For most school age children, summer is a carefree time filled with lazy days of fun in the sun. As I was growing up, though, summers were largely a continuation of the school year, not because of summer remediation but because of a driven older sister who knew she was going to be a teacher from the moment she started talking.

For me and my twin brother (and any of our friends Roseann could trick into joining us), hours of baseball and pool time were replaced by workbooks and blackboards. And, Roseann took her job seriously; her "school" came complete with homework, picture day and regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences. In fact, I still have a report card from those days. Though the grades were good, Roseann pulled no punches, telling our parents: "Larry should spend less time socializing and more time on task if he hopes to reach his full potential." Nice, huh?

Anyway, though I lament the lost play time, I realize it was this extra learning, learning after the "official" learning had concluded, that probably steered my academic career in the right direction.

This past month SAS Education launched its own version of Roseann's Summer School with the release of Extended Learning Pages. Extended Learning Pages provide our students access to all the course content they encountered in class, combined with additional learning tools to create a richer learning experience that extends well beyond the last day of class.

From SAS' Extended Learning Pages, students can download course data for after-class practice. It also includes additional exercises and data for extra practice and code samples from support.sas.com. Other valuable components of the Extended Learning Pages are a list of recommended readings, blog sites, technical papers, SAS Press books and documentation around the content, as well as links to SAS-sponsored online discussion forums, where users can share experiences, questions and ideas with other users.

So, if you haven't taken a SAS class lately, visit us on the Web and sign up for one today. In addition to the best SAS training possible, you'll get a bevy of additional educational tools that will keep you learning months after your class concludes.

Here's to sisters and aspiring teachers.