Certainly, a well-rounded education is the foundation from which all of us spring forth. I am grateful to the many incredible teachers who have inspired me to do greater things, and have fired my enthusiasm for everlasting learning!

I have also been honored to have the most amazing teachers in all of my children’ s lives. These are extraordinary people who not only teach our children, but love them, challenge them, and provide an environment where a child learns how to learn.

But, sometimes I wonder if the outline of our educational plan is lacking something. I watched the movie Easy A with my older daughter. The main character’ s parents were loving, supportive, and built great confidence in their daughter and developed her ability to handle her own problems.

There was a scene where the mother was speaking to the younger child and he announced that he received an “ A” on his spelling test. She replied, “ That’s great, honey, but everything has spell check these days. ”It was funny — but TRUE!I don’t mean that we shouldn’t teach our children how to spell, but maybe some of our time should be spent educating them about the dangers of posting things on Facebook.

Maybe we might want to spend time showing them how real life works— the credit card isn’t free money— you will have to pay it back at sometime. Oh, and get this—they charge you for borrowing that money. Perhaps, we should spend some time on interpersonal relationships. I worry that our kids do not know how to relate to one another.

Choosing a career is a daunting task. My daughter is in her second year in college and has changed her major twice. It’s not that she didn’t know what she wanted to do. What she “ wanted to do”and the degree she chose did not match.

I have learned many college students do not know what they want to do because they haven’t seen what it looks like in the real world. Being a journalist in the real world looks very different from writing stories. Maybe if we spent some time exposing them to real life experience— maybe two or three courses in areas of interest in high school that give them a “ feel’for what that particular field would look like, they might be better prepared. I do not know the solution, but it seems that it should at least be a topic of discussion.

Students who date in middle school have significantly worse study skills. They are four times more likely to drop out of school and report twice as much alcohol and tobacco use as their single classmates, according to new research from the UniversityofGeorgia.

"Romantic relationships are a trademark of adolescence, but very few studies have examined how adolescents differ in the development of these relationships," said Pamela Orpinas, study author and professor in the CollegeofPublic Health and head of the Department of Health Promotion and Behavior.

Orpinas followed a group of 624 students over a seven-year period from 6th to 12th grade.

Each year, the group of students completed a survey indicating whether they had dated and reported the frequency of different behaviors, including the use of drugs and alcohol. Their teachers completed questionnaires about the students’ academic efforts. He found some students never or hardly ever reported dating from middle to high school, and these students had consistently the best study skills according to their teachers. Other students dated infrequently in middle school but increased the frequency of dating in high school.

"At all points in time, teachers rated the students who reported the lowest frequency of dating as having the best study skills and the students with the highest dating as having the worst study skills,” according to the journal article. Study skills refer to behaviors that lead to academic success such as doing work for extra credit being well organized, finishing homework, working hard and reading assigned chapters.

"Dating a classmate may have the same emotional complications of dating a co-worker," Orpinas said, "When the couple break up, they have to continue to see each other in class and perhaps witness the ex-partner dating someone else. It is reasonable to think this could be linked to depression and divert attention from studying.”

“Dating should not be considered a ceremony of growth in middle school,” Orpinas concluded.

In a computer age, a broadband Internet connection is very popular now. Whether cable or mobile broadband, today’s connections are many times faster than those in the early days. Videos play smoothly, complex websites load quickly, and files download much faster than ten years ago. And the files are much bigger too.

There’s a hidden problem: you have to live near enough to a major city to get broadband Internet. If you don’t, it’s slow dial­up access for you. And for those living really far away, there may be no Internet access at all.

Technology experts often talk about the “last mile” problem, which refers to the difficulty of bringing Internet access to remote locations. In cities and suburbs (郊区), it’s relatively easy to provide access for everyone. It is much more difficult to deliver access to those living far from cities, especially in developing countries. Internet service providers, for their part, have been reluctant to provide access to sparsely (稀疏地) populated areas. The handful of Internet users they would reach wouldn’t cover the expense.

But every year, technological advancements allow of more and more Internet users. Most broadband connections today run over existing cable TV and telephone lines although these technologies aren’t available everywhere.

Some companies have delivered the Internet over standard power lines. Advancements in cheaper and more efficient fiberoptic cables (光缆) promise to bring extremely fast Internet connections to more users. Still, the “last mile” problem remains hard to deal with. There will always be somewhere that doesn’t have an affordable broadband connection. But someday that might not matter. If the rapid progress in cellphone technology has any indication, it may not be too long before an Internet connection simply follows you wherever you go.

The English language is changing fast, thanks to the rapid progress of technology. We all have a rapid choice: We can either bury our heads in the sand and spend the rest of our lives wishing Shakespeare were alive and well. Or we can embrace(拥抱)the new English, enter into the spirit of the Internet age called Weblish.

   “You can't keep away from it, for the simple reason that whenever a new variety of language comes along, it surely influences the language as a whole.” Says Dr David Crystal, professor of language at the UniversityofWales in BangoL, whose book Language and the Internet has just been published.

    The trouble with keeping up with the new English is that there are so many new words but that the old words no longer mean what we thought they did. In the past, if someone said they did not have Windows, you would have to suppose they lived in a cave. These days, it is probably because they use a Mac(which is a computer). Spam is as disliked as it ever was, but it once meant an uninviting canned meat. It now stands for unwanted “junk” email. Spellings are changing, too. Not only is text-messaging playing "hvc with vrbs" (havoc(混乱)with verbs), but the common rules of email communication pay little attention to "perfect speaking".    

    Weblish loves to see nouns happily become verbs ("please bookmark this site"), and verbs become nouns ("Send me the download"). Verbs and prepositions are regularly thrown together to become new nouns or adjectives (dial-up,log-on,print-on,pull-down,upload),while others are created from simply pairing nouns: cyberspace, emit Internet, hyperlink, netspeak.

  Read a lot, I mean a lot! You have to increase your ability for reading. Many students are in the habit of reading only when their exams are coming while some others read only what they are taught or things that must be read because it is in their textbooks. But listen to me now, I am telling you from my own experience that it is a very bad habit and it is not enough to improve your intelligence（智力）.

      You have to learn and get ready to become versatile in your reading. The fact that you are studying medicine in school does not mean that you should not know one or two things on politics.

      Many people have complained（抱怨）to me that they find it hard to read things like novels but I just shake my head in pity for them because it is obvious they have failed to realize the truth in that wise saying by Margaret Fuller that “today a reader, tomorrow a leader!”

      When you read, you get to “see” so many places and it will be as if you have visited those places in real life. This is because reading will improve your imagination, creativity and understanding. You also get experience from learning about how people dealt with their various problems, saving you from going through the pains and difficulties they must have gone through!

 The eyes of people with Alzheimer’s disease are different from those without this disease. That’s the finding of two teens called Archana Murali and Eelna Berman. The changes they found could offer reliable evidence of the disease in living people, the girls said. More importantly, early signs of these changes might allow treatment for the disease before main symptoms(症状) occur.

  “Blood tests won’t show Alzheimer’s disease. Some genes can boost the risk of developing this disease. But people with those genes won’t always develop symptoms, ” Archana and Elena say. And Alzheimer’s symptoms may be confused(易混淆的) with those of several other diseases. The only certain way to confirm(确认) the disease is to look at samples of brain tissue after a patient died.

  But Archana and Elena have found new symtoms that appear to show Alzheimer’s disease in living people.They compared the eye scans of 68 Alzheimer’s patients with the scans from 65 healthy people. In many ways, the scans were similar. But bid differences appeared.

  For example, the teens measured the thickness of a nerve-rich layer in the retina(视网膜). That’s the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye. This layer in Alzheimer’s patients are between 20 and 25 micrometers. That’s smaller than the 30 to 34 micrometers of healthy volunteers. The teens also measured the thickness of the choroid(脉络膜)，a blood-vessel-rich layer behind the retina. In healthy people , it is 180 to 218 micrometers thick. But in Alzheimer’s patients, it is between 213 and 256 micrometers. Finally, the teens measured the diameter of a major vein inside the retina. In Alzheimer’s patients, it is between 83 and 94 micrometers. But in people without Alzheimer’s disease, the vein normally is between 131 and 134 micrometers.

  Based on their early discovery, the new technique appears to be more than 95 percent accurate. “It also would be far less expensive”, the teens say. While the cost of a brain scan is around $2,600, eye doctors can take an image of a patient’s eyes for about $100. So, if proven, the teen’s new technique would easily become part of an eye exam.

D

While for humans the expression “sleep with one eye open” is just a way to describe someone is alert(警觉的), for some animals it is a way of life. It is an ability to sleep with one eye open and the half of the brain awake, while the other half rests.

This talent has been seen in dolphins and seals as well as many bird species, and it is used for different purposes. Birds use it to keep an eye out for enemies, while dolphins do it to keep track(追踪) of any interesting activities going on around them.

Now researchers from Australia have discovered that crocodiles(鳄鱼) may also have the ability. The scientists placed three young saltwater crocodiles inside a large pool and filmed their behavior. They noticed that when left undisturbed(未被打搅的), the crocodiles spent less than an hour with one eye open. During the rest of time, they seemed to prefer sleeping with both eyes closed just like us.

However, things changed when the researchers introduced a new crocodile. Though it was one of their own, the other crocodiles immediately appeared to be alert. The researchers noticed that the crocodiles sleeping with one open eye directly aimed at(瞄准) the newcomer. The results were even clearer when a human was brought into the room. They kept one eye on the person and continued to look in the direction even when he/she was gone. Dr. John Lesku, who led the study says that the behavior is similar to that of birds. He guessed that the crocodiles shared the common ancestor with birds about 155 million years ago.

The one thing the researchers are not sure of yet is whether the crocodiles are showing normal sleep behavior. To prove that, they will have to watch their brainwaves(脑电波) carefully. Lesku says that while we have always considered the one-eyed sleeping animals strange, it may be that they are perfectly normal! This means that it is “our whole-brain sleep” that is strange! Who would have thought about it?

After students come home from a tiring day at school, they tend to worry a lot about their homework.

Whether students are working on English or chemistry homework, they are simply working on the assignment in order to get it done, attempting to memorize the concepts for thetime being and do not absorb any of the information afterward. Students are wasting theirtime on insignificant assignments rather than effectively using thattime to achieve other accomplishments. According to www.dailymail.com, many parents are concerned that homework is being assigned rather than being used to integrate what teachers are covering in the classroom. In their eyes, if less homework is assigned, students would have much less stress and could focus more on their passions and hobbies.

Homework gets in the way of participating in community service events as well as opportunities for getting a job or being a part of an extra-curricular activity. These responsibilities are important for teenagers to take on because they prepare the teenagers for the "real world." Without the proper exposure to work that is not school related, students will find themselves lost after they graduate. If homework were no longer given, students would have a lot moretime to mature in other fields rather than being educated only on academics.

In spite of the fact that teachers want students to do better on tests and absorb the material that they are teaching, homework is not accomplishing its purpose. Because school is becoming increasingly more competitive and challenging, homework is becoming a setback rather than extra practice. Its removal would benefit the well being of teenagers as well as encourage them to get out in the "real world" and discover themselves instead of staring at a pile of assignments.

   A good reader becomes sooner or later a good book buyer．The sooner，the better. The reading done in a book drawn from a library can not be so pleasant at the moment nor so  permanently useful as the reading done in our own copy．

    A book which is worth reading is likely to be read more than once，and at each reading     some idea or some statement makes such an impression that we wish to refer to it again． Some readers underline the page as they read，but I find that a page which I have underlined can not give me so many fresh impressions as one which has no marks on it．My habit is to make my own index(索引)of a book as I read．I put down the number of the page and a word or two to identify the thought or the fact which I get from it．On a second or third reading I am likely to double or triple the size of this index．This is my substitute for underlining．Most of the books in my library are so indexed that I can find quickly the passage which from time to time I wish to look up．

    To use a book in this way，organizing it for continued usefulness year after year, we must，of course，do our reading in a copy which belongs to us．The books I buy are chiefly those of less expensive editions．

    As I have grown older and the number of books on my shelves has increased，I appre ciate editions which do not take much room．By careful and continuous selection I keep my librarv down to ten thousand books．This would be，of course，too large a number for any but a professional scholar or writer．But my advice to a book lover is to weed but his library at least once every two years，giving away the books which are not likely to be read again. And never never buy a book which you will not immediately read．A library bought only for looks is not literature，but indoor decoration．