"I get some satisfaction out of taking the same knowledge you have to pay lots of money for and spreading it out," says Lee. "It's kind of like shipping out secret information."

Get Ready! students say their teachers' attitudes made the learning experience fun. Each teacher scored at least 700 on the math or verbal section he or she taught in 45 minute sessions at Get Ready!

None of the new teachers had ever taught SAT prep before joining the program, and all retained second jobs in addition to staffing Get Ready! The curriculum was an amalgamation of published preparation materials, the strategies they learned in their own prep courses and personal insights.

During one verbal lesson, each student wrote a love letter using SAT vocabulary words.

"It's an ambiguous situation when you're teaching SATS. Are you just preparing to raise the kids score or are you somehow trying to make up for the education that they're not getting?" Lang says.

Despite her worries, students say they value being taught by peers who relate to them and have fun, even in the August heat of a stuffy church basement.

"They're nice. They're fun. They're not too serious," Christine Coleman, 17, a Mount Vernon resident and student at Pelham High School says.

"I think it helps that they have just taken it themselves," Melissa Munoz, 17, a student at Mount Vernon High School says.

"If I had gone to Princeton Review, my parents would have spent I don't know how much money for me to sit in a classroom and fall asleep," says Taadhameka Kennedy, 14, of Mount Vernon, who is entering 10th grade at Brooklyn Technical High School this year.

Teachers describe their students as bright and enthusiastic, and say they had fun developing the program.

"They sometimes lack the self-confidence. They haven't had the practice," Jungil Cha 01, a Scarsdale High School graduate says. "I hope this class gives them the self-confidence and the motivation."

Lang says since most Scarsdale students hope to attend four-year colleges, they see high scores on the standardized tests as the norm.

"Low scores in Scarsdale means that that person really doesn't want to be [in school]." Lang says.

She and other teachers in Get Ready! had to adjust their assumptions when they began working with Mount Vernon students. Instead of asking what colleges students are considering, teachers asked what their plans were, and took it from there.

"I asked one of the kids who's going to be a senior if he had taken the SAT II's," Lang said. "He had no idea what I was talking about."

A Continuing Education