Palos Verdes High School AVID Family! It’s time for our 5th Annual Car Wash. In this blog, I will try to address some questions you may have about the Car Wash. Here we go….
DO WE NEED EVERYONE’S HELP?
Yes. We need everyone’s help.
HOW CAN I / MY FAMILY HELP?
Your family can help in some of the following ways:
1) Attend the Car Wash and wash cars. Bring the whole family. It’s a fun day!
2) Bake some delicious treats for the bake sale end of the car wash. If you’re able, package them for sale, but if you’re not able to package them don’t worry. You can bring them game day or you can deliver them the day before to your AVID teacher’s classroom.
3). Bring liquid refreshments to the car wash. A case of water or a gatorade type beverage is fantastic. A 6-pack of water or beverage is fabulous. Bring what you like to drink and bring a couple of extra for someone else and then we’ll have plenty. Bring your drinks on game day or bring over the next couple of days to your AVID teacher’s classroom.
4) Bring food for you and a few others. Families in the past have brought: breakfast burritos, bagels, subway, pizza, Taco Bell, and more. Again, bring what you like and if you feed 2-10 other people then we’ll be able to keep all our troops fueled up for the morning and post car wash clean up.
5) Bring a cooler for the drinks. If you bring it game day, ice would be clutch. If you bring it to your AVID teacher’s classroom by Friday we will get the ice (if available down in the athletic trainer’s office).
6) Do you or someone you know play in a band? We need more performers for the concert end of our Car Wash and Concert.
7) Bring some towels home to wash and dry. If everyone takes one load home, that will “spread the wealth” on this fun job. Wash and dry at your leisure and return to your AVID teacher.
8) Wear a costume on the day of the wash!AVID CAR WASH FUN (and some not so fun) FACTS
The Car Wash started 5 years ago and almost nobody (except the AVID teachers) thought it would be successful. The highest anyone at PV High had made on a car wash was between $1,000 to $2,000. When you factor in the $50 most AVID families spend on their 5 car wash tickets and all the students at PVHS buying car wash tickets for extra credit, we have made $10,000 or more many years on the car wash.
Where does the money go? The money is deposited into our ASB account. Our biggest expense is tutoring. Our tutors do not make a ton per hour, but over the course of 10 months, it adds up. Also, we pay the teacher tutors for their good work in January and June when they man our after school finals tutorials. Other money is used to defer the cost of buses when there is an AVID trip, or to pay for the substitute teachers when an AVID teacher is chaperoning an AVID trip, to pay for the AVID t-shirt (coming soon) you receive the first semester each year, to pay for some classroom supplies, and some Fun Friday costs and more! The money cannot come out of our AVID ASB account without a receipt. So everything is documented and on the up and up.
THANK YOU for helping make the AVID Car Wash and Concert (and Bake Sale) one of the best days of the year. See you Saturday. Teachers will be at school from 6:45 am to the end of wash (hopefully around 1:30 if we have a large clean up committee 🙂
I recently received an email that gives a good perspective on teachers and their stance on district fund allocation. This thread is admittedly slanted, and only reflects one person’s point of view. Nonetheless, I find it thought-provoking. Please feel free to email info@studyhut.com if you would like to propose a rebuttal. I will post the best response:
Today we spoke about students needing to keep track of their own grades in the last 7-9 weeks of school here since teachers are not posting now as a way to get attention to the 180 days of school issue and to try to convince the school board that teachers who haven’t gotten a raise in some years deserve one. You may know that when money was ultra tight, we teachers agreed to cut our own (and more importantly the students’) work schedule as a way to furlough our salaries and keep the district solvent. [And we know you all chipped in more than your share as well to PEF and I do the same for my kids in MBUSD]. Anyway, it’s an allocation of district revenue issue that everyone should be weighing in on, and teachers are financially stressed and as inflation raises everyone’s cost of living, it is getting more and more difficult to live on a reduced work schedule. Not to mention, should we as a society, be reducing our educational calendar as the rest of the globe certainly is not decreasing theirs? If you disagree with me, I certainly would respect your differing viewpoint, and welcome you to share it with me. But, for better or worse right now, we need to be extra vigilante of our own school performance and stay on top of our homework and prepare for exams. There are only 7 weeks to Memorial Day (including this week) and then final exams are the week after a severely truncated Memorial week (with Monday off and 2 senior project minimum days for students).
This awesome commercial was filmed by students from Palos Verdes High School in the broadcast journalism department. The commercial aired for the first time across campus this week during the Live From 205 news. Live From 205 is a nationally recognized broadcast journalism program, and Study Hut is proud to have been involved in this effort. Congrats to Live From 205 for all of your hard work, and thanks for highlighting our tutoring office in the Redondo Beach Riviera. Check it out:
Study Hut tutors could not be more excited for the big Finals push. We have students from AVID coming in for private tutoring all week, but we also have a huge event scheduled for Saturday. As in years past, we will be hosting an all day tutoring and study session on campus at Palos Verdes High School. We will have access to multiple different classrooms, and tutors will get to go into different rooms and help students with the specific subjects they need most help with.
This year, there will undoubtedly be math tutoring, science tutoring (including biology tutoring and chemistry tutoring), history tutoring, from World History and EHAP to U.S. History, Government, and Economics tutoring. Math tutoring will include algebra tutoring, geometry tutoring, algebra 2 tutoring, pre-calculus tutoring, trigonometry tutoring, and maybe even some calculus and FTS tutoring.
We will also, of course, have English tutoring, writing tutoring for students with an upcoming final paper, Spanish tutoring (all levels), and probably a few other subjects as well.
The event is free (and required!) for all AVID students, and speaking from past experience, it is an extremely productive event for all students involved. The teachers always come to support, supervise, and offer their knowledge as well.
And best of all, we are getting El Taco Man ordered, so he will be showing up with his cart, and all the tacos any young man or woman can eat. Does it get any better than this? I think not. See you on Saturday.
We did it! Wow! Another great PV AVID car wash. Standing Ovation!
Cars Washed: 260
Teachers in attendance: Ms. Huber, Mr. Kuykendall, Ms. Parkinson, Mr. Heffernan, Dr. Stephany and more……
Teachers who sold car wash tickets: Ms. Damon, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Cormier, Ms. Kuhn, Mr. Chudy, Ms. Parkinson, Mr. Broughton, Ms. Reichert, Mr. Morales and again, probably other sellers.
The grand total of sales is yet to be determined. We will get back to you on that, but rest assured, it was well into the thousands. After all, most of you bought $50 in tickets as part of your AVID dues in the beginning of the year and then there were additional sales (a couple to a few thousand dollars worth in the past two weeks alone by the aforementioned teachers).
Where does the money go: By far, AVID’s biggest expense (and worth every penny) is to our fabulous tutors. While they individually do not make a lot, they collectively are expensive since they’re here 2 or 3 days a week from 8AM to 2PM.
The money is also used to for teacher tutors in January and June. In addition, it is used for classroom supplies and to defer some costs so that it either does not get passed down to you (after all you already paid for it with your dues and car wash) or so that AVID can pick up some of the cost to make something more affordable for everyone. Some expenses include Taco Man lunch in January, chaperone gift cards to thank teachers who spend their day on an AVID trip, site team lunches, AVID T-shirt (coming next week I believe), teacher conference fees and more.
Bottom line is all of the money goes back to the program! And we teachers really appreciate not having to worry about money the entire year and we can do the things we want to do with the students in and out of the classroom. So, THANK YOU ALL!
Thank you tutors Niccole, Brittany, MJ, Justin, and Study Hut for your help and presence.
Also a special shout out Live for 205 for covering and promoting the AVID Car Wash.
SP here. I am really looking forward to my lunch meeting today with all of the rad teachers from the Palos Verdes High School AVID program. Each year during the summer, these awesome teachers (Egan, Whalen, Morales) get together to reflect on the past year. They ask questions like:
What went right?
What could we have done better?
What activities to we need to make more room for?
Which activities and ideas could be eliminated all together?
Certainly the questions and ideas that get bounced around go
much more in depth than these “Level 1” questions (some students are snickering at this), but in actuality, sometimes it is just this casual approach that gets us to the gems.
We are all working together to make sure that the AVID experience is excellent for all students at all levels. We need to make sure that we are meeting the statewide expectations for the program and the curriculum, and we also need to make sure that the goals we set for the students are achieved, and that the activities we decide on and the curriculum we endorse has a direct, positive impact on those goals. Most importantly, we are all looking forward to another amazing AVID year come Fall.
Spring semester is underway at Palos Verdes High School, and for sophomores in the AVID program, this means exposure to a whole new style of testing. As many of us know, the SAT is a very different type of test. Likewise, the PSAT is meant to serve as preliminary exposure to this different testing style for 10th grade students. For most sophomores, the PSAT is the first test they have ever seen in which there is a penalty for guessing incorrectly.
On a typical exam in history class or biology, a student is encouraged to answer each and every question to the best of his or her abilities. Any question the student is unsure about should be guessed at using strategies such as elimination. The same is not true of the SAT and the PSAT – on these tests, students must determine their own confidence level on a given problem, and must answer two questions:
– Is this question worth spending time considering?
– Can I eliminate one or more answers with certainty?
The truth is that most students have tremendous difficulty with answering these questions, which is why so many students need training for the SAT.
PV High AVID students have a huge advantage, then, because they are exposed to this style of test at an earlier age. It gives students more time to adjust to the style and become acclimated to the scoring system. Moreover, these students receive this training for free, as a perk of being part of such a prestigious program, and because of the excellent relationship between Study Hut Tutoring and the Palos Verdes High School AVID program. It is no wonder than dozens of students are turned away from the program each year, and it should come as no surprise that the application process for 8th graders is so competitive.
A lot of students from Palos Verdes and Peninsula High School come into our Redondo office despising math, and I don’t blame them. Mathematics is a tough subject that takes a lot of time to understand, and students often try to get by by memorizing the rules, proofs, and theorems without ever perceiving how they work. After all, it’s a nasty subject that I’ll never really need. Who cares about the directrix of a parabola? When do I need to know how to calculate the area of a n-sided polygon? What’s the point of being able to do basic arithmetic in my head? I can just use my iPhone calculator to get the answer, or Google search it. That’s good enough.
It’s tough to argue against these points, but I believe that putting your best foot forward when tackling math builds a solid foundation, not only in regards to academics but to life as well. If a child is willing to put in the time to genuinely understand how trigonometric identities work, they’ll be more likely to work for things in life, whether it be a job, sport, or relationship in the future. If a student understands that they need to address their poor grades in math head-on instead of ignoring it, they won’t run when life gets tough. On the other hand, if that student resorts to taking short cuts in math or gives up after trying only once, they’re likely to throw their hands up in the air whenever they face adversity. Just like there are no short cuts to becoming a great Sea King or Panther athlete, there are no short cuts in academics, especially math.
So please, help your child develop good life habits by spending some extra time one or two nights a week helping them with their math. Make sure they show their work and don’t just guess the answer. Ask them questions to see how well they really grasp the material. Tell them, “Good job!” or “Nice work!” when they’re trying their best. Teach them the joy of hard work. As a math tutor, there are no secrets to help these students. I help them first understand the basics and then build on those basics. I teach them how to systematically analyze a problem and try various approaches instead of looking in the back of the book for the answer. I encourage them to ask questions when they don’t understand something. These are all good habits that people need to succeed in life, and mathematics is a great place for children to start developing them.
