School

Kids who skip school in New York City may be answering to Magic Johnson. In order to get truant students to school, Mayor Bloomberg has launched an initiative that sends recorded celebrity messages to lackadaisical youngsters and encourages them to get to class. A New York Times report said:

The campaign, appropriately named "Wake Up! NYC," rolls out next week. It will focus on the 6,500 students who have been absent for 10 or more school days in a single year and attend one of the 25 schools whose principals volunteered to join the effort. If it yields results, it will be expanded citywide, where roughly 250,000 students miss at least one month of school in a given year, officials said.

Children who shake off school can grow into uneducated adults, so empowering people at the get-go is a common-sense approach. What do you think of this program?

This post was shared by reader glitter345 in our Ask Savvy group.

I am a recent college grad who has been searching for her dream job (or any job within my major) for months. Since graduation I have moved back home and am working at my parents' company. After college I had wanted to either work in my degree field or go on to get my masters. My parents have discouraged me from getting my masters and instead suggested I go for a law degree instead. I was hesitant, but decided to pursue it. Very soon I will be taking the LSAT law school admissions test, and I still don't know if I want to go to law school. As a back up plan, I started sending out my résumé to future employers, and I have received some responses for an interview. The job requires me to move to another state, but I am scared that if I tell my parents, they will accuse me of being wishy-washy about my life and about law school. I am not sure what to do. I want to follow my dream job, but I don't want to be a disappointment to my family, after all, they did help me pay for LSAT tutoring and the actual exam.

Ask anything career- or budget-related — well, almost anything — by posting your questions in the Ask Savvy group, and readers and I will weigh in to support you.

Mama only wants what's best for her tot, but is she within her rights to break the law to get there? With many of the nation's school systems in disarray, it's no surprise that parents will do whatever they can to give their kids the best education possible. In Akron, OH, a mother used her own father's address on school registration and free lunch forms to send her daughters to a better school. Last week, a judge found her guilty of record tampering and sentenced the single mom to 10 days in jail.

Ninety-six percent of LilSugar readers said they'd do anything – including breaking the law – to save their child's life. Some would say that education is the most important thing in a child's life. Should a parent be jailed for trying to give her lil one the best one available?

Just print your John Hancock here. It may sound funny, but given the current educational standards across the US, few tots may know how to sign their name by the time they graduate from high school. To date, 41 states have adopted the Common Core State Standards for English, a new set of standards students are expected to learn before graduation, which doesn't include cursive writing. Though 71 percent of LilSugar readers believe that script should still be taught, more states are removing it from their curriculum as they aren't assessed on kids' ability to use it, and there is more of a focus on learning the QWERTY keyboard. States like California and Massachusetts have added the longhand style of writing back into their schools, but Georgia will make a decision when administrators meet in March.

If your school doesn't require students to learn cursive, would you teach your children?

Who's to blame when a child misses too many school days? In West Virginia, a state senator thinks that parents should be held responsible and be punished if their lil ones are absent for 10 or more days. In a bill state Sen. Erik Wells will introduce to the state legislature, the parents of perpetually absent students will have their driver's licenses taken away for a few days. According to Wells, the bill is intended to increase awareness about the value of education. He said:

I think responsibility has to start somewhere and it is the parents' responsibility as parents to put the welfare of their child first, and one of those aspects is to get the child to school.

What's your opinion?

You've gotta fight, for your right . . . to keep your kids out of school? It sounds like a joke, but parents at a Staten Island, NY school are begging officials to close its doors after toxic chemicals were found in two classrooms. The town's mayor and school administrators argue that simply sealing off the two rooms where high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls were discovered will protect students from the carcinogen's ill effects. Parents are outraged and are calling for the school to be closed. Just how hard would you fight to keep your lil one's school safe?

Remember lining up in separate girl and boy lines in grade school? Or hearing the teacher say "Good morning, boys and girls"? These simple habits, which call attention to gender, are responsible for passing on narrow gender roles to children.

A study compared two types of classrooms: one in which the teacher never mentioned gender, using terms like "children" or "friends," and one in which the teacher called attention to gender. In the classrooms where teachers used gendered language, children were less likely to play with kids of the other gender and more likely to subscribe to stereotypes (such as only girls should play with dolls, and only boys can become firefighters), even though the teachers never mentioned such "rules" or had children compare themselves.

The developmental psychologist behind the study points out that we would never say "good morning black children and white children" and claims that segregating children by gender is as damaging as separating them based on race — so, no all-girls schools? The stereotypes can impact how kids judge what they're good at and what they want to do when they grow up.

While I think it's important for teachers to make sure that boys and girls interact with each other and know that their life choices won't be limited by their genders, do you think teachers should stop mentioning gender altogether?

If you want to get your MBA, Stanford Graduate School of Business is the crème de la crème. The ranks of illustrious alumni go on to become billionaires, founders or heads of multinational companies of which includes Yahoo!, Time Warner, BP, Gap, Nike, and more. Lizabeth Cutler, Stanford's Assistant Director of MBA Admissions, shed some helpful insight about the famous school. Her tips can definitely apply to other business schools as well!

SavvySugar: What are some of the misconceptions people have about business school? 

Lizabeth Cutler: You tell us! Seriously, this is hard to answer without knowing what other people think. Probably the biggest misconception we run into from applicants is that they need to have a separate “business” and “personal” persona. While this may be true at some schools, Stanford asks you to bring your whole self into the classroom, your GSB experience, and the application process. Our classes deal not only with finance, IT, and operations, but also about interpersonal dynamics, giving and receiving feedback, and leadership skills. You can’t manage an organization if you can’t manage people, and our curriculum and culture help you build the self-awareness and interpersonal skills to be an effective leader of people.

To hear more about the gender gap at the school and what kind of candidates stand out, read on.