19 April 2011

            Student-led PT rolled on today with a pretty fun workout.  Two airborne members teamed up to lead us through a workout that began with burpees, bear crawls, lunges, and a few ab workouts, and then transitioned to a full on sprint workout.  The sprint portion pitted chunks of the class together, which always makes things more interesting.

(At this point, you've probably completely stopped believing that I have an accurate handle on what "fun" means.  Speaking of that, don't sprints look fun??)

            Today marked the final day of legal assistance instruction, and the department made sure to place some classes with real impact on it.  The first of these was a two-hour block on the Civil Service Member Relief Act.  This is yet another act that provides substantial protections to service members.  It’s also an Act whose protections aren’t necessarily well known (I, as well as many of my classmates were unaware of a lot of the provisions).

            One of the most substantial was the ability to require creditors to lower pre-service interest on things like credit cards and mortgages to no more than 6%.  In an era where credit card companies in particular have gone off the deep end with interest rates of 20% or more, this protection is particularly powerful.  Several additional protections where taught, which included some dealing with preventing evictions and certain lawsuits while service members are deployed.

(I originally had some lame caption about angry credit card executives planned.  Then I googled 'angry executive' and found this as the top result.  The picture does all the work for me, really.)

            The morning rolled on with a brief review of the family law exam.  We didn’t go over each individual question, or what each answer should be, but the professor fielded any questions people had.  The next hour saw a roundtable discussion by the legal assistance professors.  Essentially, they sat at the front of the classroom and took questions regarding legal assistance from anyone that was curious about something.  I was skeptical about actually getting anything out of it at first, but a few questions came up that I wondered about, but hadn’t thought of.  In the end, it provided helpful insight into the job I head into in less than two months.

            The day wrapped up with a mentor group seminar in which we practiced the OER and NCOER material from earlier this week.  We walked through several factual scenarios where we were either receiving an OER and needed to ensure that the document was in top form, or had a soldier who needed counseling rolled into an upcoming NCOER.  My group is lucky enough to have three of the senior captains in our class in it, and they combined during the session to provide some great insight and advice into the process.