TICKETS WILL NOT BE SOLD AT THE DOOR. 

Tickets can be reserved and the trailer for the film can be seen at Screening.

When: Thursday, December 5th

Where: Foothills AMC Theater

Time: 7:30pm

Tickets: $10

You will be sent an email with your movie ticket (it will be a noreply email, so you will need to check your junk folders).     

 By Dave Goldberg, M.Ed. Guidance Counselor

After a brief hiatus due to laziness I'm back in the saddle this week and ready to rock the club. Today's article will be a soft piece. We're in the admissions doldrums these days, crossing a horse latitude. The horse latitudes were named when Spanish explorers would push a few horses overboard to lighten their loads so that the wind-powered ships could move more quickly in the gentle breezes.

Mid-November is when our university and college partners are just beginning to close the deal on bringing in their fall classes. The war rooms at USC, Boston University, Drake and Berkeley etc. are going bonkers sifting through a morass of paper and trying to sort their riders from their horses. Engineering and Architecture deans are scurrying over to admissions offices nationwide trying to peer into the closed steerage realm of the admissions counselor. The deans are hoping to pour over their own units' applicants to ensure successful students are sorted from those deemed a better fit at another school. The savvier deans know from past experience that the admissions counselors will muff it if given over to their own devices.

The process is alchemic. Better schools use a sorcerer-oracle arbiter when two or three counselors oppose two or three other counselors' opinions regarding the fitness of a student for acceptance. How does that pendulum swing your child's way? It's anybody's guess. I have seen scatter grams of specific high schools' applicants and who was admitted and who was denied and their corollary SAT/ACT and GPA's. The analysis is distressing. Merit should win the day but it doesn't always. Often there is no reasonable explanation why a stronger academic student would be denied and a weaker academic student from the same high school admitted.

I do know that it's good fun to phone the college and ask them why that denial happened to your child. No admissions counselor can ride a bike backwards; they can't back peddle fast enough. In the ambush call, you will be misled and mildly chastised and you will lose the argument, but at least you'll get your licks in on a young person who calls a bar a club.

It's even funnier to be in the admissions war room and listen to the nonsense spoke about applicants and the perceptions of what is valuable and important and what is window dressing and fluff. Twenty-somethings are often making these huge decisions about your child's future and they have so little life experience and often their arguments are specious and reckless. Nobody's going to call the Ivory Tower on this anytime soon either but you may have a say with your alumni donations. The Mighty Oz may not be so mighty after all.

Speaking of The Emerald City, I attended a NACAC conference long ago and was privy to the University of Notre Dame's admissions presentation. N.D.'s admissions director gave an excellent presentation of how they determine admissibility and what goes into making their ship sail. He brought candor to the table. First, and I'm not sure if this is still true, the N.D. Football players meet the same academic standards of the general student body. I saw their inside numbers. None of those thick-necked guys were academic slouches. Of course, that presentation was given when Notre Dame was going 2-10 back to back to back. The Irish have since re-mounted their four horses and are winning. Wonder if their collective GPA and test scores have fallen overboard concurrently.

And now for something of value. From the U.S. News & World Reports, 2013 Edition, Best Colleges, I bring you a survey of their headlined articles: 7 Secrets to Getting in; How to Find the Money; A+ Schools for B Students; 9 Hot New Majors; Coming Up With Your Short List; Why Big Might be Better; When You Don't Have the Grade; Focused on Student Success; Creative Ways to Cut College Costs; Nine Majors With a Bright Future; Best Black Colleges; 7 Ways to Stand Out in a Crowd; The Deal With Applying Early; Admissions Officers: Don't Do This (The pros describe their pet peeves); Great Schools at Great Prices.

            You probably want to pick up this magazine annually. USN&WR is a beacon of goodness, despite their using the bogus "average alumni giving rate" in their computations. That horse of a different color should be thrown overboard, post-haste.  

IRHS Accolades

• Congratz IRHS Nighthawk Vanguard band, top ten in Arizona!
• Congratz IRHS Boy's Cross Country, 3rd in State!
• IRHS Key Club made Thanksgiving cards and visited with the residents of the Villas at La Canada.
• RHS Drama's "Clue" production in the news: http://azstarnet.com/ironwood-ridge-stages-classic-whodunit/article_d8107584-056a-5a88-9e86-cc2dbf764885.html#.UoT_tkwrlRo.email ...
•  IRHS food drive, pic represents only one of many classes participating! pic.twitter.com/BARhxdIVcN
• Congratz Don Dickinson, Circle-K teacher of the year finalist!

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