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GBN Quote Of The Day

“Excellence is not an act, but a habit. The things you do the most are the things you do the best.”
–Marva Collins, educator and author

Harvard Sophomore Temi Fagbenle Named to Great Britain's 2012 Olympic Team

Fagbenle becomes the fifth Olympian in Ivy League Basketball history(Ahmed Photography).
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Rising sophomore Temi Fagbenle has been named to Great Britain’s 12-woman roster for the 2012 London Olympic Games, becoming just the second Olympian in Ivy League women’s basketball history.
Fagbenle has helped Great Britain to a 6-6 record through 12 test matches during its Olympic tune up, averaging 10.5 points and 4.4 rebounds. GB most recently defeated the world’s fourth-ranked team, Czech Republic, on June 20 with Fagbenle netting 12 points and grabbing seven rebounds in a starting role. GB has also beaten ninth-ranked Korea, 11th-ranked Canada and 12th-ranked Argentina.  Great Britain began its training camp on May 5 with 20 women invited to compete for a roster spot. The team went through two rounds of cuts before the final 12-woman squad was announced. GB is scheduled to play seven more test matches before the Games begin.
Great Britain, as host, received an automatic qualification to this year’s Olympic women’s basketball competition.  The tournament is set to begin on Saturday, July 28 and will run through Sunday, Aug. 12. All games will be played at the newly built Basketball Arena and the North Greenwich Arena.  Fagbenle is only the second Olympian in Ivy League women’s basketball history and just the fifth basketball Olympian in the Ancient Eight’s storied history. She joins Brown’s Martina Jerant (Canda, 1996), Princeton’s Bill Bradley (United States, 1964) and Konrad Wysocki (Germany, 2008), and Dartmouth’s Crawford Palmer (France, 2000).
Fagbenle matriculated to Camrbridge this past fall as the program’s first-ever McDonald’s All-American after concluding an incredibly successful high school career. She was ranked 13th overall in the Class of 2011 by ESPN HoopGurlz, and was the fifth ranked forward on the list. She led Great Britain’s U18 National Team to the 2010 Women’s European Championship, and was named Great Britain’s U18 Player of the Year as a result. As a senior at Blair Academy, she was named the New Jersey Gatorade Player of the Year after guiding her team to the state and MAPL championships .  After sitting a year in residency, Fagbenle will enter the 2012-13 season as a sophomore at Harvard.
article via gocrimson.com

Harvard Sophomore Temi Fagbenle Named to Great Britain’s 2012 Olympic Team

Fagbenle becomes the fifth Olympian in Ivy League Basketball history(Ahmed Photography).

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Rising sophomore Temi Fagbenle has been named to Great Britain’s 12-woman roster for the 2012 London Olympic Games, becoming just the second Olympian in Ivy League women’s basketball history.

Fagbenle has helped Great Britain to a 6-6 record through 12 test matches during its Olympic tune up, averaging 10.5 points and 4.4 rebounds. GB most recently defeated the world’s fourth-ranked team, Czech Republic, on June 20 with Fagbenle netting 12 points and grabbing seven rebounds in a starting role. GB has also beaten ninth-ranked Korea, 11th-ranked Canada and 12th-ranked Argentina.  Great Britain began its training camp on May 5 with 20 women invited to compete for a roster spot. The team went through two rounds of cuts before the final 12-woman squad was announced. GB is scheduled to play seven more test matches before the Games begin.

Great Britain, as host, received an automatic qualification to this year’s Olympic women’s basketball competition.  The tournament is set to begin on Saturday, July 28 and will run through Sunday, Aug. 12. All games will be played at the newly built Basketball Arena and the North Greenwich Arena.  Fagbenle is only the second Olympian in Ivy League women’s basketball history and just the fifth basketball Olympian in the Ancient Eight’s storied history. She joins Brown’s Martina Jerant (Canda, 1996), Princeton’s Bill Bradley (United States, 1964) and Konrad Wysocki (Germany, 2008), and Dartmouth’s Crawford Palmer (France, 2000).

Fagbenle matriculated to Camrbridge this past fall as the program’s first-ever McDonald’s All-American after concluding an incredibly successful high school career. She was ranked 13th overall in the Class of 2011 by ESPN HoopGurlz, and was the fifth ranked forward on the list. She led Great Britain’s U18 National Team to the 2010 Women’s European Championship, and was named Great Britain’s U18 Player of the Year as a result. As a senior at Blair Academy, she was named the New Jersey Gatorade Player of the Year after guiding her team to the state and MAPL championships .  After sitting a year in residency, Fagbenle will enter the 2012-13 season as a sophomore at Harvard.

article via gocrimson.com

GBN Quote Of The Day

 “Humanism starts not with identity but with the ability to identify with others. It asks what we have in common with others while acknowledging the internal diversity among ourselves. It is about the priority of shared humanity.”

— Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University professor and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research.

Earl Lewis to Lead the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Earl Lewis, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University, has been selected as the next president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The foundation, headquartered in New York City, has over $5 billion in assets and in 2011 issued $230 million in grants. Dr. Lewis will take on his new role in March 2013.

via Earl Lewis to Lead the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

Jackson State Freshmen to Receive Free iPads!

Under the scholarship program of the nonprofit Mississippi e-Center @JSU, Jackson State University will provide new iPads to all full-time members of the fall 2012 entering class who are entering the university for the first time. About 800 to 900 students are expected to receive the iPads.

The Apple devices will be integrated into the first-year curriculum and will save students money by allowing them to purchase electronic textbooks instead of traditional books. Students will receive training on the devices. Faculty will be instructed on how to use the iPads to enhance the teaching and learning experience.

Students who leave the university will be asked to return the iPad or pay for the device. Once they complete five semesters the iPad will be there’s to keep.

Mark G. Hardy, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Jackson State University, explained, “We will be placing technology directly in the hands of students and giving them a mobile platform so that learning happens when they are inside or outside of the classroom.”

Cleveland Student David Boone Worked Hard To Go From Homeless To Harvard

 david.jpgDavid Boone used to sleep on this bench in Artha Woods Park when he had nowhere else to go. Next fall, the senior at Cleveland’s MC2STEM High School is headed to Harvard.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — David Boone had a system.  There wasn’t much the then-15-year-old could do about the hookers or drug deals around him when he slept in Artha Woods Park. And the spectator’s bench at the park’s baseball diamond wasn’t much of a bed.
But the aspiring engineer, now 18 and headed to Harvard University in the fall, had no regular home. Though friends, relatives and school employees often put him up, there were nights when David had no place to go, other than the park off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
So he says he made the best of those nights on the wooden bench.
His book bag became his pillow, stuffed with textbooks first — for height, he says — and papers on top for padding.
In the morning, David would duck into his friend Eric’s house after Eric’s parents left early for work so he could shower and dress before heading to class at Cleveland’s specialized MC2STEM High School. David expects to graduate from there next month as salutatorian of the new school’s first graduating class.
“I’d do my homework in a rapid station, usually Tower City since they have heat, and I’d stay wherever I could find,” he said.
If you meet David Boone today, his gentle, confident demeanor and easygoing laugh betray no cockiness over racking up a college acceptance record that others brag about for him. He was accepted at 22 of the 23 schools he applied to — including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown and Penn.
He also gives no hint of the often harsh and nomadic life he has led. The medical problems he faced as a boy, a splintered family, being homeless — it all could have left him bitter and angry.
But David says that giving up would have left him stuck in a dead-end life, so it was never an option.
“I didn’t know what the results of not giving up were going to be, but it was better than nothing and having no advantages,” he said. “I wanted to be in a position to have options to do what I want to do.”
David was born to a young mother, who divorced his father when David was a little boy.

Urban Prep Academy Graduates All College-Bound For Third Consecutive Year

Urbanprepgraduates

Urban Prep students at graduation.

For the third year running, an all-male charter school with students from Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods is sending its entire senior class to college.  Urban Prep Academy reports that all 85 seniors graduating from the all-male preparatory school have been accepted to four-year colleges or universities, the third consecutive year an entire senior class has gotten acceptance letters along with their diplomas.
This year’s class also has some standout stars, like Vernon Cheeks, 17, who was accepted to 14 schools, according to CBS Chicago.  “It taught me how to be resilient. It also taught me how to be accountable for my own actions,” he told the station of his experience in the standout high school program.
Urban Prep’s success is unusual in its West Side neighborhood, which sees disproportionately high rates of violent crime so severe that parents requested heightened protection for academy students earlier this year, amid concerns that gang territories were advancing on the school.
“[In] this volatile, violent area, these are like lambs surrounded by wolves, and that shouldn’t be,” the grandmother of a student told ABC Chicago.
The school’s success has grown exponentially since its founding in 2006, when onlyfour percent of the school’s first freshman class was reading at grade level when they entered.
In 2010, the school sent all 107 graduating seniors directly into college or university programs for the first time.
“No other public [school] in the country has done this,” Urban Prep Academy Founder Tim King said at the time. Continuing that success in 2011 and 2012 makes the school’s performance even more remarkable.
The school also boasts an impressive “persistence” record this year–83 percent of 2010 Urban Prep graduates who went on to college have stayed there, compared to a national average of 35 percent among African-American males, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Dora Anne Council, 76, Graduates From Gateway Community College

After starting school 42 years ago, 76 -year-old Dora Anne Council finally walked across the stage to graduate from college.

 
Thursday was the graduation day a Hamden grandmother has been looking forward to for 42 years.  Dora Anne Council, 76, was among the 870 graduates to receive their diplomas at Gateway Community College Thursday night.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Annette Gordon-Reed Earns 2010 MacArthur “Genius” Grant!

Macarthur4-popup

Harvard Professor and author Annette Gordon-Reed, 51, whose book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (W. W. Norton) won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction, is among the 23 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  Ms. Gordon-Reed investigated the story of the slave family that included Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Jefferson who scholars widely believe bore his children. A New Yorker, Ms. Gordon-Reed teaches law and history at Harvard. Some of her grant will go toward travel expenses as she researches another book on the Hemings, she said.

Twelve men and 11 women, ranging in age from 30 to 72, were named MacArthur fellows this year. All will receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached.  Since the inception of the program in 1981 and including this year’s fellows, 828 people, ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selection, have been named.

article information via nytimes.com