The family reunion lasted for 2 days, so it’s only fitting that I blog about it twice.

We had activities for everyone!  The treasure hunt and the Boardwalk were the highlight for the kids, while the adults enjoyed Rob’s cooking and telling stories for the oral histories. 

It’s always fun to get together with the family!

I just hosted another Tatsui Family Reunion last weekend. 

As the elders get older, I feel compelled to create opportunities to reunite all of the many family members. 

By using programs such as Family Tree Maker to enter data about each aunt, uncle, cousin, and extended family member, we keep finding new connections. 

We took individual oral histories that we place in Family Tree Maker, and then we had a group oral history video session where we told stories that we may have heard from our grandparents and hashed out as many details as we could while the camera was rolling. 

Even though we may not have all of the answers to our many questions, documenting what we do know and remember will be vital to future generations.  In the process of gathering info and playing games, we all got to know one another better – and we created new memories, and stories.

I look forward to getting together with my family every year. 

I’m really excited that Merit Academy has expanded to include international students!

Our one-on-one classes offer an ideal academic environment for each student, which is especially important for international students, who often end up at the back of a typical classroom.

We are currently looking to place students for the Fall.  By sharing a home with a student, American families can help reinforce English language acquisition and integration into American culture, with the added benefit of learning about the culture of the student!

Merit provides a $1,200 per month stipend to cover expenses throughout the school year.  If you’re interested in hosting an international student this Fall, please contact me at 831.462.5655.

Logan is on a roll! Tomorrow, June 25^th, is another NO DRIVING DAY!

Run your errands and do you shopping today so you can relax at home on Saturday. 

Join Logan as he rallies Californians to not drive for one day a month to reduce the CO2 that enters the atmosphere.  Then, simply go to his website – WhenNotIf.org to enter your data so he can tally up how much CO2 was diverted by our joint efforts. 

If you need to get somewhere tomorrow, carpool, take public transportation, or ride your bike! 

Thanks for supporting Logan and doing your part to offset Climate Change. 

I use a combination of personality and career tests to guide my clients as they begin the journey to select their colleges, majors, and future careers. 

While this may sound like a lofty task – and impossible goal – when my clients are 17 and 18 years old, I’m struck by how accurate these tests sum up their personalities, motivation, organizational skills, and confidence.

Sometimes it’s difficult to get a sense for how students use their time or how they work in small groups. These tests help me cut to the chase so I can efficiently explore career options with them.

If you’ve never taken a personality test, try the Myers Briggs test.  This is a truncated version of their full battery of tests but it will give you a general idea about your personality type. 

Remember, I use a combination of tests to do a comprehensive analysis – the online tests are just for fun, so don’t take them too seriously!

…But you’ll never believe what they did…

I thought it would be entertaining to take our new international student to see a Giants game, after all, it IS America’s favorite pastime, right? 

To ensure that it would be a wonderful experience for her, I invited a couple of teens to join the fun. I thought it was a good plan.  I was thrilled when the Giants’ first at bat was a homerun right out of the stadium.  I couldn’t have planned a better introduction to baseball fever. Then, the second at bat hit another homerun.  Wow!  The kids were clapping and really into it and I was mentally patting myself on the back for orchestrating this cool cultural experience for the kids.

But then all three of them pulled out their cell phones and nothing could pull them away.  They played video games together, made funny images using their photos, and shared Snapchat photos that they thought were hilarious. 

At one point, one of them popped their heads up to read the scoreboard and said, “Oh, we’re winning again!” and then went right back to playing on their phones. The only time they stopped playing games was when they went to buy Ghirardelli ice cream and hot chocolates.

They claim to have had a great time at the game but I think we could have accomplished the same cultural experience in front of a TV – and saved a few hundred dollars! 

Before your college-bound high school grads indulge in summer relaxation, make sure they ask their high school guidance counselors to send their final transcripts to their colleges. 

Most counselors head off for summer vacations a few weeks after school is out so do this now.  Colleges need confirmation that students have successfully graduated with no grades below a C-.  The counselors are responsible for sending the transcripts but sometimes they don’t know which colleges your kids will be attending in the fall. 

Avoid 11^th-hour crises of needing transcripts from counselors who are out of the office until August by talking to the counselors now.  Most colleges need the transcripts by July 15^th, but some are now requesting them by July 1^st.

If your grad received grades lower than C-, they will need to contact their colleges now to give them a heads up.  Each college has their own policies on grades below a C- so check first, and then place the call or write an email. It’s best to have this discussion with the college BEFORE they receive their transcripts.  Most likely, the student will be placed on probation for the first term.  If they have received scholarships, contact financial aid to make sure that scholarship dollars are not withdrawn.  

Congratulations on your kids’ graduations!

If you’re heading off to college, take a few hours to research the many opportunities ahead so you can take full advantage of your college experience. 

Check out the tips I wrote in “Why Laying out a 4-Year Plan is Essential.”

For those of you searching for a good and meaningful gift for a high school grad, read my blog “The Best Graduation Gift is a GOOD PLAN.”

Make the most of your summer and be prepared for college!

High school students, and their parents, stress out about their grade point averages (GPAs). Fact.  But, why? Because colleges consider GPAs to be the single most important factor in making admission decisions. Makes sense, right? But the criteria by which these high school teachers use to determine these grades vastly differs from school to school. That’s unfair.

As a college advisor, I meet with students across the United States, so I see a wide variety of grading rubrics and final grades.  Even the schools that seem to be transparent about how grades are determined because they publish a detailed rubric at the start of the school year still have variances that may seem sketchy. 

Some teachers dock points for each day an assignment is turned in late, while others will allow a pile of late work to be turned in the day before the grading period ends.  Hmm.  Others allow students to retake exams that they fail or let them drop the lowest test scores to improve their grades.  Many give extra credit points for ridiculous things like bringing treats to class or going on field trips.

Over the years I’ve seen some doozies. One student took a 3-week summer history class where the teacher told him he didn’t need to attend the actual classes.  Really! He just needed to show up on the last day of the summer program with all of his completed assignments.  This student gathered up notes from a previous history class that he had failed and turned them into his summer teacher for credit.  The shocker was that the teacher gave this student an A in the history class – he obviously didn’t look at the pile of papers.  But the ridiculous part of this story is that the teacher actually replaced this student’s previous F’s in the fall and spring semesters with A’s! How is this fair to the other thousands of students who suffer from reduced GPAs when they fail a class?

To get students to actually take state mandated standardized tests each year, teachers and administrators have bribed students to do well on the tests by offering a full-letter bump in their final grade if they score at a specific percentage on the standardized tests.  In other words, if the student gets an 80% in the chemistry section of a standardized test, this chemistry teacher would bump the student’s final grade by one letter grade.  Say what? 

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve seen a teacher not budge when a student received an 89.99% and gave him a B+.  This actually happened to one of my clients, who was a straight-A student until he got this single B+ in Chemistry.  The student asked the teacher if he could do extra credit, write an essay or do anything to bump his grade to an A so he could become the class valedictorian during his senior year.  Sadly, the teacher wouldn’t budge, and even though the student reached out to the principal and superintendent of schools, the teacher refused to change his grade.

When teachers use unethical grading practices to help their students improve their GPAs or to gain high scores on standardized tests (which reflect well on the teacher), that ruins the value of GPAs for everyone. College admissions officers are savvy to schools with substandard curriculum but they aren’t always aware of grading practices of particular teachers.  Seems to me that there should be more transparency about actual grading rubrics and policies on Rate My Teacher so colleges get a realistic view of student achievement in classes.