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Grad school can be an overwhelming undertaking, from applying to your program to the challenging coursework. This guide can help you survive any issues that come to help make your transition into grad school, as well as your completion, as smooth as possible.

From an "interview Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, a distinguished professor of psychology, and a massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out."
1. Interleaving - focus on practicing different mini-skills, rather than trying to master one skill before moving on the next.
2. Vary your study location.
3. Spaced practice. Consider "taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard. You have to work for it. The more you work, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more awesome you can become."
4. Forget about forgetting.
Author: Garth Sundem, Wired Magazine, Jan 29, 2012

Should school boards be endorsing presidential candidates? That's the question I've posed to my School and Society class, and I'm curious to see their responses.

Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. "Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning," Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom "does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning."

At last week's dog-and-pony show, Duncan bemoaned how the U.S. is being outpaced in educational technology by countries such as South Korea and even Uruguay. ("We have to move from being a laggard to a leader" was his sound bite.)

Does Duncan ever read his own agency's material? In 2009, the Education Department released a study of whether math and reading software helped student achievement in first, fourth, and sixth grades, based on testing in hundreds of classrooms. The study found that the difference in test scores between the software-using classes and the control group was "not statistically different from zero." In sixth-grade math, students who used software got lower test scores — and the effect got significantly worse in the second year of use.

1. Focus on open-ended assignments and exams
2. Be an authentic role model