on a private visit to Depaul University. I set up this visit (and numerous others) to give the kids an opportunity to learn more about the different options they will be presented with once they graduate high school. On this particular visit, our students, Yolanda (Yoyo), Breonca
(Beebee), Cierria (Cici), Dijana and Charles, learned about the potential advantages and disadvantages of attending a large private Vincentian university right smack dab in the middle of Lincoln Park. I was impressed by the diversity of the student body and their emphasis on learning through service. The kids were very interested to learn that according to Princeton Review, Depaul has the most diverse student body in the nation as well as some of the happiest students.

Yoyo, being interested in business and marketing in particular was happy to find out that business is one of the most popular areas of study at DePaul. Cierria, on the other hand, was surprised with the lack of courses offered in design, particularly fashion design. For Dijana, our current student in the spotlight, this visit served to confirm her desire to attend Depaul once she graduates so that she can study education and mathematics to prepare for a rewarding career as a High School math teacher. During our visit, Dijana made particular inquiries about dorms, trying to figure out which of the various living and learning communities would be best for her. We look forward to helping her set up these future visits if necessary and ensuring that she has adequate resources while working on her Depaul application.

It was clear that during our visit, our students learned a great deal about not only the college admissions process but the whole college experience. Since we scheduled the visit on a day where Depaul students were in school, but Chicago Public School students had off, our kids were able to see students hastily making their way from class to class, relaxing in the quad, signing petitions in the student union and organizing fundraisers in the dining hall. Though everyone said that the experience was beneficial, it was especially encouraging to hear that every one of our students is planning on attending the next college visit I've planned, which will be next Friday, Oct 24th, at Westwood College. In fact, the kids don't know it yet, but I'm planning on having them tell the rest of the students about how eye-opening their Depaul University visit was at our tutoring sessions this week in order to ensure a better turnout to our upcoming visits (which include Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago State University, University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University).

While on the subject of college preperation, I'm in the process of compiling a college prep library for our high school students that will consist of ACT and SAT prep books/CDs, princeton review and other guides to colleges, SAT subject test prep guides as well as a collection of successful admissions essays from various schools. Therefore, if you have any of the materials that I just mentioned, and I know you must if you are either attending college now or are a graduate, please consider donating them to Cabrini Connections so that our kids might benefit. Please email me at chris.warrens.mail@gmail.com, call me at 312-492-9614 or leave me a comment here on the blog and we can coordinate a way to get your college prep materials in the hands of some kids who could really benefit from them. Thanks so much for your time and generosity. I hope to be hearing from you soon.

Radical Math

Hey all (and particularly those in education)-- So as I was going through the extensive collection of web links (nearly 1500) that the Tutor/Mentor Connection has compiled to help our students and mentors easily access resources on the internet, I came across one particularly interesting link I'd like to share with you all. I don't know about you all, but I've never really been a math person. This makes it particularly difficult for me to get our students excited about doing their math homework during tutoring sessions, even on the off chance that I actually retained enough trig, calc, agrebra...etc to be able to help them in any meaningful way. For me, and I suspect more than a few others, my distaste for math was primarily because, unlike science or social studies, I didn't really see any potentially useful real-life application of the knowledge, particularly in my more advanced courses. Even if I could utilize trig in real life and figure out how tall a building was based on its shadow, I wasn't convinced that applied trig was going to change the world; Thankfully, the folks at "Radical Math" believe otherwise.

Radical Math is a resource for educators who are interested in integrating issues of social and economic justice into their math classes and curriculum. If you check out http://www.radicalmath.org/ you'll find over 700 lesson plans, charts, data sets, graphs...etc that allow teachers to spice up their math instruction by bringing these ideas into the classroom.

So how does one combine social/economic justice issues with math you ask??? Let me give you an example that is currently part of the curriculum at Chicago's own Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice.

I'm confident most of my readers are aware of the events surrounding the so-called Jena 6, if not (which is understandable since the trial has been more or less absent from mainstream media), it is summarized on page 4 of this document, which is a lesson plan that uses the Jena 6 to engage students a variety of subjects. The mathmatics component of the lesson plan teaches kids combinatorics (i.e. permutations, combinations n C r..etc) by having students perform such operations as:

Determine the probability of randomly selecting a 12-person, all-white jury from a town
that is 85.6% white, 14.4% people of color (mainly African American), of 2,154 adults
(2000 census)

and then generalizing the formula for combinatorics ( n C r )

This exercise also allows students to investigate the concepts of randomness and what it is like to "think like a mathematician while at the same time seeing how knowledge of fundamental mathematical concepts can lead to greater understanding of complex social justice issues like racism.

This is just one of hundreds of ways that Radical Math's curricula fuses social and economic justice issues with mathematical concepts to increase the relevance and understanding of both among students. Here, you can find some of the other ways they suggest augmenting math curricula with social and economic justice issues such as the following:

Prisons, racial profiling, death penalty
Poverty, minimum/living wage, sweatshops
Housing, gentrification, homeownership
War, defense budgets, military recruiting
Public Health: AIDS, asthma, health insurance, diabetes, smoking
Educational access, funding, testing, achievement gaps
Environment: pollution, hunger, food and water resources
Welfare, TANF
Immigration

Man I wish my math teachers used some of this curricula instead of boring me out of my gourd for all these years! Have a great weekend everyone and please do a whole generation of kids a favor and tell the educators in your life about Radical Math, it just might help us eventually bring about some real change.

over and out