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As regular readers know, I have a bone to pick with the “credit hour.” Although it’s nearly ubiquitous in American higher education, its origins were pedestrian and it tells us nothing about actual learning.

Quick: What percentage of employers believes that the graduates of post-secondary education they hired in the past year have been adequately prepared for the job market?

The language we use matters when discussing the various players in the education ecosystem. Labels are never neutral, but rather carry with them a history of judgments, debates, and conclusions.

Tonight I watched the last installment of the Twilight films. Over the past four years this has become a tradition with the young woman I've been mentoring. She introduced me to the first Twilight film -- which I found surprisingly good -- and then I encouraged her to read the books. These were the first books she really enjoyed and I read them with her. She was a young teenager when we first began and now she's a lovely, mature young woman contemplating marriage.

One evening last month, I met up with a small group of young women, and went home feeling uplifted, happy and inspired. These are women I have known for many years, and they are more than dear to me. They are funny, smart, witty and adventurous. We have traveled together, had countless dinner parties together, gossiped, and learned together. The common bond between us (aside from a mutual affinity) is that I was once their professor and they were once my students.

In higher education there is no more well-known privacy law than the Family Education Rights Privacy Act, or "FERPA." Established in the 1970s to protect against abuses law enforcement made against students involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, this early public privacy law fits into type 3 of the five categories I established in earlier blogs.

This one’s a little bit self-indulgent, but I hope my wise and worldly readers will bear with me. I think the answers will be of wider interest.

I don't know much about K-12 education. Beyond the fact that I have two kids (8th and 10th grade) in our local public middle school and high school, and that I spent 12 years in public primary and secondary schools, my knowledge of the sector is embarrassingly skimpy.