Free E-Book Teaches Black Males How To Become Head Of House, Community, And Nation

--Free E-book is manual for boys raised in single mother households--

In honor of the 17^th Anniversary of the Million Man March, speaker and trainer, H.A. Jabar will be giving away his E-Book, A Well Made Man: Building The Temple Of Self, Volume 1, for free at his website hajabar.com. The book compares the process of building a building, to the process of building a man. It instructs males on how to draw a blueprint for their life, dig a financial foundation, and erect a mighty structure supported by seven characteristics and seven principles.

The former amateur wrestling standout and Arizona State University graduate, H.A. Jabar, has turned in his wrestling shoes and singlet for a pen, pad, and microphone. The wrestler turned speaker and trainer was inspired by a speech titled ‘A Well Made Man’ given by Thaddeus Muhammad. The speech detailed the story of a man that appeared to Mary, the mother of Jesus. H.A. Jabar expands on the subject matter by comparing the process of building a building, to the process of building a man. He details nine areas of focus that a man must become proficient in, to take his rightful place in society.

A Well Made Man: Building The Temple Of Self, Volume 1 is written as a manual and guide with a variety of references for readers to further their study. It is written to serves as a tool in a young man’s tool box, to assist him in increasing the speed of maturation. It is to help propel boys into manhood.

With the increasing rate of boys raised in single mother households without the presence of strong male role models, A Well Made Man: Building The Temple Of Self, Volume 1  teaches young men about specific areas of life that they must focus on to become well-made men. It is a guide that details what it takes for a man to except his duty and become the head of his household, community, and nation.

The free E-Book will be released on October 14^th, 2012- the 17^th Anniversary of the Million Man March, The Holy Day of Atonement. The theme of the book is in harmony with the spirit and purpose of the march; atonement, reconciliation, and responsibility.  The theme was for men to atone to God for their shortcomings as men, husbands, and fathers; to demonstrate their willingness to reconcile differences at home, school, church, in organizations, and in the society in general; and to demonstrate their willingness to accept responsibility to change their behavior and to strive to make their communities a more decent place to live.

A Well Made Man: Building The Temple Of Self, Volume 1 is a guide that will help men to learn the characteristics , principles, and areas  of focus necessary to become responsible citizens. It can be downloaded for free at hajabar.com.

Before a Test, a Poverty of Words

Before a Test, a Poverty of Words

Not too long ago, I witnessed a child, about two months shy of 3, welcome the return of some furniture to his family’s apartment with the enthusiastic declaration “Ottoman is back!”  The child understood that the stout cylindrical object from which he liked to jump had a name and that its absence had been caused by a visit to someone called “an upholsterer.” The upholsterer, he realized, was responsible for converting the ottoman from one color or texture to another. Here was a child whose mother had prepared him, at the very least, for a future of reading World of Interiors.

PREP Simone Brown helping a student at Intermediate School 292 in Brooklyn prepare for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, the subject of a recent lawsuit.

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Published: October 5, 2012

Though conceivably much more as well. Despite the Manhattan parody to which a scene like this so easily gives rise, it is difficult to overstate the advantages arrogated to a child whose parent proceeds in a near constant mode of annotation. Reflexively, the affluent, ambitious parent is always talking, pointing out, explaining: Mommy is looking for her laptop; let’s put on your rain boots; that’s a pigeon, a sand dune, skyscraper, a pomegranate. The child, in essence, exists in continuous receipt of dictation.

Things are very different elsewhere on the class spectrum. Earlier in the year when I met Steven F. Wilson, founder of a network of charter schools that serve poor and largely black communities in Brooklyn, I asked him what he considered the greatest challenge on the first day of kindergarten each year. He answered, without a second’s hesitation: “Word deficit.” As it happens, in the ’80s, the psychologists Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley spent years cataloging the number of words spoken to young children in dozens of families from different socioeconomic groups, and what they found was not only a disparity in the complexity of words used, but also astonishing differences in sheer number. Children of professionals were, on average, exposed to approximately 1,500 more words hourly than children growing up in poverty. This resulted in a gap of more than 32 million words by the time the children reached the age of 4.

This issue, though seemingly crucial, has been obscured in the recently intensified debate over the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, the multiple-choice exam used as the sole metric for entrance into some of New York City’s elite public high schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

Thousands of students in the city are in the throes of preparing for the test to be administered the last weekend of this month. Two weeks ago, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, along with other organizations, filed a federal civil rights complaint challenging the single-score admissions process as perilously narrow and arguing that it negatively affected black and Hispanic children, who are grossly underrepresented in these schools, so long considered forceful agents of mobility.

As the complaint makes note, of the 967 eighth-grade students offered admission to Stuyvesant for the current school year, only 19 were black and 32 Hispanic. During the previous school year, only 3.5 percent of students at Bronx Science were black and 7.2 percent Hispanic. At Staten Island Tech, the figures were even lower. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg quickly defended the process, contending that it was so free of subjectivity that it must, inherently be regarded as fair.

Others called the system Darwinian. The Education Department, required by state law to rely exclusively on the test, volunteered defensively that it offered free exam preparation to low-income students. The fact that so many children of means take costly tutorials to ready themselves for testing has always been a matter of concern to anyone hoping to see the racial imbalances redressed.

And yet, all of this focus on the test — which examines reading comprehension, math skills, the ability to reason logically — suggests a myopia of its own. Expanding the ranks of poor black and Hispanic children in the top high schools would seem to require infinitely more backtracking. Consider that Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Brooklyn, one of the major pipelines to top public high schools, last year had a student population that was 0.52 percent black.

As the education theorist E. D. Hirsch recently wrote in a review of Paul Tough’s new book, “How Children Succeed,” there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age 6 is the single highest correlate with later success. Schools have an enormously hard time pushing through the deficiencies with which many children arrive.

According to state education data, a far higher percentage of children in New York City charter and district schools in grades three through eight score at the highest level (a four) in math than they do in what is known as English Language Arts. In the 2011-12 school year, only 3.2 percent of children in district schools scored at the four level on the end-of-year statewide English exam. (For charter schools, the figure was 1.9 percent.)

All of this would seem to argue for a system in which we spent ever more of our energies and money on early, preschool education rather than less. The city has taken the right direction with the announcement of a new preschool in Brownsville, Brooklyn, scheduled to open next year, that will start with children as young as 6 weeks old. But that’s one program in a city where 7,500 children reached kindergarten this year without preschool preparation. Obviously we want equal opportunity; we also want children to know what words like “equal” and “opportunity” mean.

E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com

African American youth invents surgical technique at age 14

By Taki S. Raton


“Tony Hansberry II isn’t waiting to finish medical school to contribute to improved medical care. He has already developed a stitching technique that can be used to reduce surgical complications, as well as the chance of error among less experienced surgeons,” writes Jackie Jones in BlackAmericaWeb.com on June 16, 2009.
 “The project I did was basically the comparison of novel laparoscopic instruments in doing a hysterectomy repair,” reveals Hansberry.
At the time, Hansberry was a high school freshman at the Darnell-Cookman Middle/High School of the Medical Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, a special medical magnet school that allows its students to take advanced classes in medicine. Informational documents cite that students at the school are able to master suturing in eighth grade. Suturing is the surgical stitching of a wound.
The son of a registered nurse and an African Methodist Episcopal church pastor, the Darnell-Cookman student said that “I just want to help people and be respected, knowing that I can save lives.” His goal is to become a neurosurgeon.
Jones reports that the idea for his unique procedure was conceived during the summer of 2008 while enrolled as an intern at the University of Florida ’s Center for Simulation Education and Safety Research at Shands Hospital in Jacksonville.
It was noted that Hansberry responded to a challenge to improve a procedure called the “endo stitch” used in hysterectomies that could not be clamped down properly to close the tube where the patient’s uterus had been. Using a medical dummy, the 14-year-old devised a vertical way to apply the endo stitch, completing the stitching in a third of the time of traditional surgery.
“It took me a day or two to come up with the concept,” Hansberry said in the Jones interview.
He was supervised by urogynecologist Dr. Brent Siebel and Bruce Nappi, administrative director of the Center for Simulation Education and Safety Research. Hansberry’s accomplishment, it is reported, won second place in the medical category regional science fair in February 2009.
“Education experts say that youngsters as young as 10 can experience great achievement at an early age if their thirst for knowledge is encouraged and they are given opportunities to shadow professionals and get internships,” as quoted by Jones.
In April of 2009, Hansberry presented his findings at a medical conference at the University of Florida before an audience of doctors and board-certified surgeons. Medical lead teacher Angela Tenbroeck is quoted noting that in many ways, Hansberry is a typical student, but that he is way ahead of his classmates when it comes to surgical skills.
“I would put him up against a first-year med student. He’s an outstanding young man and I am proud to have him representing us,” she says. As an 11th- grader at the age of 16, the January 25, 2011 Jacksonville.com blog reports that Hansberry was one of nine youth who were selected to travel to Washington that February to present the Boy Scouts of America Report to the Nation to President Barack Obama.
District director for the Boy Scouts of America Lawrence Norman in the Jacksonville report said that when district leaders were asked to recommend an exemplary Scout, “Tony’s name kept coming up.”
Hansberry was also introduced at the annual meeting of the North Florida Council of The Boy Scouts at the University of North Florida on January 25, 2011.
According to Jacksonville writer Justin Sacharoff, the Boy Scouts of America Report to the Nation features the year’s achievements including national service, conservation, healthy living and community involvement.
The Darnell-Cookman Middle/ High School of the Medical Arts is a school within the Duval County Public Schools system in Jacksonville. It is a National Blue Ribbon School and also an “A” school in the State of Florida school grading system.
The school had its beginnings nearly 200 years ago when Methodist minister Reverend S.B. Darnell moved to Jacksonville to serve as pastor of Ebenezer Methodist- Episcopal Church. In the late 1800s, he founded the Cookman Institute. It was the first school of higher education for African Americans in the state of Florida specializing in the religious and academic preparation of teachers.
Under the leadership of Darnell, the school served thousands of young Black men and women until it was destroyed in the Great Jacksonville Fire of 1901. The Reverend Alfred Cookman, a close friend of Reverend Darnell, helped raise the money to rebuild the school. Today, Darnell-Cookman School of the Medical Arts has an enrollment upwards of 1,100 students in grades 6-12. The first graduating class will receive their diplomas in the spring of 2012.
This “Young, Gifted and Black” series is proud to present its first writing during this 2012 February Black History Month by sharing the exemplary modeled accomplishment of Tony Hansberry II. But in reality, Hansberry’s achievement historically in our communities is really not unusual or extraordinary for our African American students when they are taught, groomed and culturally inspired in an academically supportive instructional environment unique to how we learn, grow, and develop mentally, socially, emotionally, and even psychologically as Black youth in today’s challenging diverse society.
And added to this point in his words, our young neurosurgeon to be says that, “It’s not really hard if you have a passion for it.”

Tenured Professor Departs Stanford University for an Online Start-Up

Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

January 23, 2012, 4:53 pm

By Nick DeSantis

The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his tenured position to aim for an even bigger audience.
Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital – Life – Design conference in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.
During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.
Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move was motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digitial media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.
He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said.
One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” It will be taught by David Evans, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a Udacity partner. Mr. Thrun said it is designed to teach students with no prior programming experience how to build a search engine like Google. He hopes 500,000 students will enroll.
Teaching the course at Stanford, Mr. Thrun said, showed him the potential of digital education, which turned out to be a drug that he could not ignore.
“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

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Three Black Males Defy Odds and Become Chess Masters at 12 and 13

Masters of the Game and Leaders by Example

Richard Perry/The New York Times

From left, James Black Jr., Justus Williams and Joshua Colas competing in Manhattan last month. Their success is a “phenomenon,” one veteran player said.

By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN

Published: November 12, 2011

Fewer than 2 percent of the 77,000 members of the United States Chess Federation are masters — and just 13 of them are under the age of 14.

Among that select group of prodigies are three black players from the New York City area — Justus Williams, Joshua Colas and James Black Jr. — who each became masters before their 13th birthdays.

“Masters don’t happen every day, and African-American masters who are 12 never happen,” said Maurice Ashley, 45, the only African-American to earn the top title of grandmaster. “To have three young players do what they have done is something of an amazing curiosity. You normally wouldn’t get something like that in any city of any race.”
The chess federation, the game’s governing body, does not keep records on the ethnicity of its members. But a Web site called the Chess Drum — which chronicles the achievements of black chess players and is run by Daaim Shabazz, an associate professor of business at Florida A&M University — lists 85 African-American masters. Shabazz said many of them no longer compete regularly.
Ashley, who became a master at age 20 and a grandmaster 14 years later, said the rarity was not surprising. “Chess just isn’t that big in the African-American community,” he said.
The chess federation uses a rating system to measure ability based on the results of matches in officially sanctioned events; a player must reach a rating of 2,200 to qualify for master.
In September last year, Justus, who is now 13 and lives in the Bronx, was the first of the three boys to get to 2,200, becoming the youngest black player to obtain the master rank. Joshua, 13, of White Plains, was a few months younger than Justus when he became a master last December. James, 12, of Brooklyn, became a master in July.
(Samuel Sevian of Santa Clara, Calif., is the youngest master in United States history, earning the title last December, 20 days before his 10th birthday.)
The three New Yorkers met several years ago during competitions. Justus has an edge over James, mostly because he won many of their early games, before James caught up. Head to head, James and Joshua each have several wins against the other. Justus and Joshua have rarely competed against each other.
Although they are rivals, the boys are also friends and share a sense that they are role models.
“I think of Justus, me and Josh as pioneers for African-American kids who want to take up chess,” James said.
James’s father, James Black, said he and Justus’s and Joshua’s parents were aware of what their sons represent and “talk about it a great deal,” but tried not to pressure them too much.
Black said his son “knows that the pressure comes along with the territory. What is going to happen is going to happen. As long he plays, we’re sure that things will work out for the best.”
The three boys approach the game differently. Justus and Joshua say that James studies the most, and Joshua admits he would rather play than practice. “I like the competition,” he said. “And I like that chess is an art.”
Justus said he is the most aggressive of the three, and he and James agree that Joshua is the most unpredictable. “Joshua likes to change up his openings during tournaments,” Justus said.
Supporting the boys’ interest is not easy financially. Though there are many tournaments in the New York City area, the boys must travel to play in more prestigious competitions, sometimes overseas. This week, they are set to play in the World Youth Chess Championship in Brazil.
They study the game with professional coaches who are grandmasters. The lessons are expensive — $100 an hour is not unusual — and the boys’ families have either found sponsors or have paid for the instruction themselves.
The boys aspire to be a grandmaster by the time they graduate from high school, something that only a few dozen players in the world have done. Ashley, who has met the boys but does not know any of them well, says the obstacles are substantial.
He said several children that he had coached to the junior high school national championships in the early 1990s went on to enroll at elite colleges and then to have successful careers. Along the way, he said, playing chess became less of a priority for them. It is difficult to make a living as a player, he said, adding, “I’ve seen many talented kids go by the wayside.”
Ashley said he could not predict whether the success of Justus, Joshua and James would encourage other young African-Americans to play. Another black teenager, Jehron Bryant, 15, of Valley Stream, N.Y., became a master in September.
“Masters will never be epidemics,” Ashley said. He said the rise of the young masters was a “phenomenon” that was “ worth noting.”
“It is special,” he said, “and that we know for a fact.”
Justus, Joshua and James all played in the Marshall Chess Club Championship in Manhattan last month. Justus and Joshua finished with disappointing results — a common problem for young players, who often lack consistency. But James tied for fifth. In the last round, he beat Yefim Treger, a strong veteran master who is in his 50s.
Treger is a tough opponent because he uses unorthodox openings. James kept his head, however, patiently seizing space and building up his attack until he was able to force through a passed pawn. He wrapped up the game by cornering and checkmating Treger’s king.