No one will hold you hand in grad school. You need to focus fully on what you want. If you want to be in business, suck it up.

I finished masters and PhD in 6 years by keeping my eyes on the ball and being sure to hang out with the other grad students who were on the ball. Not the ones who went to bars on the weekend, who sat around and bitched, etc. The ones who worked.

Undergrad was a breeze. Graduate school requires a type of discipline some people find painful. It is not for everyone, but it is not hell. Demanding professors are not evil. They simply expect you to work as hard as they did.

When you get your MBA from a top school, door open all over the place. The pain is worth it. The problem is today that too many schools place social over discipline and tough academic preparation. It creates a real problem when people who are not used to working very hard actually run into those issues.

I begged off events because of midterms while in graduate school. I had a boyfriend have fits because he did not understand why I couldn't drop everything to be with him. In the words of my advisor "Men come and go; a grad degree is forever. You have the brains, talent, discipline and drive for this. If he does not understand that, get rid of him." He was absolutely right. I loved my studies. Not always my classes. My life is tremendously better for having a PhD. I am doing what I want to do.

But I don't do as well as I'd like because the professors can't teach and the textbooks don't reduce things to understandable terms.

It's not the professors or the book because other people do succeed. It's you. Suck up and WORK. It's amazing the grad students who whine that their first semester and a semester later figure out that if they read the texts before going to class it makes so much more sense. Or they have a moment of serendipity and figure out that it all goes together.

For many students, graduate school is the first time in their lives that they are not coddled. Oh, the whining and the screaming!

How does a clerk check the ID of a woman in a burqua or a niqua? Or a police officer at a traffic stop? How do we track people for security purposes in crowds to prevent bombings (women can be suicide bombers). If we have information a femal terrorist is going to be a certain place (say Mall of America) and there are many women in burquas (not the veils of the scarves, because you can see faces) how can we check identity and try to head off a bomb?

The burqua and the niqua muffles sound and distorts words. It is hard to hear. In societies advocating them, schooling is segregated to facilitate education. We do not have resources to build segregated facilities here because these women want to cover their mouths. What about if that woman is in an accident? Does anyone really think emergency personnel are going to not uncover her face? Frist responders check pulse on neck and wrist. SHouldn't medical outweigh religious preference?

It is a practical identification and communication issue, not a race issue. A yarmulke does not interfere with identification. The niqua and the burqua do. The politicalization of the two garments is covering the base problems of practicality.

It's not about choice. You do not have the right to mask your identity. The state has a profound safety and health interest in clear communication and easy facila recognition. That really outweighs every other argument to me.

If they want to cover their body, fine. The face has to be uncovered for security and communication reasons. No religious rationale is going to outweigh that. It's a secular issue, and in some things where secular and sacred clash, the sacred has to give weigh.

If you do an ERIC search, or an education search at an academic library, you will find that most of the meta analysis find single sex schools to be an effective alternative. SOme kids are distracted or overly involved in gender roles. A number of parents prefer single sex education. Girls especially seem to benefit, but black boys do measurably better as well.

It is a good choice. Just like with everything, it should not replace co-ed, but it would be effective to have it for those students whose personalities would benefit.

We should READ the Koran and see what it says. Slate has a writer "blogging the Bible", chapter by chapter. It's a great start for a reasonable discussion. I prefer that to reading books about the book.

In Wisconsin and Minnesota, sex offenders are being pushed to small town and rural areas under the idea that the density is less. In my small town the offender numbers are exploding (5,000 now for 55,000 residents). None of these people committed crimes here. They are all from large urban areas, but they are being released up here.

While the definition is overly broad, the hard core level 3s are the most likely to re-offend, and they are the ones most often encouraged into rural areas. They also are not able to be "cured". There is no cure.

For level three offenses and offenders, I would support life imprisonment. I would also support it for adults going after 14 year olds. They ruin those kids lives. Mary LeTourneau screwed up that kid's life just as much as any male. He was 13.

Constrict the number of crimes for the term "sex offender". Put in "romeo and juliet" clauses. But let's not act like monitoring sex offenders is eating up great amounts of resources. For the large urban areas, it's an afterthought. They spend rather little. It's in the rural areas that are now getting concentrated numbers that resources are beginning to get burned.