When Your Dream College Says No

Seniors, in just 10 more days you will have received all your college decisions - accepted, denied and/or waitlisted. What if you're denied to the colleges you mentally and emotionally placed at the top of your list? It hurts. Grieve. Then, resolve that it is their loss. You were accepted to other colleges, and they were also on your list, and for good reasons. Examine their offers closely. Revisit their campuses. Being denied admission may have kept you from a bad situation of being in over your head academically, struggling to maintain a C average. Embrace the colleges that are eager to have you. You will do well there.

Testing 5-year-olds

At a public elementary school in California, teachers are asked to sit  their kindergarteners down at a computer to answer questions on a standardized test to assess their academic growth.  Five-year-olds.

And the standardized testing frenzy never lets up from then on.  In high school, students not only have to take their CAHSEE to get out of high school, but their SAT or ACT to get in to college.

According to a power point from CSU Los Angeles, standardized testing “began in the United States in the early 1900s to determine one's individual intelligence quotient” and was used during WWI because “the Army needed a method to determine which soldiers were “Officer Material.”  Then the No Child Left Behind Act came along and, well, you know the rest.

Testing individual students makes sense if there is probable cause…a suspected learning disability, perhaps, or history of developmental delays or neurological problems.  But that isn’t how it works.  Every single student is tested, regardless of their age, effort, grades or native language.  And as teachers, we are asked to not divulge that parents may request a waiver excusing students from standardized tests.

Does standardized testing work as an evaluative tool of teacher effectiveness?  No more so than judging the effectiveness of a postal worker based on whether the bills he delivers actually get paid, or critiquing a doctor based on the number of miles his patients walk per week.  You can’t hold someone accountable for variables beyond their control.

In what other publicly funded government institution is annual testing mandatory for citizens?  Are Amtrak passengers required to submit to a yearly test on their ability to read a train schedule?  Do California sea lions have to jump through hoops for the Marine Mammal Commission?  Does the USDA Rural Development agency ask housing recipients to undergo annual inspections to be sure they have vacuumed and dusted adequately?

All this standardized testing leaves our children with the impression that no matter what they do, they will always be judged, and that their worth is measured by how far above the 50^th percentile a test reports them to be.  Average isn’t good enough, and any talent that can’t be measured by a standardized test must not be very important. 

COLLEGE APPLICATIONS SUBMITTED? HERE ARE YOUR NEXT STEPS!

1) Check your email daily.  Colleges will communicate with you through email with any questions they have about your application, reminders about deadlines, info about events on campus, and materials they need you to send or haven't received from your high school such as transcripts, letters, SAT scores, etc. 
2) In one of these emails should be instructions for setting up a student portal/account.  Do it.  That is how most will notify you if you are accepted, long before the envelope arrives in the mail!
3) Your high school counselor and teachers are responsible for sending your fall/mid term transcript or grade report, your letters of recommendation, and submitting your info for Cal Grant aid.  You are responsible for reminding them.
4)  You are also responsible for using College Board to send your SAT scores to all the colleges to which you applied, or ACT.org if you are submitting ACT scores (except for the CSU system, which won't need them for admission decisions if your GPA is 3.0+).  Most colleges will need your test scores by Jan. 15 at the latest! The UC system requires ALL your test scores and uses the highest total score from all three sections for one test date, but you only need to pay for and submit the scores to ONE UC campus and the rest will get them also. For CSU, use the CSU mentor code to save money and all the CSU's will receive your scores.  CSU will super score so you can send just your tests that are the highest in each section.  Common app schools differ in their test policies; some super score, some don't, and you need to send your scores to each college.   Check the website of each college to which you applied for details and deadlines.
5) Complete (parents will have to assist) the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) AND the CSS Profile (if needed) for all the colleges you applied to, EVEN if your income is $250K plus annually.  Many private colleges use the financial aid applications to make "merit" aid decisions and to award scholarships, and even if you don't qualify for federal aid you will be eligible to take out low interest student and Parent Plus federal loans if you decide to.
Deadlines for these range from Feb 1 to March 1 depending on the college.

6 Things I Learned From My Gardener About Work and Relationships

My gardener has not only won my business, but my friendship.  It surprises me, because I thought we were from different worlds. Instead, over the past year, he has taught me many valuable lessons about doing business and about relationships.

1) Making a Good First Impression is About Being Sensitive to Your Customers' Needs and Developing Trust:
Ernesto was the gardener for the home next door and the one across the street, yet we had never spoken until I took a walk with my new collie puppy.  He was wielding an ear-deafening blower and my dog shrank away from him as we passed.  Ernesto turned off the blower, set it down, crouched down, and called my dog to him.  He petted him, smiled at me, and called my dog "Lassie".  In that instant, a connection was made not only between Ernesto and my dog, but between the two of us. I was in between gardeners, and I needed one my dog wouldn't be afraid of.  I hired him on the spot.

2) Communication is About Understanding, not Language
It is true that Ernesto speaks very little English and understands not much more, and that my Spanish is based on my world of classroom teacher, not gardening. But we somehow manage to hold conversations about rather complex topics, such as why I need a new sprinkler valve or what schedule the timer is on, and whether or not he should prune back the roses so they will be "more beautiful" in the spring, and the best type of grass seed for my lawn.  He relies on eye contact, pantomime, and lots of "I show you", and somehow, as I listen, my Spanish elevates to a level where I'm not translating in my head but actually comprehending.

3)  Don't Judge People.  Period.
Ernesto drives a beat up 20-year-old pickup, speaks very limited English, and is a gardener who thinks nothing of killing a gopher, picking it up and tossing it in the trash and then shaking my hand!
But he knows the LATIN words for my privet hedge (Ligustrum) and plays the guitar professionally on the weekends at various clubs all over the county.  He also likes my dog.

4)  Small Extras Cement a Relationship.
Ernesto usually gardens for me on Saturday, unless he is playing the guitar at a club, in which case he comes on Thursday.  Regardless, he knows my day for trash pick up is Friday, so he always comes on Thursday to take to the curb not only the grass clippings from Saturday but also my household trash and recycling cans.

5)  Be Clear in Your Agreements.
Ernesto explains (see #2) any extra work he feels my garden needs, and whether or not he will do it a little bit each week ("despues y despues y despues, entiendes?") or if it will cost "extra" and also, if that will be his hourly rate or a contract flat price.  If he purchases an item, he provides the receipt.  He is a gardener, but he is a professional.

6)  Take Pride in Your Work.
Ernesto is the first one to beam with happiness when my lawn is green, my beds mulched and my sprinklers working properly.  He smiles and tells me "I am intelligent", and I agree.

12 Steps to a Great College Essay

12 Steps to A Great College Essay

©2014 Laura Rader, Wise Ambitions College Consulting

1.  Give yourself plenty of time.  Common Application Essay prompts are released August 1.  Open, read and save the prompts August 1.

2.  Print out all the prompts in August.  Think about them.  Gather your memories.  Scroll through your Facebook postings, iPhotos and Instagrams to jog your memory.  Next to each prompt, write a sentence or two of an idea or ideas that might work.  You can pull people and ideas from any stage of your life as long as the memory is clear in your mind and focused as follows:

           Snapshots in time.  Choose brief, memorable moments of a larger picture.  You only have about 500 words.  Two pages, tops.

            Symbolism.  People and events that represent your values, personality, goals, dreams and life lessons learned.

            Significant.  What you write about needs to be important and memorable to you, so that you can convey that passion to the reader.

            Additional information.  If you choose to write about a talent or activity you’ve already included in other parts of your application, the essay must elaborate, expand and add additional insight into that.  This is not a resume.

            Personal.  The essay needs to be fully about you, honest, and with a positive spin even if it’s a sad topic.  You can write about death and divorce if you grew from that experience.  Do not write about your drug use, sex life or any crimes committed.

3.  In September, work on expanding all your ideas into an outline of your essay.  Three or four sentences should do it - Beginning, Middle, End, the Point.  Save them.

4.  Settle on two or three essay ideas that spark your creativity the most and that will be the most interesting to you to write.

5.  Start with a hook.  Grab your reader’s attention with action, humor, catastrophe or dialog and keep that going for the first paragraph.  Then back off and explain.  Save what you’ve written and then let those first paragraphs sit for a day or so.

6.   Reread your first paragraphs.  Think about where your essay is going.  Look for a theme you can carry throughout, and pieces you can weave together into a whole.  Then keep writing.  Save often.

7.  If one of your essays isn’t getting off the ground, discard it.  Focus on the one that is beginning to take on a life of its own.  That’s your story.  Commit to it.  Write your two pages.

8.  Finish.  Be sure your ending is as powerful as your beginning.  Walk away for a week and do something else, like study and homework and your extra curricular activities.

9.  Reread it.  Cut out cliché’s, redundancies, ramblings.  Be sure your sentences are varied in length and complexity.  Check your word choice and be sure your nouns and verbs are specific.  Your writing should create a movie in your head and arouse strong feelings.  If it doesn’t, revise, revise, revise.

10.  Have a trusted person read it.  This can be someone who knows your very well (family, best friend, teacher) or someone who is a good writer.  Preferably both.  Ask them for their honest opinions on whether or not it seems focused, interesting, insightful and authentic.  Listen to their advice.  Make changes if you agree with them.  Then share it again with one or two more people.

11.  Finish your final revisions.  Check your grammar.  Run it through spell check and grammar check and read it again, word by word, looking for homonyms, possessives and errors in tense.

12.  Type a clean copy, 12-point font, double-spaced.  Save it.  Copy and paste it into your application.  Reread one more time to be sure nothing was lost or changed in the process.  Press Submit.  Breathe.

College Classrooms or MOOCs?

College Classrooms or MOOCs?

I can almost hear my father turning over in his grave.

“Replace college classrooms with online courses?  That’s just ridiculous!” he would say.

Dad was a tenured, full time, PhD professor of History at San Diego State University, one of the “middle tier” universities that is in danger of being replaced by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), according to a recent article in Business Insider;  “Three Trends Are About to Create a Higher Education Earthquake”, June 29, 2014.  Although my grasp of technology and social media far exceeds any my father ever possessed - a brilliant man who never remembered to charge his Nokia cell phone and never owned a computer – I agree whole heartedly that replacing college classrooms with online courses is ridiculous.

Like many people, I have experience with real and virtual classrooms.  I attended San Diego State University in the 1980s, when the computer science department was teaching Pascal as an innovative programming language.  I have taught 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th grade for 27 years in public schools.  I am now taking online courses through a public university.

My online courses are convenient, cost effective and enjoyable.  My online professors are intelligent, thoughtful, and capable, and my online classmates equally so.  Yet, the limitation of technology, its very nature, puts up invisible walls between teacher and students.  Power point presentations, videos, forums, WIKIs and emails only allow for formal, edited discourse.  Each lesson is carefully crafted; forum posts follow a list of proscribed netiquette rules; feedback is thoughtfully worded to remain almost 100% positive; and debate is politely restrained.  I’m learning a lot, but I miss the classroom.

A classroom is a living thing, made up of human beings.  As my father taught and as I teach, I improvise, and I engage with my students.  I use humor to keep their attention and energy levels up.  I pull examples from my personal life to draw an analogy, and I draw pictures on the whiteboard to graphically illustrate a point.  Finally, I offer ongoing help and guidance as they work, to an individual or a group, as much or as little as needed. 

My students are part of the process.  They don’t post to a forum.  They ask questions that change the course of my lesson, sometimes taking the class off on tangents to topics of much more value than what I had planned.  Students debate with each other over their interpretations of what we are learning, and not in a carefully worded and edited post, but spontaneously and emotionally.  Students befriend each other over group projects and then carry that friendship out the door to the playground.  There are no walls.

I don’t recall a single lecture from my San Diego State classes, but I do remember my French professor bought me coffee and asked me why my grade had slipped from A to C and on hearing my answer, told me that I shouldn’t tank her class over a breakup with my boyfriend.  I do remember my Physiological Psych professor evacuated us calmly and quickly when there was a bomb scare in our building, and then continued our lesson on the lawn.  I do remember the handwritten note praising my essay on the artist Alexander Calder.  I do remember that my Social Psychology professor became genuinely excited about the results of my experiment on social interaction.  There were no walls.

But in my online class, the invisible barriers go up.  Improvisation ceases to exist.  Even if the class were conducted by Skype, or Chat, technology allows for a pause and replay that real life does not.  A teacher’s humor is there, but not the sound of laughter.  A teacher’s personal life is a brief sentence in the introduction to the course.  And a teacher’s feedback is delivered equitably and consistently, whether or not it is asked for.

           

Even more dramatically, students in an online course don’t interrupt.  They don’t ask questions that change the scope of the lesson, nor debate spontaneously and emotionally.  The rules of netiquette (made necessary by the invisible walls which silence tone of voice, and blind us to facial expressions and body language) constrain debate.  And friendships?  We make offers to add each other to our Linked in networks, but not offers to go outside the walls and play.

           

Those relationships, discussions, experiences and mistakes simply can’t happen in an online class.  The invisible barriers of technology prevent them.  And so no, I do not think that online courses, no matter how cost effective or efficient, can or should ever replace, even on a small scale, the traditional classroom.  Or the traditional teacher; like me, or my Dad.

I can almost see my father smiling.

Copyright 2014 by Laura Rader, Wise Ambitions College Consulting

              

Preparing for College or Living A Life?

A father of two elementary school aged children stopped by my Wise Ambitions College Consulting table at the San Diego County Fair last week.  He was interested in what a college consultant does, said his friend had hired one and that he planned to, but not for "at least eight more years".  Then he asked me about the value of summer programs and activities, and if colleges care about those, and shouldn't he start now by having his kids in Girl and Boy scouts, because in eight years, wouldn't it be too late?

I realized as I listened that there were no simple answers to his questions, so I said something reassuring and handed him my business card.  But I want to share the answers now, because they're important, and too complex for a county fair conversation.

Parents, preparing for college is really preparing for adult life.  College, for those who choose to attend, is the last sanctuary for mentored practice at living.  At its best, college opens doors and windows, widens horizons, inspires and educates, broadens perspectives and eliminates prejudice.  As almost an after thought, most colleges also help students find and pursue their passions, with a focus on turning those into meaningful, gainful employment.

The question isn't, "Should my children participate in summer activities or scouts and will colleges care?" but, "What activities will be best for my children to enrich their adult lives?"  Life is not a dress rehearsal, and your children aren't auditioning for a play.  Colleges, like parents, want students to have what's best for them.

So, if your daughter is curious about plants and animals, go hiking and camping together, buy her pets, take her to aquariums, zoos and botanical gardens.  Don't do it so that she can ace AP Biology or become an engineer, do it because it is her passion at the moment and you have the power to gift  those experiences. If your son loves to draw pictures and cartoons, buy him reams of blank paper, pencils, crayons, paint.  Take him to art museums and buy him a camera. Show him how to use a ruler and graph paper to draw an image to scale.  Art is under appreciated by society, and he may not be able to make money doing it, but life is not a race to nowhere, it is a journey, and if art makes his life richer, what parent wouldn't want that?

Life is the cumulative total of all our experiences and passions.  College is just one more place where those can be nourished and explored.  Don't give college admissions counselors the power to decide how your child should live their life.  Just let your child be, and find a college that appreciates them for the person they are becoming.

And sure, joining Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts is a great idea.