Five years ago, when I taught art at a school in Seattle, I used Tinkertoys as a test at the beginning of a term to find out something about my students. I put a small set of Tinkertoys in front of each student, and said: “Make something out of the Tinkertoys. You have 45 minutes today—and 45minutes each day for the rest of the week.”

  A few students hesitated to start. They waited to see what the rest of the class would do. Several others checked the instructions and made something according to one of the model plans provided. Another group built something out of their own imaginations.

  Once I had a boy who worked experimentally with Tinkertoys in his free time. His constructions filled a shelf in the art classroom and a good part of his bedroom at home. I was delighted at the presence of such a student. Here was an exceptionally creative mind at work. His presence meant that I had an unexpected teaching assistant in class whose creativity would infect(感染) other students.

   Encouraging this kind of thinking has a downside. I ran the risk of losing those students who had a different style of thinking. Without fail one would declare, “But I’m just not creative.”

 “Do you dream at night when you’re asleep?”

 “Oh, sure.”

 “So tell me one of your most interesting dreams.” The student would tell something wildly imaginative. Flying in the sky or in a time machine or growing three heads. “That’s pretty creative. Who does that for you?”

 “Nobody. I do it.”

 “Really—at night, when you’re asleep?”

 “Sure.”

 “Try doing it in the daytime, in class, okay?”

 A

First Lady Michelle Obama is a big fan of volunteering. Volunteering means working for free to help someone else. Mrs. Obama says volunteering is very important. “It should be part of everyone’s life,” she says.

Many teens agree. They say that helping others feels great and makes a difference. These days, more teens volunteer than work for pay. Teens clean up parks, walk dogs at animal shelters, visit the elderly and more.

Some cities ---- including Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. ----require high school students to volunteer. Students must volunteer in order to graduate. The student volunteers learn new skills and help their communities.

Many parents are in favor of the idea ---- they say volunteering helps teens build job skills. But most teens don’t want to be forced to volunteer. They say they are busy. And they say volunteering is only fun if it’s a choice.

Read both sides of the debate and decide.

YES

Volunteering can help teens get into college or get a job.

Many cities and towns need help. Volunteers can help keep important programs going.

Not all teens will volunteer if it isn’t required. Schools should require students to do all they can to get ready for adult life.

NO

Most teens are already very busy with classes, homework, jobs and sports. Forcing them to do more isn’t fair.

It should be up to each person. Helping out doesn’t feel as good if you have to do it.

Finding a volunteer job isn’t always easy. Students shouldn’t be kept from graduating because of something they can’t control.

“To educate a girl is to educate a thousand people,” says Maimouna Samaké, a mother of six children (including five girls). “If you put one seed in the ground and rain comes, it will grow to produce many seeds.”

Samaké, one of 2,000 residents, lives in a small village, Sounkala, in one of the world’s poorest countries. Now she has a chance to see this wish come true thanks to Build On, an American non-profit organization that is building a school in her community.

For 17 years, Build On has been sending American high school students overseas to create schools in places where literacy (文化) and formal education are usually out of reach. The organization has built about 300 schools in Mali, Malawi, Nepal, Senegal, Nicaragua and Haiti. Its goal is to get young Americans in mostly urban areas to get involved in education. At the same time it can bring literacy to children and adults in poor villages in the developing world.

Sounkala’s current school only has about 70 children; mud floors, poor lighting, few desks and an absence of books mean that the school is not the most ideal learning environment. Therefore they certainly could use Build On’s help.

Samaké hasn’t been to school, but she wants a better future for her five daughters, including Ramatou, 12, and Mariam, 10. “When a woman attends school, she will teach what she learns to her children,” said Ramatou, who wants to become a doctor. “She will also know how to take better care of her family.”

Build On tries to build schools for grades one to three. If things go well over those three years, they return to help build another school for grades four to six, and then set up evening adult literacy classes.

Ramatou and Mariam will not learn inside the walls of Build On school since they are already in the sixth grade, but Samaké hopes that they will be able to attend evening classes to continue learning.

Here are a few tips we’ve put together to help you learn English well.

    Speak, speak, speak!

    Practise speaking as often as you can—even speaking to yourself is good practice. Try recording yourself whenever you can. Compare your pronunciation with the master version, see how you can do better and have another try. If you do this several times, you will find that each version is better than the last.

    Why not learn with someone else?

    It helps if you can learn with someone else. If you can persuade a friend or family member to study with you, it will make you keep working. Arrange times to meet and set goals for the week, and test each other regularly.

    Don’t get stuck （卡住）by a word you don’t know.

    Practise improvising (即兴的) ways of getting your meaning across while speaking spontaneously (本能), even if you don’t know the exact words or phrases. Think of things you might want to say whenever you have spare time. A basic example is the use of tenses. If you don’t know the past tense but want to talk about yesterday, use the verb in the present tense and use the word for “yesterday”. Use facial expressions, hand movements, anything to get your meaning across.

    Language learning is also about intuition (直觉)

    Guesswork is important in learning a new language. When listening to recorded material, you aren’t expected to understand everything first time round. If you play the same piece several times, you will most probably understand something new each time. Learn to make maximum use of all the clues you can pick up. For example, what do the speakers sound like? Happy? Angry? Calm? Etc.

    Build up your vocabulary

    A wide vocabulary is the key to successful language learning but don’t try to learn too much at once. It’s best to study frequently, for short periods of time. Take a maximum of six or seven items of vocabulary and learn them. Put them into sentences to fix them in your mind, then come back to them later. Much of the vocabulary in the course is presented by topic.

    And above all, have fun!

Bill Gates recently predicted that online learning will make place-based colleges less significant, and five years from now, students will be able to find the best lectures in the world online. I applaud Mr. Gates. But what’s taking us so long?

As early as 1997, MIT(麻省理工)decided to post videos of all university lectures online, for free, for all people. But today, how many students have you met who mastered advanced mathematics or nuclear physics from an MIT online video? Unfortunately, the answer is not many.

The problem is the poor quality of online education websites and the experience they provide to students. Those who go to the MIT website and watch courses online are surely very smart people, but it’s not like playing a video game such as World of Warcraft. Only the most ardent students, those who are highly motivated, will devote themselves to studying these boring online videos.

The real question is why we aren’t spending more to develop better online education platforms. Where is the “Avatar” of education? Think about this. The market forHollywoodfilms per year is worth around 30 billion USD. Education in the world is a trillion-dollar-a-year market, hundreds of times bigger thanHollywoodmovies. Yet the most expensive digital learning system ever built cost well under 100 million dollars.

Bill Gates’ prediction is going to happen. There is no doubt about it. But it will only happen when we create high-level educational content and experiences that engage and excite more than has ever been possible in the real world.

  Human brains begin growing and developing at a very young age. They learn from the simplest experiences, which enable your children to be aware of the world. There’s no denying that outdoor play helps a lot!

   Times when children have to wait for their turns on playground equipment and following the playground rules by sharing, all these form components of a healthy social-emotional development. Young children develop their social-emotional skills through practice and small steps over time.

   As parents or caregivers, it is fairly simple to support your child’s social-emotional skills. Acts like holding him, touching him, and speaking to him and giving him loving care and attention are all helping factors. When you allow them freedom to play, it is important to follow their interests in helping build their social-emotional skills.

   Difficulties in social-emotional skills can often lead to children having trouble when playing with other children. Becoming easily angry or not empathizing（理解）with other children are all signs that may point in this direction. This can in turn lead to them not empathizing with the needs of other children.

   As for the development of cognitive（认知的）skills, these develop through practice and opportunity over time. And while some cognitive skills may be genetic, most are learned through real life situations. In other words, learning and thinking skills can be improved through experiences.

   To enable them to learn, it is important that we are mindful of what our children are interested in. And this realization is only set in place once the child is given enough room and time to grow and explore.

   Depriving children of such experiences can mean that they might struggle with higher-level thinking skills. And while it is normal to keep them safe, we forget that by rushing●m and cutting down on play time, we’re actually causing more harm than good.

Do you know how it is when you see someone yawn and you start yawning too? Or how hard it is to be among people laughing and not laugh yourself? Well, apparently it’s because we have mirror neurons (神经元) in our brains.

Put simply, the existence of mirror neurons suggests that every time we see someone else do something, our brains imitate it, wheter or not we actually perform the same action. This explains a great deal about how we learn to smile, talk, walk, dance or play sports. But the idea goes further: mirror neurons not only appear to explain physical actions, they also tell us that there is a biological basis for the way we understand other people.

Mirror neurons can undoubtedly be found all over our brains, but especially in the area which relate to our ability to use languages, and to understand how other people feel. Researchers have found that mirror neurons relate strongly to language. A group of researchers discovered that if they gave people sentences to listen to (for example: “The hand took hold of the ball”), the same mirror neurons weretriggeredas when the action was actually performed (in this example, actually taking hold of a ball).

Any problems with mirror neurons may well result in problems with behavior. Much research suggests that people with social and behavioral problems have mirror neurons which are not fully functioning. However, it is not yet known exactly how these discoveries might help find treatments for social disorders.

Research into mirror neurons seems to provide us with ever more information oncerning how humans behave and interact. Indeed, it may turn out to be the equivalent for neuroscience of what Einstein’s theory of relativity was for physics. And the next time you feel the urge to cough in the cinema when someone else does well,perhaps you’ll understand why.oncerning how humans behave and interact. Indeed, it may turn out to be the equivalent for neuroscience of what Einstein’s theory of relativity was for physics. And the next time you feel the urge to cough in the cinema when someone else does well,perhaps you’ll understand why.