Many seniors feel pressured to go straight from high school to college, but Camden Olson, who graduated from the Latin School of Chicago in the US last year, didn’t give in. She decided to spend a gap year-taking a year off before college-raising a guide dog for Guiding Eyes for the Blind in Maine. The non - profit provides trained guide dogs to blind and visually - impaired (视力障碍的) people. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do.” Olson said.

It is becoming more and more popular among American teenagers to have a gap year. Some students use the year off to figure out what they want to do: travel the world or save money for college.

Olson is using her time to follow a passion she’s had since 7th grade. For years, she kept an eye on guide dog services until she came across the opportunity at Guiding Eyes. With support from her friends, family and teachers, Olson went for it. Olson’s volunteer work centers around Derby, a one-year-old black dog.

“My job is to raise him to be well-mannered and socialized,” she said. “Guide dogs can’t be distracted. They go everywhere with their visually-impaired owner. They give a blind person a lot of support, too.”

Of course, there’s an end in sight for Derby and Olson’s close bond. When Derby celebrates his own graduation, Olson will have to say goodbye to him.

“No doubt there will be tears, but, if he passes, I will be so happy for him to become a working dog,” she said.

While some do not agree that gap years are a good choice, Olson said she’s seen major success. In fact, she’ll be attending Princeton University soon and is thinking about majoring in biology.

“I think I’m already so much more mature than I was,” she said. “So many kids come back from gap years a lot more focused and prepared.”

An 18-year-old girl from Austria is taking her parents to court for posting over 500 photos of her on Facebook since 2009, without her permission.

Anna Meier has apparently become fed up with her parents refusal to take down intimate and embarrassing photos of her dating back to when she was a toddler, and is now seeking justice in court.

She said that when she was 11 years old, her parents started sharing photos of her with several hundreds of Facebook friends, without ever asking if it was alright with her. “They didn’t care whether it was a picture of me sitting on the toilet or lying naked in my cot – every stage was photographed and then made public,” she said. The girl added that she was only able to see the photos posted on Facebook by her parents when she was 14, after setting up her own account on the world’s most popular social network. Angry and upset, Anna asked her mother and father to remove the over 500 photos of her immediately, but they refused. She kept asking them over the years, but faced with constant refusal, she felt that she had no other way to coerce them than taking them to court. Which she did as soon as she turned 18, this year.

Although Anna is convinced that her right to privacy has been violated, her parents, on the other hand, see nothing wrong with posting baby photos of her. However, a German law firm advises parents not to post photos of children on Facebook without   their   consent.   Apart   from   legal   consequences   and   subsequent   compensation,   they   also   risk   making   their children-especially those of school age-targets for cyber-bullying(网络暴力).

Sometimes one plus one does equal three, as was the case when Dave McNee met Claudia Mandekic 14 years ago. McNee was at a dentist appointment in Toronto when he chatted with Mandekic, who was studying to be a teacher. When she told McNee what a headache it was to get students excited about math, he made a surprising suggestion, “Why not throw in something they enjoy, like sports?”

The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first shot in 2011, when the colleagues were invited to run a summer-school program for kids who’d failed Grade 9 math at Georges Secondary School.

When the students showed up for their first day, they weren’t exactly thrilled. Over the next few hours, Mandekic and McNee gave the kids techniques to improve their shooting while also helping them calculate their field-goal percentage, which, in turn, taught them about fractions (分数). The winning team would be determined based on which group had the highest total percentage and had done the most efficient math. “When the bell rang, they were so fixated on collecting their data and figuring out which team won that they didn’t leave,” says Mandekic. “I realized we might be onto something.”

The classes, later named BallMatics, soon spread to other Toronto schools. “I was terrible at math,” says Duane Douglas, an 8th grader. “But once I started BallMatics and realized the sport I loved was directly tied to math, it made me a lot better at it. Every time I played basketball, I was thinking about math.”

McNee and Mandekic have established a private high school called Uchenna Academy since 2019, where kids with excellent basketball skills can study all subjects, train at their sport and work part-time.

The value of BallMatics is clear: last year, the boys landed university scholarships for their performance in the classroom, not on the court. McNee and Mandekic believe the school’s commitment to academics is the key reason why it’s been a winner.