If you could design your own school and study whatever you wanted, what would you choose to learn?

This isn’t an unlikely question for students at Monument Mountain Regional High School, who are taking part in an activity called the Independent Project. The program is a special school within the Massachusetts public high school that’s completely run by students—no teachers, parents, or adults are allowed—and they’re in charge of deciding their whole curriculum (课程).

These teens’ homework and what they study in the classroom are all totally up to them. Charles Tsai, a journalist, made a 15-minute film about the project that shows the wide variety of activities different students join.

Students aren’t taking this lightly—instead of reacting irresponsibly to the freedom to design their own studies, they’re dealing with their own interests by writing poetry collections, learning instruments and taking flight lessons.

The program is this: On Mondays students come up with questions in relation to one of their school subjects, then they spend the rest of the week researching and coming up with possible conclusions to these questions. On Fridays, they present this information to their classmates.

“I think the more choices we have in our school, the more students we will help develop into the kind of citizens that we need,” Principal (校长) Marianne Young explains in the film.

In the video, teens express their satisfaction with the program because it holds different kinds of learners, even those who don’t always succeed in a traditional study situation.

“I have difficulty in reading and writing. School has always been a big problem for me,” one student named Sergio explains in the video. “If it were not for this program, I don’t know if I’d be graduating—I don’t know where I’d be right now. I think this has really been my savior (救星) and got me through the last two years of high school.”

Often people use laptops (笔记本电脑) on trains and airplanes, in airports and hotels. These laptops connect people to their workplace. In the United States today, laptops also connect students to their classrooms.

Westlake College in Virginia will start a laptop computer program that allows students to do schoolwork anywhere they want. Within five years, each of the 1,500 students at the college will receive a laptop. The laptops are part of a $10 million computer program at Westlake,   a 110-year-old college. The students with laptops will also have connection with the Internet. Besides, they will be able to use email to “speak” with their teachers, their classmates, and their families. However, the most important part of the laptop program is that students will be able to use computers without going to computer labs. They can work with it at home, in a fast-food restaurant or under the trees^_anywhere at all!

Because of the many changes in computer technology, laptop use in higher education, such as colleges and universities, is workable (可行的). As laptops become more powerful, they become more similar to desktop computers. Also, the portable computers can connect students to not only the Internet, but also libraries and other resources. State higher education officials are studying how laptops can help students. State officials are also testing laptop programs at other universities, too.

A new study, published in Music Education Research, examined whether an extended music education had an impact on pupils’ experienced satisfaction with school. Nearly 1,000 pupils at ten Finnish schools with extended music classes and comparison classes participated in a survey that measured the quality of school life at Year 3 and Year 6.

According to the results, the differences between the extended music classes and the comparison classes were significant at Year 6. But there were no differences between the groups at Year 3. The most likely explanation is the amount of music lessons which was four hours per week for the extended music classes and one lesson per week for the normal classes.

Merely attending an extended education class at Year 3 did not cause differences in school satisfaction. To explore whether belonging to any extended education class would have the same benefits, some extended education classes that focus on visual arts and sports were recently included in the analysis. However, school satisfaction in these classes did not differ from that in the normal ones at Year 6.

"Singing in a choir and group performance are popular activities at extended music classes. Other studies have established that people find it very satisfying to synchronize (合拍)with one another. That increases connection within the group and may even make people like each other. Other objects in the school do not have as much training in synchrony and cooperation as music lessons, which could explain part of the phenomenon,” says doctoral student Pävi-Sisko Eerola, at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

A particular answer may be that girls usually tend to give more positive scores on satisfaction with school and they also make up the majority of pupils at extended music classes. However, the gender differences do not fully explain the observed results. In fact, it seems that extended music classes improve the quality of school life more for boys than girls.

Maybe it’s impossible to adopt the Finnish music education system, but the benefits of having a few extra hours of art and self-expression via music every week are dramatic and necessary.