1. Please explain your interest in sending your son/daughter to Greenhill School.
Generally, Joyce is doing very well in the current school. However, I feel the overall environment in public school does not motivate kids to compete. I think we need to prepare kids to be more competitive in this global economy. I think a prestige school like Greenhill School can provide more challenges to her academically. I feel that Greenhill will give my daughter opportunities that would not have been available of receiving if he had attended a public school. Because I understand that private schools like Greenhill School typically contain of very low presence levels, children are frequently encouraged to contribute in as many athletic and academic programs as conceivable which is perfect for my child. I also understand that you have wonderful programs to be offered that can help prepare my child for college down the road. At Greenhill, I understand that my daughter will be able to get great attention paid to her as an individual student. I am interested in sending my daughter because I have friends whose children have graduated with great awareness into the world and community around them. The fact that Greenhill provides a lot of attention paid to each individual needs of each student is just what my child would need in order to be a successful student.
At a regular school, she would not be able to get this great advantage. I want my child to attend Greenhill also because I hear that you have a very caring faculty which is also important in developing my child as a whole person scholastically, physically and informally. I know that my daughter is picking the right school because I recognize that Greenhill has a classic scholastic curriculum that is unlike any other traditional school in the country. as a matter of fact, my friends and family members who have attended Greenhill all comment that it is one of the best schools that have ever been associated with. The last thing is that Greenhill School is a diverse community of learners that endeavors for brilliance; values individuality; nurtures a desire for learning; endorses the balanced expansion of mind, body, and character; inspires service; and inspires a admiration for others. All of these characteristics are what I want my daughter to learn and your school clearly displays those attributes. I am interested in sending my daughter to Greenhill because I believe your school is an organization that lives its mission every day and offers an excellent scholastic experience that will benefit my daughter.
2. How did you first learn about Greenhill School?
We have friend's kid going to Greenhill and they are very satisfied with the education provided. I have also talked to teachers in Greenhill during a private school fair in Plano last year. We have visited the campus several times and very impressive with the environment. I think the education quality, location and extracurricular activities fit our requirements very well. I also did plenty of research about Greenhill and found plenty of amazing reviews about the campus, faculty, teachers and the curriculum overall. I learned through peers and other family members that this school is one of the elite private schools in the Dallas metropolitan area. I learned that a friend of mine daughter has been going to Greenhill ever since she was in Kindergarten and loves it. I learned from them first hand that there is not a school out there that can match the excellence of your caliber I found out through other that your school as the quality of teaching that is also excellent along with the great organization accessible for children to flourish and understand their entire potential.
3. What are your child's greatest strengths?
Joyce's greatest strength is her ability to perform independent thinking. Since she went to kindergarten, my wife and I have never helped her with her school projects. When she got an assignment, she always had the idea how to accomplish it.
Early this year, I told her to consider how to re-decorate her room. First, she went to home depot and picked a kind of pink color that are mixed by to other colors and asked me to paint it with that color. Then she searches on the Internet and picked all the furniture which are in white color. She measured her room and designed all the arrangement. Then she ordered her curtain and bed set which are green base colors. After we finished, her room looks very pleasant.
Another example is that she posted a funny video on YouTube and nobody viewed it. I challenged her to post a video and get 50 people to view it. After several months, she did manage to have several hundred people following her on the Internet.
When we went to China last summer, she found iPhone cases in China were much cheaper than those in the US. She bought some iPhone cases in China and sold it in the US. I thought she might be able to sell on EBay but she told me that to sell on EBay you have to compete on price and it is very difficult to make money. She research on her own and setup her own selling channel on Internet. She has been running this business for three months and she is making about one thousand dollars a month currently. As the business growing, she wants to set up her own website. I created one from Godaddy.com but she looked it and told me that was not what she wanted. She then research and created a website by her own. The features she wanted is being able to list feature products and changing fonts of the website. Her website is www.shoppinkcupcakee.com
As a matter of fact, applying for Greenhill is also her own idea. I think it is very uncommon for a thirteen-year-old to know what she wants. Most of kids at this age are just following parents' instruction.
Other strengths that my daughter has it that she has very good charisma toward others especially teenagers her own age. Many of her peers and even strangers always enjoy themselves when they're around her. My daughter is very easy to get along with and she is not the type of person that is confrontational.
My daughter also has the strength of being able to understand people and that is not just people her own age. Her ability to understand others' perspective has been noticed even among adults and her teachers. Many that are older than her also recognize that she has the ability to reason with people very well even when she is up under extreme pressure. I think that her maturity level is a strong point about her because she does not easily crack under the pressure of hard work or the demands that others can sometimes put on her. One of her strengths is that she has a very strong will which has been to her advantage because when it comes to pressure, she is able to fight it off and many others have been able to admire this characteristic about her since it is rare among teenager.
Another one of my daughter’s strengths is that she is very optimistic and many people including her teachers see her as a fighter. As I mentioned earlier, when pressure gets tough, she has learned to roll with the punches even at her young age. There are times when she has learned to make lemonade out of lemons when she was backed into a corner.
I think my daughter is able to relate well with others partly because she is more of an easy going person and positive. One of her biggest strengths is having the ability to make other people smile rather they be ab adult or a small child. Her artistic aptitudes and other talents really do bring good feelings and impressions to where ever she goes.
4. Please comment on what you consider to be your child's greatest area of need. What steps have been taken to address this?
Although Joyce is creative and gifted, I think she is not motivated to compete academically very much. She is satisfied with her academic performance, while I think she can do much better. Moving to a good private school, where lots of talented students around, she will concentrate on her school work more.
We have also gone a step further and involved out daughter in some tutoring classed just to keep her motivated and ahead of the game. The tutoring has turned out to be a good investment. With the tutor, my daughter is slowly learning how to study independently, which is a basic skill that she will really need to have mastered by the time that she starts heading to college. With tutoring she has kind of got ahead of the game because it has taught her things like better note-taking, time management skills and organization that we are hoping will improve her chances of achievement in every subject.
I have discovered that with this tutoring, that it has increased my daughter’s motivation to learn much more than she did before it all started. It gave her an extra boost towards her goals for wanting to go to college because she felt more prepared. The tutoring also did other good things for her such as increasing her ability to manage her own learning and study plans. Before this, she really had no clue but after the experience it really got her mind thinking differently in regards to her education. The tutoring has also helped her to get a much more better understanding of subject parts and how to tackle different topics in different ways and also the ones that she never really thought about or was too intimidated to challenge. Another thing that the tutoring did for my daughter was that it actually motivated to want to take on extra courses for college in the future is that is possible.
5. Please describe your child's current academic environment.
She is currently studying in Forestwood Middle School, which belongs to Lewisville Independent School District and is considered exceptional in the State of Texas. Joyce took most of her course in AP class. Joyce is doing well in the school.
6. Describe your child's relationship with his/her peers.
Joyce can get along with others very well. She has lots of friends, in school, as well as in Church. Joyce is very nice to her friends. Sometimes she is the leader and at other times, she is the follower. She has certain degree of leadership because she always has the idea, but I can tell she enjoy being a team member too.
What makes her a leader among her friends is that our daughter has been provide with the opportunity to interrelate with diverse classes and cultures. She has a wide variety of friends from all different cultures and backgrounds. She understands that the world is a continually expanding environment, and that one day she will possibly need to lead across culture, ability, finances and differences of gender.
Joyce obvious trait among her friends is an inflexible set of ethics. Joyce by many of her peers is looked at as a strong individual who does not cringe from her beliefs, and will take the edge to get her vision done.
One of the things that Joyce has been taught is that a good leader does not really announce themselves as leader but is chosen by their peers and a lot of the times it seems as though they see her that way. In our household the end goal was not to teach Joyce how to become a leader but to teach her basic morals and standards so that she would turn out to be a strong individual with the competences to become a leader and I see that trait clearly when she is among her friends. Likewise, teaching Joyce about leadership really did intensify the rejections of not being an individual that is strong. Joyce understood early that being influenced easily can be harmful for her as she knows that she can naively be taken advantage of a circumstance. Because Joyce knows how to handle herself among her peers, this is not much of a problem. Joyce has been able to fight off peer pressure when it comes her way and at times has been able to influence other not to go in a direction that could hurt them. If leadership is influence, Joyce is especially that because she is responsible for helping a lot of her peers when they were facing though challenges in their young lives. As a leader, Joyce is very humble among her friends and they seem to respect that attribute. She is not a judgmental person among her peers and they appear to draw to her because of that. There are many situations in the past among her friends where there have been problems that could not be solved but Joyce stepped up to the plate and solved them.
Growing up the best way to teach Joyce about leadership among friends was by first telling her why ethics and individuality are really significant. Showing Joyce how going along with her peers blindly can be damaging for her in the long run so she learned that early on. As parents, we understood forcing rules into Joyce will not be helpful at all; it was important that she would see the motives and advantages of being a strong-willed person when she is among her peers and at this stage in her life, she appears to be doing that. Joyce was taught that leaders are the ones that would need to be most pro-active individuals in any group so you must teach him to continuously take the inventiveness what Joyce seems to do when she is with her friends. As a little girl, we showed Joyce real life examples how being self-controlled and being hands-on has made a difference in her leadership skills with people. because of having good leadership skills, I have seen Joyce become very effective at making right decisions at the right time among her peers. Joyce at a very young age is learning how to learn from her experiences at what she does as a leader. Leaders are well-informed, and as a leader that is the way Joyce personality has blossomed into as a young teenager.
Of course there are times when Joyce is a team player among her friends but she holds just as much contribution as influence when she is not. Being a team player among her friends is sometimes a spot that she does find to be comfortable at time. Her he can relax but help bring ideas to things that are going on. During group projects that her friends may do together from school, she is the one that a lot of them go to for brainstorming since Joyce is the one that comes up with a lot of ideas when others are having a hard time trying to bring solutions to problems. When Joyce is operating as team players she is most certainly the one that has some answers to solutions. She is pretty much interested in being a problem solver.
7. Describe your child's relationship with his/her family.
Joyce lives in a very traditional, warm family. Her relationship with parents is very close. We discuss all kinds of topic, as such school, economic, history and news. During the presidential election, we would discuss whom should we vote for.
Just as I have mentioned she cares for others, every night before she went to bed, she always comes to my office to hug me say good night to me. Since I often work until very late to figure out complex technical issue, when she says good night to me, she often reminds me to sleep early.
Her mom quit her professional career 5 years ago and decided to stay home to provide better care for the kids. Currently, every morning, Joyce would print out her iPhone case order and her mom will pack it and drop them at the post office.
Joyce has a 7 years old brother. He is quite different from Joyce. He likes computer programming, math and science so much. Sometimes, she asked her brother to help her pack the iPhone case into the envelop. After he finished, she would give him a ten dollar bill.
8. Does your child receive any tutoring or academic enrichment outside of the classroom? If so, please explain.
No. She has lots of other activities, such as skating, dancing, gymnastic as well as church activities.
9. Describe any service or volunteer activities you have been involved in within your community or schools.
Most of our volunteer activities are with the church. My wife helps out in school often. I am a member of Texas Disaster Relief Rescue. Looking forward to have opportunity to serve in Greenhill.
10. Please feel free to make any additional comments which provide further insight about your child.
Joyce is a very unique child with very good business skill and she is good at art too. She started her business all by her own and become very successful in three months. I can give her very limited advice since in the era of Internet since my knowledge is pretty outdated. As she going into high school, I think she needs to focus more on the academic and prepare to go to a good university. The next 4 years is very critical for her. Although she fully understands her primary task is academic studies and she tries to limit her time on her phone case business to 30 minutes a day, I think a going to a good private school like Greenhill will be able to assure her priority on academic.
Joyce is also a problem solver as I have mentioned earlier. Some would call Joyce an “insightful” problem solver. She normally does score pretty high on verbal and general reasoning type of questions which many do who are problem solvers. Sometimes she is good in determining longitudinal type of relationships. Joyce is good at doing a lot of research in making sure that the problem that she is trying to solve has a lot of information to support it.
As a problem-solver Joyce does normally has a good fix on reality. As a young teenager she does not spend a lot of time in dreamland or some daydream type of, wondering about what could have been or may have been if circumstances had been different. Joyce is a type of teen to go make something happen if it is not happening. If a problem needs to be solved, she is the first one to jump aboard to do the best she can to solve it.
Joyce is normally not the type of person that is going to just sit around gripe and complain. She is not the type of teenager that makes trouble for other people. She is more of a helpful type of person and is always eager to lend a helping hand.
Joyce by some of her teacher is also looked at as person that is a self-starter. Joyce has never been the type of person to wait for someone else to point out there is a problem or that something is wrong. Joyce is also as mentioned previously, not the kind of person that is going to wait for someone else to tell them how things need to be fixed.
As a problem-solver, Joyce is not the type of person that goes around keeping a list of complaints. Joyce is very level headed and knows how to ask for help if she needs to. She is not afraid to say “I don’t know” or “I am not sure how to solve this thing.”
A lot of times Joyce is a type of person that will sit there and engage her imagination in order for her to come up with new solutions that they may be able to try out, and she does have the bravery to go forward to see if she was right or wrong.
As a problem-solver Joyce is not the type of teenager that goes around look to others for guarantees that cannot be conveyed. She appears to be smart enough at her age to figure out that is not effective or helpful to her. Joyce even at her young age is very aware of who does and does not make the right decisions for her wellbeing, but will try to work with people who do have her best interest.
Joyce is a type of girl that has a very humbles spirit about herself. She is not proud or boastful but lets other people say good things about her instead of her doing it herself. She does not like that much of attention of the spotlight being shined on her but instead likes to hand in the back where she is not noticed that much. This is a very modest behavior about her.
Joyce is a type of problem-solving teenager that does not mind and is really capable of allying herself with others so that if an issue goes beyond her personal aptitude, she is easily able to make use of the abilities of others.
11. Please describe your daughter's study habits.
Joyce finished her homework on time most of the time. She prepared for the exam in advance too. She does her homework by herself and sometimes she discusses with classmates through IPhone’s face time.
Other things that Joyce does to make sure that she has sound study habits is finding a nice quiet place to study. She is learning that this time really makes a difference in her grades. This time has also helped her to become more disciplined. ~
She is also now learning to organize all of her materials so everything is not so over whelming for her. Joyce is now learning how to make a check list so that she can be organized in her studies.She has also developed a habit of trying to study way ahead of time in order to be familiar in with the test. This way Joyce is aware of what is on the test and she is able to develop some strategies ahead of time to be prepared.Another thing that Joyce has been learning to do was preparing her time wisely. Joyce is learning early how to plan her time in order for to be able to get some other things done on time. This has really helped her not to be able to get other school work done.
12. What are your daughter's special interests and extracurricular activities?
She has been skating since she is 6 year old. She also takes dance class for 7 years. She learned playing piano for 5 years. Now she also spends part of her spare time running her phone case business.
13. In order to assist us with our daily academic, fine arts, or athletic programs, describe any condition that might affect your daughter's participation.
Joyce has very broad interest and she is very easy going. Many people call her a very independent young lady and she is very faithful and when starting something, will make sure that it is followed through on. I do not foresee any condition would prohibit her from participation.
