Your Black World: Interview With Youth Speaker Caitlin Powell

Interview with Youth Motivational Speaker, Caitlin Powell, by Tolu Olorunda.

Caitlin Powell is a role-model, motivational speaker, writer, telecaster and singer – all packed into one. The catch: She’s a mere 10 years of age! Though a fifth grader, Caitlin’s exceptional intellect is inspiring kids and parents across the country. Caitlin, who loves reading and studying math, is also the host of her very own webcast titled, “Caitlin’s Corner TV.” As one who takes advanced courses in her school, Caitlin knows, first hand, how challenging school can be. In her nationally-syndicated webcast, Caitlin offers tips and advices to her peers, on how to lead a fruitful life and embrace the challenges that come. Caitlin Powell is also a role model to her two younger siblings, who look up to her, being the oldest, for leadership. YourBlackWorld.com recently had the opportunity to speak with Caitlin on her interests, the joy of reading, motivational speaking and much, much more:

Thanks for joining us, Caitlin. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Well, I’m involved in my courses at my school; I love to sing; I’m on the telecast – it’s a lot of fun. I do the announcer #1, announcer # 2, camera-director and sound. My favorite is actually announcer #1, because you get to share a lot of information about what’s going on in the school.

How did you begin telecasting?

In Kindergarten, when I began schooling, I saw that people were doing it, and I really wanted to do it. Once I got to the fifth grade, I applied for it, and actually got in, because they said I’m a good speaker, and I do well in front of a crowd. So, it’s just a lot of fun, and I have a good time doing it.

What do you talk about in the telecasts?

I talk about the after-school activities, and clubs.

In your latest webcast, you mentioned math as your favorite subject. Why is that?

Well, it gets my brain working; it’s really hard and challenging – and I love a good challenge. So, I stay really smart, and I hope I have a good future.

A lot of your peers dislike math for this reason. Why? And how can you help them come to love it, just as much as you do?

Well, people say that they don’t like math because it’s too hard, and too challenging, but I tell them that if you keep on practicing, you’ll get better and even come to like it; and It’ll build your self esteem. If you try something hard, you’ll bring yourself up, and will have a good future.

You also enjoy reading. Why?

Reading helps you be creative, and understand how you’re supposed to write and make sense; and if you do research, it would build up what you know about it.

How has reading helped you in the classroom?

Reading has helped me, because they give me definitions, and when my teacher asks me about certain words, I already know them from what I’ve read.

Why do you think most 10-year-olds are not too fond of reading, and how can you help them gain interest in it?

I think that they don’t like it because they like to play more video games and things like that. So, they should just stop doing that and read more to build up their knowledge. Reading could be fun, because most authors try to make it fun for kids, at their age. It also makes you use your brain, such as in mystery, where they give readers clues to figure it out. But video games don’t teach you anything. You just sit down, wasting time, and getting addicted to it. So I think people should read more, because it’ll build your knowledge, vocabulary, and how you speak.

Besides reading and telecasting, though, what other interests do you have?

Well, I like to write short stories and plays. I like to speak a lot and sing. I do anything I can with my voice and hand. In 6^th grade, next year, I would love to play the violin, because it just sounds really pretty, and I would love to play instruments.

What are your plans for High School and College?

I plan to focus on math, reading and writing, so when I grow up I can be a mathematician, a singer, and/or a writer.

What does it take to be a role model – especially at such a young age?

Well, you have to make the right decision, and learn from your mistakes. You have to learn what to do and what not to do. You have to do the appropriate things. You also have to choose your friends wisely. Don’t hang out in gangs, or at bars that sell alcohol. Don’t do any kinds of drugs or anything like that. So, you have to think wisely and be smart about your decisions.

As a role model and motivational speaker, what is missing in the younger generation that you plan on impacting upon them?

You have to set goals for yourself, and follow them to achieve them; and I think a lot of people either don’t make goals, or don’t follow them. For instance, I just did a webcast on my New Year’s resolution, and I was talking about what things to do at a certain age, and all kinds of things.

So, young people should become more interested in their future?

Yes, because they would have a more successful future if they do those kinds of things. You have to know where you are going, so you can make the right steps and be the right person.

Thank you very much for the opportunity, Caitlin. Pls. visit her blog, and subscribe to her webcasts.

Watch Caitlin in Action:

This interview was conducted by Tolu Olorunda, Staff Writer for YourBlackWorld.com.

Dr. Boyce Appears on The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch

A Note to my Friends – Why I am Boycotting the NCAA

By Dr. Boyce Watkins
http://www.boycewatkins.com/

Last year, I engaged in a short campaign on CNN, CBS Sports, ESPN and the LA Times to highlight major problems with “big time” college athletics. It is not my goal to anger anyone, but rather, to share what I have seen in my 15 years teaching at universities with major athletics programs. As a finance professor, I find the financial problems of the NCAA to be borderline criminal. As an educator, I find the educational mission of the NCAA to be fraudulent. As a black man who has seen what the NCAA does to the black community, I find myself simply offended.

The NCAA is in possession of an 11-year, $6 Billion Dollar contract for the rights to air March Madness. This does not include hundreds of millions of dollars earned each year from bowl games, regular season games, merchandizing agreements and concessions. Coaches earn as much as $4 Million dollars per year, while the players and their families, many of whom come from poverty, earn almost nothing. Coaches are allowed to jump from job to job, going to the highest bidder, while players who transfer lose a year of eligibility. Coaches and administrators earn millions from excessive commercialization of player images, while a player is not allowed to earn a penny from his/her own image. This does not include the fact that many institutions will praise and promote a winning coach with low graduation rates and quickly fire coaches with low winning percentages and high graduation rates.

I have witnessed students being taken out of class for an entire week to play in a nationally-televised football or basketball game, with academics (and the fact that the student’s grade has been jeopardized) becoming an afterthought. Players are treated like professional athletes, not students, and a weak performance on the field will cause them to lose their scholarship. Any institution operating as a government-sanctioned cartel, riddled with hypocrisy, disproportionate and exploitative compensation schemes, and glaring disregard for educational values should be scrutinized more carefully. Earning money is a wonderful thing, but I am not sure why coaches and administrators are allowed to earn billions each year from the labor of players with mothers who can’t pay the rent. I know how much tuition costs, and it is miniscule compared to the amount of money players generate for their coaches and universities. I say pay the players a fair salary, let them negotiate their own contracts and shoe deals, and then allow them to pay their own tuition.

If you believe in fairness for these young men and women, I hope you will consider joining our coalition to boycott the NCAA and March Madness.

I am not trying to "shake the ground" with these statements. I am simply asking for fairness. One star player (whose coach received millions in bonuses) saw his brother shot and killed in a housing project because his mother was too poor to move to a better neighborhood. Another player took money from a booster to help his family pay the rent, and then saw his scholarship taken away. I saw a player’s mother forced to beg her church to help her get to the Final Four to see her son play, while the coach’s family received first class accommodations. Another player was paralyzed from the neck down in a college football game and subsequently denied health and life insurance benefits from the NCAA. I feel this is wrong.

If you don’t agree with me, I understand. But as a professor, financial expert and a human being, I cannot remain silent on such an injustice. Some don’t feel the athletes deserve anything better than what they already get. We all must agree that basketball games don’t happen without basketball players, so if a game earns millions in revenue, then the basketball player is more deserving of this revenue than the coach. If that doesn’t make sense, then I’m sorry.
I hope you’ll join me in this effort.

With complete respect and sincerity,

Dr. Boyce Watkins

Syracuse University
http://www.boycewatkins.com/

ps.

Q&A On the NCAA:

1) If the athletes don’t like the system, then why don’t they just do something else?

The problem is that the NCAA is allowed to operate as a Cartel. Effectively, this implies that all of the schools exist under the same umbrella and make price-fixing agreements that keep players from having any other options. North Carolina, Duke, The University of Kentucky and other NCAA schools all agree that none of them are allowed to pay the players for their services (other than the scholarship). This sort of operating behavior is illegal in nearly every other industry, because the source of labor then has no bargaining power. Going to the NBA is not an option for most of the players, so there isn’t much else they can do.

2) What are you asking for in all this? Some sort of special treatment for athletes?

No. I am simply asking that they have a free market. Many rules are put in place alleging to “protect” the athletes. The problem is that many exploitative regimes throughout history have used protection as a cover for self-interest (i.e. The War on Terror and the Patriot Act). The truth is that many restrictions placed on players exist to simply control the athlete and to ensure that the administrators don’t have to share the revenue. Schools should never be “forced” to pay the players. I am saying that we should not force schools to allow multi-million dollar players’ families to remain in poverty. Just let the market work, the same way it does in the rest of America. If a player has no value, then he/she will not be paid. But if the school can earn $15 million dollars from a player’s ability, then his family should get some of that money, not just the coach and the administrators. Remember: When money comes in the door…..SOMEONE IS ALWAYS GETTING PAID. I believe that the person doing the work should get a substantial percentage of the revenue generated from that work. It’s really that simple.

3) Are you against the NCAA making money?

Absolutely not! I am a Finance Professor and a Capitalist. I appreciate good business when I see it. I think that the NCAA should simply make a choice: either go completely professional or completely amateur. You can’t operate as a professional organization while signing billion dollar TV deals and then become a non-profit amateur organization when it comes time to reward the players who are actually doing the work. I am in favor of the NCAA either paying everyone according to the fair market value they can negotiate, or NOT PAYING ANYONE. Non-payment, a more socialist model that the NCAA claims to promote, would imply that no coach earns more than (say) $70,000 per year. Every coach with low graduation rates would be fired, and players would not be allowed to miss class to play in a game. In other words, the players would come to college to actually get an education, not to simply play sports.

4) Isn’t a scholarship fair compensation?

Quite simply, the answer is no. I say this as both a financial expert and an educator who places a high value on learning. Many universities earn more money from one nationally-televised basketball game than it costs to pay tuition for every player on the team for an entire year. I would personally rather see the players allowed to negotiate their own contracts and then pay their tuition afterward. If one were to offer a coach and his family free tuition rather than their seven figure salary, they would be outraged.

5) It’s too complicated to find a way to pay college athletes, it just won’t work.

This argument was put forth by NCAA President Myles Brand, who I was on a CBS sports special with last year (along with “Coach K” from Duke, Billy Packer and others who earn millions of dollars from the labor of college athletes). My problem with this argument is that things work when we want them to work. Schools always find a way around the technicalities when it comes time to pay a coach $4 million dollars per year. They find ways to make sure that the tournaments occur, that vendors are paid, complicated TV deals are signed and merchandizing agreements are worked out. If it were a priority, they could surely find a way to be fair to the athletes. If they can’t, then simply drop all the restrictions on compensation and let the market do its work.

Some argue that paying athletes would destroy the purity and integrity of college sports. Actually, it is this glaring hypocrisy that continues to destroy the integrity of collegiate athletics. Allowing coaches and players to have the same rights to negotiation would allow the system to make more sense.

6) Which athletes should be paid anyway?

Athletes should be paid like the rest of us: If what you do earns money, then you have the right to negotiate (without oppressive restrictions) for your share. When Tom Cruise makes a film, he gets paid quite well. He doesn’t get the money because he’s a nice guy, he gets paid because he is generating revenue for someone else. That’s how capitalism works. So, any athlete in a revenue-generating sport should be allowed to negotiate with his/her school. If the athlete is not worth the money he/she is asking for, then the school won’t pay it. The same occurs when you try to get a job: if they offer you $45,000 and you are worth $70,000, you negotiate with the company across the street. It would be illegal for all firms in your industry to come together and agree to only pay you $25,000 per year. But that is what happens in the NCAA, where all the schools agree to non-payment of athletes. This should be outlawed.

7) What are the possible solutions to this problem?

This is a big problem and a big system, it’s going to take work. But I have some thoughts on possible solutions to the NCAA puzzle:

- The IRS and Congress must get involved: The Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives began proceedings last year that questioned the non-profit status of the NCAA and argued that they should not be considered an amateur organization. In their letter, it was stated that “Corporate sponsorships, multimillion dollar television deals, highly paid coaches with no academic duties, and the dedication of inordinate amounts of time by athletes to training lead many to believe that major college football and men's basketball more closely resemble professional sports than amateur sports.”

I argue that challenging the NCAA’s financial situation might get their attention and inject some fairness into the system.

- Teach athletes and former athletes to work together: Most of the people exploited by the system don’t realize they’ve been cheated until after it’s over. I argue that former athletes and others who are aware of how the system works should explain this to young athletes, who are sometimes so blinded by their own “shine” that they can’t see what’s going on. Athletes coming together and considering a boycott of the NCAA tournament would send a strong message to the league. That is my dream, but the reign of terror the NCAA has over the athletes makes a boycott situation difficult to imagine. Any player thinking of rebelling is likely to be punished quite heavily.

8) There are other problems in the world, why are you spending your time on this one?

I agree that it’s hard to get someone to feel sorry for a player on national television. But I’ve witnessed many horror stories about players who are punished for doing the right thing. For example, there have been cases of players not having enough food and losing their scholarship because someone gave them a bag of groceries. If a player takes money from a booster to help a homeless relative, they are then punished. When a player like Reggie Bush used his fame to help his family get a home, he was demonized and penalized. Simultaneously, his coach and university earned millions from the fact that Reggie was the most highly recognized professional athlete in America. This doesn’t make much sense, given that coaches can take money from nearly anyone who offers it to them. I fight for many issues of injustice, and this happens to be the one that we are attacking right now. We must fight one battle at a time, and I hope that my passion for this effort is understood.

If you don’t agree with me, I respect that. But if you do, please join me in this effort.

Academic Excellence Tips From Black College Professor

Dr. Boyce Watkins
www.BoyceWatkins.com
Brought to you by GreatBlackSpeakers.com - The top African American Speakers Bureau in the world.

Hey peeps!

Since we received so many follow up questions about how to excel in college (there are a lot of college students and parents on this list who understand the value of strong education), I thought I would follow-up and give some professor tips on how to excel in college. This information is relevant to anyone with children of any age, or those considering obtaining more education (which should be all of us, since education is the key to our strength in this world). More of this is outlined in detail in my book "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about College". To see me speaking on this issue, please click here. I hope you share this information with anyone you know.

1) Nearly every child in America can go to college - if George Bush can go to Harvard, then any Black kid in America can go to college somewhere. We do a disservice to kids by putting lifetime limits on them at the age of 18. I say this as a kid who was told not to go to college himself.

2) It makes no sense to go to college to be mediocre. It is stupid that many of our kids will put in 8 hours a day for minimum wage at McDonalds, but won't study for 4 hours a day. This makes no sense, since the benefits of education last a lifetime, both financially and otherwise.

3) I love sports, but it can be a waste of time. Black men are great at sports (I was pretty good myself...in fact, that was all I thought about during high school - other than making money and finding a way to lose my virginity). The problem is that even if you are good enough to go to the NFL, your career is short and you won't make much money. It would take less effort to become a neurosurgeon and make big money for life. The NFL/NBA/Rap Star dream is played out and overrated....take it from someone who knows a lot of "successful" artists and athletes. When I began to put the same effort into studying that I put into working on my jump shot, I found it was much easier to become rich, famous and successful. That's the honest to God truth.

Please click here if you'd like to join our Black Money Advice list. Also, please check out our sponsors, GreatBlackSpeakers.com, who have the top Black Speakers in the world (Donna Brazile, Spike Lee, Roland Martin, etc.).

Below, I've written a poem called "Rules of the Game" that explains (in my own silly and arguably creative way) how to kick butt in school.

Take care peeps!
Boyce
www.BoyceWatkins.com
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The Rules of The Game
by Dr. Boyce Watkins
www.BoyceWatkins.com

Education is your vehicle, it’s kinda like your first car
Here are tips from the top on how to live like a star
You think school’s not important and you let your grades slide?
Well, buckle up my negro, cuz I’m pimpin yo ride

Some think school is important, some think that it’s not
But it’s Ludicrous to think you’ll get that number one spot
Without that paper in your pocket, you’re getting no love
That top position that you’re fishin….it ain’t hiring scrubs

Do you want to fly like an eagle or live your life with a limp?
Pimpin ain’t too easy, but it sucks getting pimped
Some people think good grades come to those who are smart
But you can’t be a great heart surgeon if you don't have any heart

If you have good grades already, then the burden’s no lighter
Your GPA is slammin, but it can always be tighter
And when you hit that first obstacle and you’ve just been beat down
Are you gonna get up like a fighter or lie down like a clown?

College is the place to make your dreams come true
But making silly choices can create nightmares for you
So, let me pimp your ride and I’mma start with the rims
24 inch spinners, the paint job matching your Tims

Number 1: Study for 6 hours a day
If you are consistent and persistent then your hard work will pay
Pulling all-nighters might make sense when your doing it see
But that F on every test is what you’re getting from me

Number 2: Don’t allow yourself to skip any class
Days off never pay off when you’re trying to pass
But passing all your classes is not your first role
Be a baller and a scholar, straight As are your goal

Number 3: Don’t feel you have to drink till you’re drunk
Cause cupid makes you stupid when the party’s too crunk
We have rapists and drunk drivers when the liquor gets full
And lifetime alcoholics when they get out of school

Number 4: Don’t forget this part of the rhyme
NEVER drop out of college for any reason, any time!
People leave school for a second, to get out of that cage
Then they’re 35 with 3 kids making minimum wage

Number 5: Make sure you learn to manage your time
Your time is like your money, you should count every dime
Procrastination is a gamble, don’t rely on your luck
Or you’ll crap out and be busted, with a report card that sucks

Number 6: Getting a college degree is real cool
But to make the monster money, go to graduate school
I promise that if you’re willing to go that last mile
The bling on your check will match the bling in your smile

Number 7: Make sure you know your major by heart
Know every class you’re taking from the end to the start
Memorize the classes needed to get the degree in your hand
Don’t find yourself later saying “I didn’t know man!”

Number 8: Baby mamas are created by sex
And child support’s like Pacman when its eating your check
If you call yourself a player and eager to please
The campus is a GREAT place to catch a nasty disease!

Life is kinda serious, and it ain’t playin no games
You have to come out dunkin like Lebron James
If you don’t put hustle in the muscle to get that last inch
You’ll find yourself defeated at the end of the bench

Yes this ride is costly, cause pimpin ain’t free
But your whip will be the tightest if you listen to me
Whether you want a life of freedom or just want some cash
Or if you want a chromed-out Bentley with DVDs in the dash

Education lets you travel down the highway of life
It creates freedom for your kids or your husband or wife
You’ll drive this ride forever, until you are dead
So get on it if you want it, cause its built in your head

Written by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Finance Professor at Syracuse University. He does regular commentary in national media, including CNN, ESPN, CBS and BET. For more information, please visit www.BoyceWatkins.com