Our Second Visit to Granada High

Last week, BetterGrads returned to Granada High School (Livermore, CA) for College Planning Night and the Freshmen-In-Transition (F.I.T.) program. The presentation team included three of our fabulous mentors - Andrea Olson, Andrea Duwel, and Greg Felter - and me.

We spoke about college to bucket-loads of students and parents: nearly 800 over two days. Unlike last year, when we used a more scripted approach to our presentation curriculum, this year we asked attendees to direct the show by slinging questions at us on any aspect of college.

Let the fun begin.

Questions like “How much does college cost?” and “Is there a lot of homework in college?” surfaced dozens of times. We also received a few zingers from left field, which we tried to answer: “Are the dances in college like Stomp the Yard 2?” (what’s Stomp the Yard one?) and “Have you ever been in a fight in college, and if so, what happened?” (no).

Wrapping it all up, we can offer two takeaways (and a cool video) from two inspiring days at GHS:

1. Money (or the lack thereof) is one of the biggest barriers students face when wondering whether they, too, can go to college. We asked the entire freshmen class of over 600 students at Granada High to write down three questions about college. From a random sample of twenty responses, financial questions like “How much does college cost?” and “How do you pay for college?” came up fifteen times, or 75% of the time, second only to questions on academic difficulty like “Is college harder than high school?”

2. Students know what they don’t know and are eager to learn. In three of the four 45 minute F.I.T sessions, we presented for no more than 12 minutes before opening up the floor for questions (in the first session we spoke for about 25 minutes before fielding questions). Tepidly, one or two students would raise their hand as the first volunteer. After the second or third question, however, students invariably raised, waved, or flailed their arms up high, jockeying for the facilitator’s attention to be directed at them and their question. When an entire section of students were reprimanded by a teacher for complaining loudly that we were not calling on them, I couldn’t suppress a smile displaying my contentment. College mentoring organizations like ours should listen as much as more often than we talk.

Finally, video interludes rock. Students seemed to enjoy this message by two members of our national staff and a NYC-based mentor: