Signing up for classes comes down to three things:

First and foremost: The class you are required to take.

Number two: What time the class is offered (I most often would try to avoid those awful 8 a.m. classes).

Lastly, who is teaching the class.

The professor teaching the class may be the last thing you’re thinking about, but it should be the second after what class is required for you to take. There are also plenty of ways to figure out exactly what you’re getting yourself into when you sign up for a particular professor.

Many college offer teacher evaluations as part of the course sign up process. That is, if your school offers registration online.

If your college doesn’t offer teacher evaluations over the internet, you can always check some of my favorite sites to see what other people are saying about your professor.

My favorite for reviews is RateMyProfessor.com. This website has over 10 million comments from users about professors at over 6,000 schools. This one is good because you can see what other people think about the professor, but this is just like a teacher evaluation program offered by any college only when you post something, it stays on the website. Many colleges end up taking down the most negative comments from their evaluations.

My overall favorite site has to be PickAProf.com, its now part of MyEdu.com. On this site you can see how other people did in the class grade-wise. This can really help in deciding if you want to take a teacher who barely passes anyone, or one who will pass more than 3/4 of the class. This one actually really helped me in picking a professor for some of my harder classes.

Yesterday Southwest Airlines announced that it wanted to test some new environmentally friendly materials on a refurbished airplane that they are dubbing the “green plane.” The measures to create the environmentally friendly, recycled plane would cut the weight on an airplane and would save the company over $10 million in fuel costs if it changed all its planes to the more environmentally friendly materials.

Measures include making things such as life vest pouches and carpet more environmentally friendly. It actually shaves off about 472 pounds from each plane. With that much shaved off of the weight, each plane could save 9,500 gallons of fuel per year. Even if fuel was $2 a gallon, that would be $19,000 of savings per year. Considering that the company has 540 planes, that’s where the $10 million in savings comes from.

Over the next six months the new materials will be tested not only to see how well they can hold up against everyday wear and tear but also to see how Southwest’s customers like them. If they do, the environmentally friendly materials will be used throughout the entire fleet.

Airplanes do use a lot of fuel and anything that a company can do to maybe push a get a little more mileage out of the fuel that it already uses would be beneficial for not only the company’s bottom line but also for the environment. I would like to see what these environmentally conscious materials are and what they look and feel like. Sometimes people go “overboard” with environmentally conscious and make everything green or make it look recycled. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.