Every man wants his son to be somewhat of a clone, not in features but in footsteps. As he grows you also age, and your ambitions become more unachievable. You begin to realize that your boy, in your footsteps, could probably accomplish what you hoped for. But footsteps can be muddied and they can go off in different directions.

My son Jody has hated school since day one in kindergarten. Science projects waited until the last moment. Book reports weren't written until the final threat.

I've been a newspaperman all my adult life. My daughter is a university graduate working toward her master's degree in English. But Jody? When he entered the tenth grade he became a “vo-tech” student(技校学生). They're called “motorheads” by the rest of the student body.

When a secretary in my office first called him “motorhead”, I was shocked. “Hey, he's a good kid,” I wanted to say. “And smart, really.”

I learned later that motorheads are, indeed, different. They usually have dirty hands and wear dirty work clothes. And they don't often make school honor rolls(光荣榜).

But being the parent of a motorhead is itself an experience in education. We who labor in clean shirts in offices don't have the abilities that motorheads have. I began to learn this when I had my car crashed. The cost to repair it was estimated at $800. “Hey, I can fix it,” said Jody. I doubted it, but let him go ahead, for I had nothing to lose.

      My son, with other motorheads, fixed the car. They got parts(零件）from a junkyard, non-toasting toaster have been fixed. Neighbours and co-workers trust their car repair to him.a

        Since that first repair job, a broken air-conditioner, a non-functioning washer and a non-toasting toaster have been fixed. Neighbors and co-workers trust their car repairs to him.

        These kids are happiest when doing repairs. They joke and laugh and are living in their own relaxed world. And their minds are bright despite their dirty hands and clothes.

I have learned a lot from my motorhead: publishers need printers, engineers need mechanics, and architects need builders. Most important, I have learned that fathers don't need clones in footsteps or anywhere else.

        My son may never make the school honor roll. But he made mine.

    When it's five o'clock, people leave their office. The length of the workday,for many workers,is defined by time. They leave when the clock tells them they're done.

    These days, the time is everywhere: not just on clocks or watches,but on cell-phones and computers.That may be a bad thing,particularly at work.New research shows on that clock-based work schedules hinder morale and creativity.

    Clock-timers organize their day by blocks of minutes and hours.For example: a meeting from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., research from 10 a.m.to noon,etc.On the other hand,task-timers have a list of things they want to accomplish.They work down the list,each task starts when the previous task is completed.It is said that all of us employ a mix of both these types of planning.

    What,then,are the effects of thinking about time in these different ways? Does one make us more productive? Better at the tasks at hand? Happier? In experiments conducted by Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier,they had participints organize different activities-from project planning,holiday shopping,to yoga-by time or to-do list to measure how they performed under "clock time" vs "task time".They found clock timers to be more efficient but less happy because they felt little control over their lives.Task timers are happier and more creative,but less productive. They tend to enjoy the moment when something good is happening,and seize opportunities that come up.

    The researchers argue that task-based organizing tends to be undervalued and under-supported in the business culture.Smart companies,they believe,will try to bake more task-based planning into their strategies.

    This might be a small change to the way we view work and the office,but the researchers argue that it challenges a widespread characteristic of the economy: work organized by clock time.While most people will still probably need,and be,to some extent,clock-timers,task-based timing should be used when performing a job that requires more creativity.It'll make those tasks easier,and the task-doers will be happier.

    Publishers of books for beginning readers are in the business of doing whatever they can to make children develop a love of reading. At times, that means they'll produce books that are more colorful and more packed with pictures. But it turns out that when it comes to learning to read books, more pictures aren't always better.

    In fact, simply having more than one picture on a page can negatively(消极地) affect the ability of preschoolers to learn words from that page, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Sussex. “Storybook reading is a great activity to help children increase their vocabularies,” writes co-author Zoe M. Flack in the University's School of Psychology blog.

    But the illustrations(插图) can affect how well children will learn new words. “For example,” Flack writes, “We know that children learn words better if illustrations are realistic.” Also, studies have shown that adding bells and whistles(哨声) to storybooks may negatively affect learning, according to Jessica S. Horst, Flack's co-author for the study. “We also know that children look within illustrations for the things they hear in the story, so if the story mentions a girl dropping an ice cream, children will look at the ice cream in the illustration.”

    With that in mind, Dr. Horst and Ms. Flack began to wonder what would happen when picture books show many illustrations on a page and how young children who haven't yet learned to read know which illustration to look at while listening to a story. To find out, they read storybooks that displayed either one or two illustrations per page to 36 three-year-old children. As it turns out, children who listened to stories with only one illustration at a time learned twice as many words as children who listened with two or more illustrations.

    We offer five kinds of courses. Each course has been designed to help student according to their needs.

    Course 1: Central English

    General English is designed to develop students' basic communication skills in speaking and pronunciation, reading, listening, writing, grammar and vocabulary. Tuesday to Friday: 9: 00 am to 11:00 am, $ 288 per week.

    Course 2: Academic English

    Academic English is for students who want to take the IELTS exam or for those who need to use English in a professional area. Monday to Friday: 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm, $ 320 per week.

    Course 3: High School ESL

    Why not make the most of your time studying in Australia with the help from TIES? We have High School ESL classes each week specifically designed for international students. Tuesday to Friday: 8:00 am to 11:00 am, $ 25 per hour.

    Course 4: Night Classes

    Do you want to improve your English and get the best possible results in your GRE test? We have two night classes each week design to meet your needs. Tuesday to Thursday evenings: 8:30 pm to 10:30 pm, $ 60 per day.

    Course 5: One on One

    If you are interested in some One on One lessons with TIES teachers, we can design a course to meet your needs. One on One lessons can improve your English language skills more quickly and help students who want to take TOEFL. Tuesday and Friday: 2: 00 pm to 5: 00 pm, $ 80 per hour.

    More than seven hundred years ago, the Prince of Wales had a very big and brave dog called Gelert.

    One day the Prince wanted to go hunting with his men. He told his dog to stay at home and look after his baby son. The baby was in a wooden cradle, which was like a small bed.

    When the Prince came back from hunting, Gelert ran out to meet his master. He wagged his tail and jumped up to put his paws on the Prince's chest. Then the Prince saw the blood on Gelert's jaws and head.

    "What have you done?" the Prince said. He rushed into his house and looked for his baby son. The cradle was lying on its side on the floor. The clothes were torn and there was blood on them.

    "So you have killed my son?" the Prince said angrily. "You unfaithful dog!" He took out his sword and killed the dog. Just as Gelert was dying, he managed to bark. Then the Prince heard a baby call to the dog.

    The Prince ran out of the house and saw his son lying on the ground unhurt. Near him was a dead wolf. Then the Prince knew that Gelert had defended the baby and killed the wolf.

    The Prince ran back into the house but he was too late. Gelert was dead. The Prince was very sad indeed. Tears ran down his face when he realized he had killed his faithful friend. The Prince carried the body of his brave dog to the top of a mountain and buried him there. After this, the Prince never smiled again. Every morning at dawn, he walked up the mountain and stood by the dog's grave for a few minutes.

    If you go to Mount Snowdon in Wales, people will show you where Gelert is buried. There is a sign by his grave. It reminds people of a brave and faithful dog.

    The new social robots, including Jibo, Cozmo, Kuri and Meccano M.A.X., bear some similarities to assistants like Apple's Siri, but these robots come with something more. They are designed to win us over not with their smarts but with their personality. They are sold as companions that do more than talk to us. Time magazine cheered for the robots that "could fundamentally reshape how we interact with machines." But is reshaping how we interact with machines a good thing, especially for children?

    Some researchers in favor of the robots don't see a problem with this. People have relationships with many kinds of things. Some say robots are just another thing with which we can have relationships. To support their argument, roboticists sometimes point to how children deal with toy dolls. Children animate (赋予…生命) dolls and turn them into imaginary friends. Jibo, in a sense, will be one more imaginary friend, and arguably a more intelligent and fun one.

    Getting attached to dolls and sociable machines is different, though. Today's robots tell children that they have emotions, friendships, even dreams to share. In reality, the whole goal of the robots is emotional trickery. For instance, Cozmo the robot needs to be fed, repaired and played with. Boris Sofman, the chief executive of Anki, the company behind Cozmo, says that the idea is to create "a deeper and deeper emotional connection ... And if you neglect him, you feel the pain of that." What is the point of this, exactly? What does it mean to feel the pain of neglecting something that feels no pain at being neglected, or to feel anger at being neglected by something that doesn't even know it is neglecting you?

    This should not be our only concern. It is troubling that these robots try to understand how children feel. Robots, however, have no emotions to share, and they cannot put themselves in our place. No matter what robotic creatures "say", they don't understand our emotional lives. They present themselves as empathy machines, but they are missing the essential equipment. They have not been born, they don't know pain, or death, or fear. Robot thinking may be thinking, but robot feeling is never feeling, and robot love is never love.

    What is also troubling is that children take robots' behavior to indicate feelings. When the robots interact with them, children take this as evidence that the robots like them, and when robots don't work when needed, children also take it personally. Their relationships with the robots affect their self-esteem (自尊). In one study, an 8-year-old boy concluded that the robot stopped talking to him because the robot liked his brothers better.

    For so long, we dreamed of artificial intelligence offering us not only simple help but conversation and care. Now that our dream is becoming real, it is time to deal with the emotional downside of living with robots that "feel".