Strategies for Academic Success

As an immigrant from Mexico, I know the importance of competent academic coaching, healthy mentorship and sustained role-model guidance.  I am bilingual, bi-cultural, and I attended a public high school (Pierce High School) in Arbuckle, a small agricultural community in Northern California.  In spite of growing up in a humble migrant farm-worker family, I found a way to attend and succeed at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

After a fulfilling and diverse career in university administration, public school teaching, business consulting and practicing law, I made the decision to exclusively dedicate the rest of my life to improving the academic success of Latino youth–in recognition of and as a response to the enormously devastating impact of the Latino Education Gap.  That is why I founded OjoOido.com PBC, a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation.

OjoOido.com is a Latino e-learning website that delivers a blended multimedia curriculum to develop core study habits and skills for Latino youth.  Latino youth and parents, receive sustained coaching and training on how to competently negotiate the public school system.  OjoOido.com’s innovative approach is targeted, relevant, and transformative.

I believe that one of the most powerful ways to reduce the Latino high school dropout rate, increase college attendance and improve college graduation rates, is by targeting a root problem: the minimal or complete absence of academic study strategies for the vast majority of Latino youth.  OjoOido.com addresses this failure to provide the Latino student population access to comprehensive and culturally relevant technical academic skills coaching and training.

Latino youth are resourceful, talented and capable.  Latino families value education and aspire to be productive and informed citizens.  The first strategy of academic achievement is to recognize that you are responsible for your own learning.  Most Latino students want to be a part of a different and better world, but often they do not know how.  Study strategies are rarely taught or for that matter discussed by teachers, especially at the middle school and high school level.   Teachers must be content driven and normally expect students to devise their own approach to negotiating the academic workload or depend on parents for this direction.

OjoOido.com inculcates what it means to be an independent learner and the value this has in later life as a lifelong learner to insure that Latino youth achieve.  OjoOido.com’s pragmatic and systematic study habits and skills pedagogy builds competent, confident, motivated and self-reliant students.   From my own experience as a student, educator and lawyer, I believe that all students must first understand the role motivation plays, how good you are at setting goals, managing your time and reflecting, in order to obtain academic success because it is those activities that will reveal to the student how she or he currently stands with regard to independent learning.  It is understanding the importance of these issues and implementing them which determines one’s attitude to work in middle school, high school, college and later.

By the teaching and implementation of study strategies, OjoOido.com trains Latino students to succeed far beyond what they currently perceive is possible and provide Latino parents the support needed to proactively prepare their children to become engaged and competitive public school students.

The current OjoOido.com Latino Role Models—Lou Gonzales, Mario Olivares, Anthony Munoz, Edwin Aguilar, Lindsey Olivares—and I know first hand what is required for Latino youth to become competent public school students.  Our background mirrors that of an overwhelmingly high percentage of Latino students in the United States.  We know the obstacles that our Latino youth face in successfully negotiating the public school system.  Therefore, we have used our collective practical wisdom, expertise, creativity and impassioned zeal to create a blended multimedia student development pedagogy that Latino serving institutions and its administrators, teachers, parents and most importantly, its students can utilize to improve educational attainment.

Our backgrounds demonstrate that we are persistent, driven and passionately believe that all students can – and will succeed – with the opportunity to learn and grow; regardless of cultural or socio-economic obstacles that may stand in their way.  Throughout our lives we have demonstrated a record of problem solving, creating, developing and executing tactical and strategic planning to successfully achieve our goals.  Our life-long passionate interest in and involvement in educational programs designed to strengthen under-resourced Latino students’ ability to succeed in challenging academic environments has lead us to create OjoOido.com; a sustainable, replicable and scalable Latino e-learning solution–by Latinos, for Latinos.