In 1974, after filling out fifty applications, going through four interviews, and winning one offer, I took what I could get —- a teaching job at what I considered a distant wild area: western New Jersey. My characteristic optimism was alive only when I reminded myself that I would be doing what I had wanted to do since I was fourteen —— teaching English.

    School started, but I felt more and more as if I were in a foreign country. Was this rural area really New Jersey? My students took a week off when hunting season began. I was told they were also frequently absent in late October to help their fathers make hay on the farms. I was a young woman from New York City, who thought that “Make hay while the sun shines” just meant to have a good time.

But, still, I was teaching English. I worked hard, taking time off only to eat and sleep. And then there was my sixth-grade class — seventeen boys and five girls who were only six years younger than me. I had a problem long before I knew it. I was struggling in my work as a young idealistic teacher. I wanted to make literature come alive and to promote a love of the written word. The students wanted to throw spitballs and whisper dirty words in the back of the room.

    In college I had been taught that a successful educator should ignore bad behavior. So I did, confident that, as the textbook had said, the bad behavior would disappear as I gave my students positive attention. It sounds reasonable, but the text evidently ignored the fact that humans, particularly teenagers, rarely seems reasonable. By the time my boss, who was also my taskmaster, known to be the strictest, most demanding, most quick to fire inexperienced teachers, came into the classroom to observe me, the students exhibited very little good behavior to praise.

    My boss sat in the back of the room. The boys in the class were making animal noises, hitting each other while the girls filed their nails or read magazines. I just pretended it all wasn't happening, and went on lecturing and tried to ask some inspiring questions. My boss, sitting in the back of the classroom, seemed to be growing bigger and bigger. After twenty minutes he left, silently. Visions of unemployment marched before my eyes.

    I felt mildly victorious that I got through the rest of class without crying, but at my next free period I had to face him. I wondered if he would let me finish out the day. I walked to his office, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

He was sitting in his chair, and he looked at me long and hard. I said nothing. All I could think of was that I was not an English teacher; I had been lying to myself, pretending that everything was fine.

    When he spoke, he said simply, without accusation, “You had nothing to say to them.”

     “You had nothing to say to them”. he repeated.” No wonder they are bored. Why not get to the meat of literature and stop talking about symbolism. Talk with them, not at them. And more important, why do you ignore their bad behavior”? We talked. He named my problems and offered solutions. We role-played. He was the bad student, and I was the forceful, yet, warm, teacher. 
       As the year progressed, we spent many hours discussing literature and ideas about human beings and their motivations. He helped me identify my weaknesses and strengths. In short, he made a teacher of me by teaching me the reality of Emerson's words: “The secret to education lies in respecting the pupil.”

    Fifteen years later I still drive that same winding road to the same school. Thanks to the help I received that difficult first year, the school is my home now.

    It isn't often that zookeepers call on craftsman for help. But cold weather at the Wildlife SOS Elephant Conservation and Care Center in northern India was putting elephants at risk. So the center's staff joined forces with locals to find a creative way to keep the animals warm. Now the elephants are stepping out in style, thanks to volunteers who made use of their crafting talents to knit (编织) enormous sweaters to protect the animals.

    Wildlife SOS is a conservation group that has been taking action against animal cruelty and saving wildlife in danger since 1995. Their Elephant Conservation and Care Center is devoted to rescuing the large animals from abuse in circuses, illegal dealing, and other circumstances where they have been ignored or treated with extreme cruelty. There are currently 20 elephants living at the center, and the staff hope to take in 50 more of the creatures this year.

    Because most of the elephants housed at the center are recovering from injuries or are elderly and weak, they are particularly vulnerable to cold temperatures. When the staff reported near-freezing nighttime temperatures in the winter, volunteers from surrounding villages began knitting enormous sweaters to keep the elephants warm. The monumental sweaters are large enough to cover the elephants' backs, bellies, and legs.

    Making the sweaters is a big undertaking—each one takes approximately four weeks to create, with volunteers working together on the enormous clothes. Local villagers have already made sweaters for three of the 23 elephants on their own, each with a unique pattern and color.

    If you're also looking for something happy and heartwarming, this is it. The elephants usually wear blankets to keep warm during colder months and you can purchase a blanket for an elephant on the Wildlife SOS website.

    After spending a year in Brazil on a student exchange program, her mother recalled(回忆), Marie Colvin returned home to find that her classmates had narrowed down their college choices. “Everyone else was already admitted to college,” her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, said from the family home. “So she took our car and drove up to Yale and said, 'You have to let me in .' ”

    “Impressed--she was a National Merit (全国英才) finalist who had picked up Portuguese in Brazil. Yale did, admitting her to the class of 1978, where she started writing for the Yale Daily News and decided to be a journalist,” her mother said.

    On Wednesday, Marie Colvin, 56, an experienced journalist for The Sunday Times of London, was killed as Syrian forces shelled(炮击) the city of Homs. She was working in a temporary media center that was destroyed in the attack.

    “She was supposed to leave Syria on Wednesday”, Mrs. Colvin said. “Her editor told me he called her yesterday and said it was getting too dangerous and they wanted to take her out. She said she was doing a story and she wanted to finish it.”

    Mrs. Colvin said it was pointless to try to prevent her daughter from going to conflict （冲突）zones. “If you knew my daughter,” she said, “it would have been such a waste of words. She was determined, she was enthusiastic about what she did, it was her life. There was no saying 'Don't do this.' This is who she was, absolutely who she was and what she believed in: cover the story, not just have pictures of it, but bring it to life in the deepest way you could.” “So it was not a surprise when she took an interest in journalism,” her mother said.

    Many people have long dreamed of being able to fly around as simply as riding a bicycle. Yet the safety and strength of a flying bike was always a big problem. Over the past 10 years, developments in technology have moved the dream of personal flying vehicles closer to reality. Now, two groups of inventors say such vehicles may be available soon.

    The British company Malloy Aeronautics has developed a prototype (原型) of its flying bicycle. Grant Stapleton, marketing sales director of Malloy Aeronautics, says the Hoverbike is able to get in and out of small spaces very quickly. It can be moved across continents very quickly because it can be folded and packed, he adds.

    Mr. Stapleton says safety was the company's main concern. He says the designers solved the safety issue by using overlapping rotors ( 交叠式旋翼 )to power the vehicle.

    The company is testing a full-size prototype of the Hoverbike, which will most likely be used first by the police and emergency rescue teams.

    In New Zealand, the Martin Aircraft Company is also testing a full-size prototype of its personal flying device, called the Jetpack. It can fly for more than 30 minutes, up to 1,000 meters high and reach a speed of 74 kilometers per hour.

    Peter Coker is the CEO of Martin Aircraft Company. He said the Jetpack “is built around safety from the start. In his words, reliability is the most important element of it. We have safety built into the actual structure itself, very similar to a Formula One racing car.”

    The Jetpack uses a gasoline-powered engine that produces two powerful jet streams. Mr. Coker says it also has a parachute (降落伞) that can be used should there be an emergency. “It starts to work at very low altitude and actually saves both the aircraft and the pilot,” he adds. Mr. Coker says the Jetpack will be ready for sale soon.

    Do students learn as much when they read digitally as they do in print? Investigators have been trying to determine whether students do as well when reading an assigned text on a digital screen as on paper.

    A number of researchers have sought to measure learning by asking people to read a passage of text, either in print or on a digital device, and then testing for comprehension.

    Most studies have found that participants scored about the same when reading in each medium, though a few have indicated that students performed better on tests when they read in print.

    Since in standardized testing, reading passages and answering questions afterwards may tell us little about any deeper level of understanding, some researchers are beginning to pose more subtle questions.

    When people were asked to read d story in print or on a digital device and then to reconstruct the plot development, the answer is: Print yielded better results. When people were asked to read by choosing how much time to spend on each platform, the researchers found that participants devoted less time to reading the passage on screen and performed less well on the following comprehension test.

    So, how does the learning question relate to educational goals?

To become skilled in critical thinking, students need to be able to handle text. The text may be long, complex or both. To make sense of it, students cannot skim, rush ahead or continually get distracted. So, does reading in print versus on screen build critical thinking skills?

    When asked in which medium they felt they concentrated better, 92 percent replied “print”. For long academic reading, 86 percent favored print Participants were also reported to be more likely to reread academic materials if they were in print

    What's more, a number of students indicated they believed print was a better medium for learning. By contrast, in talking about digital screens, students noted “danger of distraction” and “no concentration”.

    Evidently, it's not too hard to tell that a pattern did emerge: Print stood out as the medium for doing serious work.

    Modern lifestyles are generally quite different from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, a fact that some claim as the cause of the current rise in global obesity, but new results published July 25 in the open access journal PLOS ONE find that there is no difference between the energy expenditure(耗费) of modern hunter-gatherers and Westerners, casting doubt on this theory.

    The research team behind the study, led by Herman Pontzer of Hunter College in New York City, along with David Raichlen of the University of Arizona and Brian M. Wood of Stanford measured daily energy expenditure among the Hadza, a population of traditional hunter-gatherers living in the open Savannah of northern Tanzania. Despite spending their days hiking long distances to seek for wild plants and game, the Hadza burned no more calories each day than adults in the U.S. and Europe. The team ran several analyses accounting for the effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. In all analyses, daily energy expenditure among the Hadza hunter-gatherers was indistinguishable(难以区分的) from that of Westerners. The study was the first to measure energy expenditure in hunter-gatherers directly; previous studies had relied entirely on estimates.

    These findings overturn the long-held assumption that our hunter-gatherer ancestors expended more energy than modern populations, and challenge the view that obesity in Western populations results from decreased energy expenditure. Instead, the similarity in daily energy expenditure across a broad range of lifestyles suggests that habitual metabolic(新陈代谢的) rates are relatively constant among human populations. This in turn supports the view that the current rise in obesity is due to increased food consumption, not decreased energy expenditure. It means we have more to learn about human physiology(生理学) and health, particularly in non-Western settings.

    "These results highlight the complexity of energy expenditure. It's not simply a function of physical activity," says Pontzer.” Our metabolic rates may be more a reflection of our shared evolutionary past than our diverse modern lifestyles."