Episode: 171
Title: HPR0171: AVID 101
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0171/hpr0171.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:52:08

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That's helpful.
Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is the Yelp Command that's coming to you live ish from North Carolina.
For those of you who might know me or have known me in the IRC, you know that this is
a change.
It used to be from Western Pennsylvania, now from Eastern Carolina and this is important
for two reasons.
One, you Americans might actually notice that there's a little bit of accent change
from the last Hacker Public Radio by Yelp Emanus and two, this is not a home brew episode
and that's because of the move I have not had the time to do the amount of research that
I have wanted to do for the home brew episode and don't fear, it's coming.
Don't be hearing about various types of beer and how they're made and what characteristics
they should have when they come out of the bottle when you're done making them.
So that ought to be good but like I said, I want to put a lot more effort into it than
I've been able to put in so far.
Now onto the subject of this episode.
The subject of this episode is a program called Avid and what Avid stands for, it will
be learning a little bit on, a little bit later on in the episode, but right now we're
going to be talking about the history of Avid.
Avid was a program which like all great programs was born out of necessity and by program
I don't mean computer program, I mean kind of academic program and it was born in 1980s
when affirmative action took place and the lower performing schools were first intermingled
with the higher performing schools.
Now this usually meant that urban schools were mingling with suburban schools and urban
schools at this time and big cities in California were mostly minority groups and suburban schools
at this time were mostly majority groups.
So what happened was these minority students were bust out to the suburban schools and teachers,
some teachers had the opportunity to decide whether or not they wanted to stay at the suburban
schools which were going to have their scores decrease or go to the urban schools and have
their schools, schools scores increase.
Now one such teacher was lady by the name of Mary Catherine and she was pretty much given
blanket leave to go to an urban school and pretty much rewrite the whole program from
the ground up which is a pretty tempting thing if you're a teacher to be able to have
complete creative license.
But what she opted for instead was to take some of these high school students who were
coming in from the urban school and find out which ones were interested in working hard
and succeeding and take those students and give them the tools to succeed.
Now I think it brings us to what is avid stance for advancement via individual determination.
Advancement, a lot of these minority groups, their families were uneducated, you know,
some of them were in from Mexico, some of them were from rice paddies or goodness only
knows what in Asia.
So not the strongest education, if they did have a strong education, it was not in the
American system so they weren't familiar with how the American system worked and so on
and so forth.
So advancement stands for academic advancement.
Via is just a big little word through or through individual and in the avid program a
lot of emphasis is placed on what you are determined to do, what you want to do and then
determination is the idea that if you really want it you will be given the tools to do
it and you'll be able to do it.
Now the students are obviously selected for being able to accomplish things or having
at least the ability to accomplish things but they're not the top students, they're almost
exclusively sea average, average students who their parents may or may not have had any
kind of education.
So what does this look like in practice?
You have what are called the wicker principles and this will be part of the presentation
that I'm going to put up online that you can look at.
It is designed to help students, even the students at my particular school to prepare
for college level courses.
As of next semester my high school freshman will be taking college courses that you did
hear that correctly.
My ninth graders will be taking some college courses, they're not going to have a full
college course load but they're obviously going to be taking college courses.
So students are taught at my class, they're taught organizational skills, how to work
smarter instead of harder and one of the big ways to do it.
