Good news, freshmen! UC Merced has extended their applications until Dec 20th.
Transfer students, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Cruz have extended their transfer applications to Jan 3, 2020.
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Good news, freshmen! UC Merced has extended their applications until Dec 20th.
Transfer students, UC Merced, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Cruz have extended their transfer applications to Jan 3, 2020.
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In today’s podcast, I talk about how I’m changing my gift-giving habits this year so I can stand behind what I believe and promote a healthy future! To that end, I’m giving water filters this year! There are a lot of reasons for this (which are covered in the podcast), but I feel good that my loved ones will be receiving gifts that will help keep them healthy when I’m not around. I picked water filters because the majority of drinkable water in the United States barely qualifies as “drinkable”, because our water sources are poisoned by industrial chemicals, byproducts from fracking, pesticide run-off, and more.
To listen to today’s podcast, find GakkoMom on iTunes and subscribe to it, or listen below:
Did you know that we cut 25 MILLION Christmas trees every year in the US? They cover a million acres and they take 6-15 years to grow. What would Christmas be without having fresh Christmas trees in our homes? Artificial trees just don’t have the pine scent that wafts throughout the house. I struggled with this dilemma about 25 years ago and found a solution that would eliminate cutting trees and yet still provide the pine scent in our homes. We could build an Eco Xmas Tree!
By creating a “trunk” out of 2” by 4s,” and drilling holes up and down the trunk, we could build a Xmas tree using cut pine branches. Yup! I built the first Eco Xmas tree in 1994. We cut branches off our pine trees on the property and put them in the holes in the wooden “trunk.” Our Eco Xmas tree was perfect because there were no bald spots – we could easily replace the skimpy branches with fuller ones if needed.
Our Eco Xmas tree smelled just like a real Christmas tree and it looked even better. We decorated it just like we did real cut trees and everyone had to peek at the “trunk” because they didn’t believe it wasn’t a real tree. Best part, it was easy to disassemble. Instead of having to deal with a huge dead tree after Christmas, we simply pulled out the branches and burned them in the fireplace or composted them.
So this season, build your Eco Xmas Tree instead of cutting a fresh tree. With all of the fires we’ve had this year, we really need those 25 million trees to keep producing oxygen and sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere!
Seems the media focuses on the hysteria that pipes out of the White House every day, and as a result, we’re not getting comprehensive coverage of what’s really going on in America. I was thrilled to learn that youth crimes have dropped all across the United States for 13 years. Now that’s good news!
Nationwide, property crime rate dropped about 7% and violent crime about 4% last year. In California, the youth arrest rate has dropped 86% since 1988. In San Francisco, arrests fell from 139 to just 16 last year, and they saw just 46 murders compared to 100 in 2007.
This historic drop in youth crimes and arrests comes 20 years after the fear of the “superpredator” teens that worried authorities. According to Mike Males, a senior research fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, “It’s not just historic lows, it’s a historic chasm. It’s not even leveling out.”
This trend of declining crimes among youth is now decreasing cases for young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 as the youth get older. Experts and criminologists have many ideas but no concrete explanations for the decline in youth crime. I’m just glad that across the US, youth crime and arrests continue to drop to historic lows.
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My local bookstore Bookshop Santa Cruz now carries my book The Eco Xmas Tree. If you’re in the area, stop by and check out the Local Authors’ Section!
Love to support brick and mortar bookstores, and hope you do too! You can buy the book directly from Bookshop Santa Cruz by going here:
With the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that we all face today, I hope we can gather with friends and family over Thanksgiving to appreciate the many things we are grateful for.
Turn off the news and close social media apps. Enjoy talking to people – face to face – and listening to their stories. This is REAL and this is what we need a little bit more of in our lives.
Wishing you a wonderful Thanksgiving!
In today’s podcast, I speak with Leslie O’Malley, the Waste Reduction Manager for Santa Cruz Public Works. Figuring out what to do with all the plastic we generate is a big problem, and Leslie is an expert on types of plastics, where we can (and can’t) send it, and even simple things like when is plastic considered trash, and what can we do to make sure plastic is actually considered plastic for recycling instead of going into a landfill. It was a fascinating discussion that everyone should hear!
To listen to today’s podcast, find GakkoMom on iTunes and subscribe to it, or listen below:
Over the past 10 years, alternative education programs have been popping up for high school and even college students. Students are seeking and demanding programs that teach them viable skills needed for their future careers. Colleges are also making changes to recruit these students. Now innovative private programs are beginning to team up with colleges to offer the best of both worlds: skills-based education and a liberal arts bachelor’s degree.
Just across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Dominican University and Make School have partnered to create a computer science coding boot camp. This gives students the opportunity to learn cutting-edge coding skills while completing general education courses to get the safety net of a college degree. And we’re definitely going to see a lot of these partnerships popping up across the nation. It makes better financial sense for a college to partner with a tech-savvy training program than to spend millions of dollars to open or improve their existing departments.
Even though colleges try to offer most majors, they really can’t be the best in all academic areas. Small liberal arts colleges and universities have difficulty recruiting students who have specific STEM or other interests. These new partnerships and joint programs may just change what colleges offer students in the future.
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My daughter calls me a “prepper,” and I used to be slightly embarrassed to let others know about the way I’ve changed the way I do day-to-day things. But in light of the impending plight of the planet and how we have become accustomed to utilizing plastics for convenience, I want to share with you, in this and future blogs, some easy things I have done to reduce my impact on our civilization.
I wake up in the morning and shampoo my hair with homemade shampoo bars and conditioner bars. I made about 200 bars for the holidays to give to family and friends, and I have about a 5-year supply that I store in a large glass container. After trying my first shampoo bar from Lush, I loved the concept. I went online to get shampoo bar recipes, and rallied my family to do 15 experiments to find the best recipe. My goal: stop buying plastic bottles.
A lot has changed with written communication since I was in college. Well, I’m a little embarrassed to say that not only did we not have computers back then, I had an old electric typewriter – without the correction tape! All correspondence was handwritten because using the typewriter was saved for formal research papers. When we made a typo, we’d have to retype the entire paper or use a lot of Wite-Out. There was no “Hey Susan…” We addressed everyone formally using their titles (Dr, Mrs, Mr) and always used our best grammar.
Fast forward to today when emails are considered the formal protocol and texts are used for friendly communication. Not only are messages truncated with abbreviations (BRB=be right back; FOMO=fear of missing out) I don’t usually understand, but I often search for clues in the few words I receive to help me decipher whether the message is positive or negative. Without the use of emojis (faces with emotions), I’d be clueless in creating any kind of meaningful conversation.
As a college advisor, it shocks me to see how students communicate with their high school teachers and college professors. Most students don’t know how to write a business-style letter or even a professional letter. Their requests for more information or even letters of recommendation are written like demands from entitled children. Looking at the world from their self-centered universe, their letters lack pleasantries that might entice the receiver to respond, and most don’t offer any kind of thanks or appreciation. They lack important details like background information we need to answer their questions or format and deadlines for letters of recommendation. That’s why all students should observe “netiquette” when communicating with teachers and professors.
So what is netiquette? It’s etiquette on the internet. For instance, it would be nice to hear how they like our classes or style of teaching. Even a “How did you like that comment that Jason made in our last class?” to show their engagement or understanding of the world from our perspective. When the information they request is something they could have found on their own, these students don’t realize that they’re giving us a bad first impression. And ultimately, when we are asked to write letters of recommendation or need to determine final grades, we hold the cards and make decisions based on all of our interactions with them.
I’m not advocating students to brown nose their teachers or professors. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. When students reach out and make connections in person or through emails or texts, it behooves them to greet teachers with proper salutations (Dr, Mrs, Mr, Ms) and share their thoughts before requesting favors. They should make sure they’ve done all of the work on their end before asking them for assistance. They should always offer to meet or gather more information or documents to save our precious time.
When students are polite, respectful, and helpful, they’ll establish a positive relationship with their teachers and professors, which will ultimately put them in a good position to request those all-important letters of recommendation or grade bumps when they’re on the fence. So netiquette is real and should be implemented in correspondence with teachers and professors.
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