Rather, the 16-year-old junior at Montgomery Blair High School sees it as a way to better his chances of doing well on the SAT and to bypass the need for those pesky remedial college courses in math, which he admits is not his strong suit.
“It’s really just like training,” Charles said in an interview with Diverse after attending an SAT prep course led by a math instructor, who taught the students one of the “tricky” concepts about the number zero as an absolute value—something that could come up on the SAT.
“When you’re practicing for a sport, you’re going to have to put in a certain amount of time,” Charles said. “You just have to be able to do it.”
Charles is by no means alone.
Upward of 3,000 students—or roughly 2 percent of the nearly 154,000 students in the increasingly diverse Montgomery County Public Schools system—attend the Saturday School that is run by the nonprofit George B. Thomas, Sr., Learning Academy.
Program supporters say the Saturday School, which relies on paid teachers and college students as volunteer tutors, could benefit the world of higher education in numerous ways if it were to be replicated—something that is beginning to happen.
