Everybody loves a contest, especially when it involves winning a case of ramen noodles. ClassesandCareers.com has launched a new blog called College Life particularly for college students and college students at heart. To kick things off properly, we are holding the Student Scavenger Contest 2009,which challenges students to present as many ideas on how to get free or cheap chow as possible. Whoever turns in the most ideas will win one $100 restaurant gift card, a $200 Walmart gift Card, and a case of ramen noodles.

We dreamed up this crazy challenge one day while reminiscing about all the wild things we did during school to get three square meals a day. I used to go to fast food joints at closing time and offer the manager all the change I had in exchange for all the stuff they hadn’t sold that day. For $4.27, I could get two days worth of Big Macs, McRibs, french fries, and Quarter Pounders with Cheese. Sad, yes. Desperate, absolutely. But it makes for a wonderful yarn later.

Another wonderful one I heard of was a gentleman who, finding his cupboard contained only a can of corn niblets and a tiny mound of dust bunnies, called his friends together for a potluck. He made sure to call the best cooks around. When the potluck came, he heated up his corn niblets, adding in a small lump of butter, which he borrowed from his roommate, for good measure. His friends brought lasagna, bratwurst sausages, and a heap of other delectables. All went home gorged and content. Some even left some leftovers with our protagonist. And our protagonist lived to fight another day. Truly, he was a Student Scavenger, inventive, sly, and a tad bit unprincipled.

So that’s what this contest is all about: commemorating all the crazy things we resort to in order to get some food when money is stretched. You can tweet your ideas or post them on Facebook as long as you link back to our blog. You can leave your ideas as a comment on our blog. You can even film yourself demonstrating your idea and post it on YouTube for a bonus. The most entries wins, with videos getting extra weight.

If you want to join the contest and earn the honor of being a genuine Student Scavenger, go to the contest page to get started.

President Obama is claiming that children in the U.S. spend too little time at school.  He is proposing that the school day be lengthened or the summer break shortened.  In comparison to other countries, American students are not reaching the mark and steps need to be taken to ensure that we remain competitive in education.

The president acknowledges that the idea isn’t popular with his daughter’s Malia and Sasha or in his family, but "we must face the challenges of a new century demand for more time in the classroom.”  The president wants schools to last longer in the day, stay open late, and be open on the weekends so that kids have a safe place to go when they don’t have classes.

Our school system is set upon an agrarian economy because that’s what our country started out as.  America is no longer an agrarian society so the seasons shouldn’t predict the school year.  Kids today are not out "working the fields" said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Both the President and Education Secretary are enraptured by the idea of making schools longer.

Apparently several schools in Maryland have lengthened the school day and added over 300 hours in the past three years.  Students stay 3 hours longer each day. Initially, students didn’t like the additional hours but now admit they’ve learned a lot.  The results thus far seem to be positive.

Summer school has helped many students in the past. He believes that children could learn more if summer vacations were lengthened, plus they would have an easier time remembering what they had learned in the past.  Therefore,  teachers and students could progress much quicker because they are able to focus on learning new material rather than reviewing past lessons.

Adding to the school year is in complete opposition to what experts have been telling us about over scheduling children.  The president wants to not only make school days longer but also have a shorter summer vacation. Children already have to focus on school, homework, sports, musical instruments, friends, family and may now have to face more time in school. I realize that we need to keep up with what other countries are doing in the world if we are to maintain our standard of living and competitiveness in the marketplace, but where does it stop? 

Kids already juggle so much and there is a lot of responsibility placed upon them.  It seems like nowadays they don’t really get to experience childhood, because they are to busy doing other things.  All parents want their children to be geniuses.  Just look at all the materials you can buy to make your baby smarter.

Even as babies we are stressing the importance of learning and intelligence, so that they can be successful in life.  That’s good to a certain point, but I think sometimes parents have lost their focus on what’s really important and letting kids be kids.  They will be adults and have responsibilities soon enough.

We need children that are intelligent, but also have social skills and they can’t develop that if they always have their nose in a book. They need to be able to spend time with their friends and learn about life outside of the classroom.  Sometimes what they learn outside of school is more important.

So where is the balance between school and life when it comes to American kids? Is extending the school day and shortening summer really worth the cost? The major problem is that we have been scoring low on tests in comparison with other countries. What we need to do is find a way to be more efficient.  Score higher on tests and improve our learning methods while still maintaining an appropriate school day length.

In Brussels, Belgium two attempted bank robbers  used too much dynamite to try and crack open an ATM machine and were killed. They not only blew themselves up but half the bank. Police found the victims among the debris of the bank.  One victim had identification papers from Kosovo. The explosion happened in a town called Dinant which is a town just about 90 kilometers southeast of Brussels.

At 3:20 a.m. police arrived at the Record Bank. Residents reported a loud blast that wrecked a large part of the building.  Police shortly arrived to find half of the building missing. They immediately found one victim.  Apparently he had died shortly after the incident from head injuries but the second victim wasn’t found until later when firemen had removed much of the rubble from the site.

The prosecutor’s office said police had found large quantities of dynamite. Police experts believe the men had pumped gas from a canister through the letter-box and then set off the explosives before they could get to a safe distance. So not only did these robbers not get any money but they also lost their lives. Apparently this must have been their first attempt but it also became their last.

Because of the explosion and the amount of wreckage the entire building must be rebuilt. Police believe that there was a third would-be robber that escaped, and that the same group was most likely responsible for an attempted break-in at the local post office. The robbers must have decided that the bank was the best place to get the money. They may have been better off going with the post office; at least they might still be alive. 

Just a couple comments on this story; first of all if you were planning on robbing a bank, why wouldn’t you have studied this out first? They could have probably found out online or in a library or something about how to use explosives. There are lots of places a person can find information.

 All they had to do was spend a little time researching.  Plus an explosion is going to make a loud bang especially in the night so people are bound to wake up and call the police. These men needed to have put more time and thought into their plan, because this attempted robbery was one of the worst attempts in the history of bank robbing.