A Back to School Bulletin Board Really Got My Daughter on Track

My daughter has always struggled to keep on task when it comes to her schoolwork. We have tried to get her planners and decorated notebooks to keep track of what she needs to do every day, and it just doesn't seem to work. Last year, my wife and I were at the end of our wits when we came across a back to school bulletin board, and to our great delight, it really helped her improve academically.

The great thing about a back to school bulletin board is that you do not have to open it. It seems kind of funny to me, but to my daughter, she would use the planners and notebooks for a while, and then they would get tossed to the side with all of her other books, note pads and general clutter. Out of frustration, my wife and I went to a local department store one day and looked for anything that might help our daughter keep to task, and that is when we first saw a back to school bulletin board.

It was about two by three feet in size, and it had the entire month printed out in days along with several lines down below for notes. My wife jokingly said we should get it for her, but I immediately thought it could be something that really benefited her. It was not that expensive, so we decided to give it a try.

When we brought home the back to school bulletin board, my wife and I explained that we had been concerned about our daughter's lack of organization when it came to schoolwork. She sighed and nodded, apparently more eager to get us out of her bedroom than to hear what we had to say. We showed her the back to school bulletin board, and she actually seemed impressed.

We showed her all of the features and told her that we knew there was no way she could miss this every day and that it certainly could not be tossed in among her other books and folders. I even agreed to mount it for her wherever she wanted it in her room.

To our great delight, my daughter used her back to school bulletin board daily, and it was always filled with writing about certain assignments or projects that needed to get done, and how she was going to work on this part of the assignment on these days. It was brilliant.

My wife and I watched as our daughter became more organized and her grades steadily improved, and it was all thanks to the back to school bulletin board we bought when we were at the point of grasping for straws. I am quite proud of her, and quite grateful for the instrument that helped her achieve her full potential.

New Lesson Plans for High School coming in 2014 will Change the Way Children Think

In a popular piece in the New York Times earlier this year, the writer spoke of an ambitious project to reform lesson plans in India where young children would for the first time, be asked to write their own stories to help them think for themselves. While that has been something that's always been done in America, there are those who feel that we may be falling behind in our efforts to help high school children think creatively and on their own. A new experiment in lesson plans for high school in New York tries to address this concern.

Lesson plans for high school usually involve having children read something and then summarizing it on their own - an exercise in reading comprehension. While all that has been useful, one does have to admit that such a plan doesn't stretch the child too much. Everything the child needs to know is right before her and all she needs to do is to paraphrase. The new lesson plans involve assignments where students need to formulate complex thoughts on complex subjects drawing information from a variety of sources. Students, for instance, might find themselves faced with an assignment where they need to write about what it means to have freedom of the press. For this, the teacher asks them to watch Citizen Kane, read up about how in places as far apart as China and Egypt, the authorities clamp down on Facebook the moment they smell trouble, and watch a documentary about a public protest in the 80s against the intellectual Noam Chomsky, and his position on freedom of speech to do with ideas expressed that are deeply offensive to most people.

By the year 2014, if everything goes as expected with these experimental lesson plans for high school, this could be the way all children in America learn. A curriculum standard of this kind is called, the Common Core. Most states have signed up for the new standards - and one hopes that they will help students do a lot more than merely learn math formulas and so on.

The country now finds itself in a situation where the No Child Left Behind law, that punishes schools for failing its students, is seen to be completely inadequate. Schools merely lower their standards when they find that they can't educate their children adequately. President Obama plans to completely revamp the law, and the common core will be a big part of that effort.

The new lesson plans for high school will require that by 12th grade, students already work at college level so that colleges no longer need to impose any bridge courses on their freshman. If a student is asked to read a book, her job will not be to summarize what she's read; it will be to analyze what she's read and come out with new conclusions. If the student has to present something to a class, it won't be just about how she seems to understand what she's learned. She also has to find a way to present it so persuasively that she wins other students over to her point of view. Students will have to find out how when you read something, the writer could have biases.

As ambitious as all these are though, implementation is where everything usually falls by the wayside. Let's hope that the new common core system actually works.

Why are there so Few People Applying to Law School Now?

For the longest time, American presidents have been graduates of the country's top law schools (and our current president was a professor there after having graduated). Legal dramas and movies on TV have always glamorized a profession in the bar out of all reason; and lawyers, if they came out of a reputable law school, could pretty much depend on a life that didn't depart that far from movie depictions - lots of money, exquisite company perks and a great place in society. Those applying to law school today may need to pay attention to the changed narrative that life as a lawyer in today's world.

In a Wall Street Journal review, they’ve found that the shine is quickly wearing off. At no time in the last 10 years have applications to law schools been this slow. About 12% fewer people are interested in a career in the law. Certainly, the public interest in any field of study waxes and wanes from time to time. As far as the law has been concerned though, the general trend has always been upward. Why, people didn't stop applying to law school even through the recession. In fact, 20% more people took the LSAT in 2008. And schools reported an extra burst of applications.

Which is saying a lot. Law schools were cheap to build and to run. You don't need expensive labs, equipment or anything. The country can just build new law schools whenever demand hits. And demand overwhelmed even such ready availability. So why are so many disillusioned with the law as a profession?

Over the last few years, fresh law school graduates have found the going tough in the job market. Law school can be crushingly expensive; these fresh graduates who come out looking for jobs need a reasonable pay scale so that they can expect to pay their student loans back. All they find now are hundreds of applicants for each opening at any law firm. Thousands today are willing to accept mere legal assistant positions for pay by the hour - often at a level that's not far above minimum wage.

One additional possible explanation for this state of affairs could be that since the economy is improving a little bit (unemployment is down by half a percentage point) there could be more people heading for the job market than to graduate school. This is an enduring trend in any country. When job prospects seem to look up, more people think of jumping headfirst into the job market and putting off studying further.

But most of the damage seems to have been done by the constant barrage of reporting from respected journals like the New York Times that have tried to expose the law school as nothing but a waste of time and money that doesn't get anyone anywhere. The keep writing about how since legal automation has become very popular, businesses have just stopped paying lots of money to lawyers to help them do legal research. That's been a great source of employment for fresh lawyers for a long time. With that gone, new lawyers really have no workable alternative. Why would anyone go around applying to law school anymore?

The Much-Disliked Medical School Admissions Test gets an Overhaul

Have you ever spoken to a young person who’s hopeful of becoming a qualified doctor? Usually, they speak in glowing terms about all they hope to achieve in life in the medical profession and how well they have been doing at preparing for med school one day. When the conversation comes around to preparation for the Medical College Admission test or the MCATs, you will usually catch a sharp drop in the kind of enthusiasm say feel. What is it about the medical school admissions test that doctor hopefuls dislike so much?

The medical school admissions test is a standardized exam that requires a great deal of mastery of the pre-medical curriculum area. Usually, young people hopeful of a place in med school don't just study hard to merit a seat. They sign up for a great deal of extracurricular work. They work as an assistant to a doctor, volunteer at hospitals, and so on. The kind of requirements that medical school admissions tests place on them, they usually have to give up all kinds of extracurricular work and devote themselves entirely to studying their physics, chemistry and biology texts. This becomes a point of contention. They feel that the whole admissions process has its focus on the wrong priorities. How sensible can it be to require a potential doctor to give up working to help people so that they can study? Isn't it an ability to care for people that makes a good doctor?

The MCAT is a test they call the SATs for doctor hopefuls. It's been around for about 80 years now. Back then, the test was all about making sure that an applicant for med school was always someone who was really interested in medicine. They had a lot of trouble back then with people applying for med school, and then realizing halfway on that they weren't interested in medicine after all. The test has really been successful; of the 20,000 med school students taken on each year, only a handful quit.

While the med school admissions test might be successful at separating the truly serious medical students from the non-serious, it does absolutely nothing to predict what candidate actually cares about people or who is ethically superior. For this reason, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the body that administers the test is about to make a major change to the way the MCAT is run. They want to test students now for their personal philosophies, their ethics and their sense of fairness.

Some people are worried about the wisdom of tampering with a successful formula. They feel that whether or not someone wants to help people isn't important. That's a quality that's in abundance in the general population. People who just love to help people are almost never in a position to do that. Helping people comes from having the power to help people; it doesn't come from a mere willingness to do it. Still, they're going through with the change. The new MCAT will run in a couple of years.