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Career Coaches in High School
Tweet Share on Facebook March 21, 2008 Comment (5)Do high school students need career coaches? A Virginia newspaper's profile of a recently hired career coach raises the question for me. It sounds as though the coach is probably a great asset to the school, offering students various interest assessments as well as giving them a good look at the training and requirements of different careers.
But I do wonder how early students should be defining their career paths. My father always told his kids—there are four of us—to study what we loved or what interested us in college, rather than prepare for our careers. Elsewhere in Virginia, however, career coaches are being deployed in high schools to combat some worrisome statistics: More than a quarter of the state's students entering ninth grade don't graduate within four years, and more than half of those students don't move on to postsecondary education. The results look quite good. The Winchester Star reports that in high schools with career coaches, 40 percent of students who lacked college plans now have them.
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When Your Boss Is a Hypocrite
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2008 Comment (1)Of all the things Eliot Spitzer has been labeled in the past two weeks, none seem to have been used with such frequency as "hypocrite."
The self-named "steamroller"—a seeming paragon of moral rectitude and righteous indignation as New York's attorney general and then governor—was reduced to being "Client 9." The man who had overseen the takedown of a sophisticated Staten Island prostitution ring in 2004 was now called out as a customer of call girls. He has a wife. He has kids. And he had a state at stake.
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A Dream Job's Dark Underbelly
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2008 CommentAnother dream job bites the dust. This time, New York Times reporter Kim Severson shares an ugly truth about food writing, which is, of course, the sort of gig that seemed impervious to ugly truths. But it turns out that one can try too many morsels of pork belly and duck foie gras terrine and end up with a serious health problem:
If 1960s Las Vegas had its Rat Pack and 1980s cinema its Brat Pack, early 21st century food has its Fat Pack....
The journalists, bloggers, chefs and others who make up the Fat Pack combine an epicure's appreciation for skillful cooking with a glutton's bottomless-pit approach. Cramming more than three meals into a day, once the last resort of a food critic on deadline, has become a way of life. If the meals center on meat, so much the better.
