NewsUpper SchoolStudent LifeFaculty/StaffServiceAcademics
Cox gets involved with Project Success
Feb 17, 2005 8:00 AM
By Janice (Scoggins) Cox - FF/S
In June of 2004, a high school student from inner-city Atlanta entered Berry College’s Gate of Opportunity and witnessed something he had never before seen – deer and cows grazing the fields. The only real animals Delmonte Dennis had ever seen were rats and cockroaches.
From June to July, Berry hosted 30 students from inner-city Atlanta for four weeks of study and personal development in the Project Success College Immersion Program, sponsored by the 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Inc. Darlington faculty member John Cox, who had previously taught writing courses at Berry College, got involved.
“When they were looking for a writing instructor, my name came up. I had never worked with this group before,” Cox said.
According to Dr. Clarice Ford, director of multicultural student affairs at Berry, Project Success works with minority students beginning in the middle grades and helps them develop academic, leadership and general-life skills. While on campus, participants attended classes in math, science, writing and vocabulary building.
Cox said working with the program was a memorable experience. “I enjoyed talking to [the students] about what their lives are like, reading about their experiences and just getting an opportunity to work with kids that too often don’t get a real chance at success,” said Cox. “I would love to work with them in the future.”
Cox taught Rhetoric and Writing, a course in which students Santana Tate and Jason Thomas said there was nothing that they did not like.
“I tried to not only teach them the academic material, but to also show them what upper-level high school and college classrooms are like,” said Cox. “The atmosphere is quite different from what they are used to. Most of these students come from large, inner0city Atlanta schools where the class sizes can easily exceed 40 or 50 students. This exposure to more individualized instruction can open their eyes and give them a leg up when they attend college.”
The class involved teaching composition techniques and critical thinking, and some of the activities included making a paper airplane and then writing instructions for it, describing a quarter (25 cents) in extreme detail and having the students narrate real-life experiences.
“I have learned more in a month in this class than what I have learned in all my years of high school. [Mr. Cox] broke writing down to the core,” Thomas said.
Classmate Joseph Tenner recalled writing more essays in Cox’s course than he had written in almost 13 years of school. “During the course of this summer class, I feel that my writing skills developed, and they bloomed into a thing that I learned to like,” he said.
To Delmonte Dennis, what stuck out the most was Cox’s phrase “You say what you’re going to say, you say what you say and then you say what you’ve said” when describing the redundancy of five-paragraph essay format.
“I like this slogan, and I think [Mr. Cox] should keep it,” Dennis said. “At my local high school, we write the basic five-paragraph essay, and I always had a redundancy problem in my papers. Now all I have to do is think of the slogan.”
Other Project Success courses focused on self-confidence, etiquette and recreation. Special outings included trips to NASA in Huntsville, Ala., and to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn. The 100 Black Men of Rome also organized a picnic for the participants.
From June to July, Berry hosted 30 students from inner-city Atlanta for four weeks of study and personal development in the Project Success College Immersion Program, sponsored by the 100 Black Men of Atlanta, Inc. Darlington faculty member John Cox, who had previously taught writing courses at Berry College, got involved.
“When they were looking for a writing instructor, my name came up. I had never worked with this group before,” Cox said.
According to Dr. Clarice Ford, director of multicultural student affairs at Berry, Project Success works with minority students beginning in the middle grades and helps them develop academic, leadership and general-life skills. While on campus, participants attended classes in math, science, writing and vocabulary building.
Cox said working with the program was a memorable experience. “I enjoyed talking to [the students] about what their lives are like, reading about their experiences and just getting an opportunity to work with kids that too often don’t get a real chance at success,” said Cox. “I would love to work with them in the future.”
Cox taught Rhetoric and Writing, a course in which students Santana Tate and Jason Thomas said there was nothing that they did not like.
“I tried to not only teach them the academic material, but to also show them what upper-level high school and college classrooms are like,” said Cox. “The atmosphere is quite different from what they are used to. Most of these students come from large, inner0city Atlanta schools where the class sizes can easily exceed 40 or 50 students. This exposure to more individualized instruction can open their eyes and give them a leg up when they attend college.”
The class involved teaching composition techniques and critical thinking, and some of the activities included making a paper airplane and then writing instructions for it, describing a quarter (25 cents) in extreme detail and having the students narrate real-life experiences.
“I have learned more in a month in this class than what I have learned in all my years of high school. [Mr. Cox] broke writing down to the core,” Thomas said.
Classmate Joseph Tenner recalled writing more essays in Cox’s course than he had written in almost 13 years of school. “During the course of this summer class, I feel that my writing skills developed, and they bloomed into a thing that I learned to like,” he said.
To Delmonte Dennis, what stuck out the most was Cox’s phrase “You say what you’re going to say, you say what you say and then you say what you’ve said” when describing the redundancy of five-paragraph essay format.
“I like this slogan, and I think [Mr. Cox] should keep it,” Dennis said. “At my local high school, we write the basic five-paragraph essay, and I always had a redundancy problem in my papers. Now all I have to do is think of the slogan.”
Other Project Success courses focused on self-confidence, etiquette and recreation. Special outings included trips to NASA in Huntsville, Ala., and to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn. The 100 Black Men of Rome also organized a picnic for the participants.
