"To go and deal specifically with students, to give private lessons, that is what makes our program unique," Robertson says. "And the second aspect of it now is the preparation of these beautiful kids for college by coaching them [academically] and getting them ready for their SATs. With [Proposition] 209 passed, we’re dealing with the problem in a preventive way. Let’s prepare ’em so they can nail the exam, then it’s not an issue. They can go wherever they wish to go."
"I love it when they come here," says Tatum Little, a Washington Prep flute player, of her UCLA teachers. "Not only can I get information about my playing, but I can find out what [the UCLA] curriculum is."
Perhaps not surprisingly, the UCLA teachers are just as enthusiastic as their students are about the program. They get as much as they give.
"There’s nothing like seeing a student master something that they couldn’t have done before you started working with them," says Jonathan Phillips, trumpet player and now the Department of Music’s outreach coordinator. As a UCLA student, he was one of the program’s first teachers at Washington Prep. "It was a really powerful experience to go to Washington and to be able to share — to recognize that we have a gift in being at UCLA, in having the musical abilities that we do, and then be able to go and share that with
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who weren’t born into [privileged lifestyles] like some UCLA
students were. There’s that feeling of not only being able to
share something, but also learning about a part of the Los Angeles
community that most of us had never been exposed to. I think it’s
important that our students are given the opportunity to go into the
inner city, to see what it’s really about."
"The guys from UCLA are willing to come up a lot when they’re not on the clock," says Fernando Pullum, director of Washington Prep’s band, a one-man band himself and the school’s only music teacher. "Jonathan was supposed to take four or five students; he ended up with nine trumpet students because he couldn’t say ‘no.’ " "I love playing, but almost equally I love teaching," says Nathan Endsley, a saxophone player in his last year at UCLA who teaches at Washington |
Prep. "I like that ‘click’ that goes on when somebody
in there goes ‘oh man.’ When somebody really loves jazz,
it doesn’t matter even if they’re just getting into it.
What’s cool is being able to say, ‘You love that? Do you
know what’s so cool about that?’ And then putting in that
knowledge that I’ve learned in college. And then they see it
in a totally different way."
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