It may be just a coolness factor for kids, but one classroom in Canada is getting a big boost in reading thanks to canine teaching assistants.

University of Alberta researcher Lori Friesen's says one Alberta classroom showed positive success when small children signed up for weekly reading or writing sessions with her and one of her dogs. During that time, they would read children's literature or work on the student's writing.

A thirteen year old girl from Montana was visiting family in the Denver area. The sight of a huge cloud of smog in the sky made the girl think, “Oh my gosh! What are we doing?” This shocking discovery led to an interest in renewable energy.

Today, that young lady is Chandra Macauley and she's a student at Montana State University majoring in chemical engineering. In 2009, she studied abroad in Sweden where she experienced a new perspective on renewable energy that showed her promising results she felt could serve as a model for renewable energy development in the United States. She disagrees with people that say going green isn't economical because an entire country is proving that renewable energy is a viable solution.

It’s been a little more than two years since I finished my master’s in psychology, and I was looking through some of the work I’d done in my social psychology class when I ran across a discussion post on implicit and explicit norms. At the time I was an adjunct instructor in developmental reading and writing; I've just this semester moved to a full-time English instructor position.

The piece remains of interest to me, both because of my role as an instructor and as mom to three on the spectrum. Explicit norms are for obvious reasons easy to grasp; they’re the rules that are clearly stated; implicit norms are much harder, especially for folks who have difficulty with socially-based learning.