Some people are pessimistic(悲观的) when they think about the future. They say that, a hundred years from now, we will have used up most of the earth's resources. We will have made our seas so dirty that we will not be able to eat fish from them. There will be so many people in the world that we will have to use all the countryside for housing; there will be no farmland left.

    Other people have a different idea about the future. In their view, the city of the future will be a huge pyramid-shaped(金字塔形的) building, which will be floating on the surface of the sea. About 5,000 families will live there, and there will also be schools, shops in it.

In a hundred years' time, people will not need to use oil. They will heat their homes with power from the sun.

    Think of space. Perhaps a station will be set up on the moon; people will be able to visit the moon as tourists. They may even spend their holidays in space, travelling from planet to planet.

What an interesting picture!

    Many people don't think about the future. “I don't care. I'll be dead. ”they say. But it is our duty to care because the world of a hundred years' time will be the world of our children's and their children after them.

Bell Teacher Campus 2016: Cultural Talks

    Our talks start at 16:00 on the first week in August, and each one lasts about one hour. Each talk will be offered only once during your 4-day stay. Please sign up on the main Bell Noticeboard (Second floor, Mary Allan Building).

August 1st

    BRITISH MUSIC, by Pete Sharma in Room 106. British music is famous worldwide. In this talk, I'll discuss what's popular and what's not right now and the top music festivals in the UK. We will listen to some of the artists and share some thoughts about singing and dancing.

August 2nd

    LOVE ME, LOVE MY CAT, by Lis Harrison in Room 207. We will be looking at this national interest through idioms(习语), songs, and everyday British life, and along the way covering some vocabulary for “talking cat”. At the end, we'll be discussing that old topic: do we Brits treat out pets better than we treat our kids?

August 3rd

    A GAME AS ENGLISH AS CROQUET(槌球游戏)，by Anna Young in Room 218. First, we will look at the origins of croquet, a much loved garden game in England. We will look at simple croquet rules, and then practice time! We'll go out and play!

August 4th

    WHY ENGLISH PEOPLE LAUGH, by Jim Scrivener in Room 117. Let me try to show you a little bit of what British people find funny. You will discover some of the most popular radio& TV comedy game shows. You probably won't find it funny at all! But you will learn a bit more about us Brits!

    It's that time of year when people need to lock their cars. It's not because there are a lot of criminals running around stealing cars. Rather, it's because of good-hearted neighbors who want to share their harvest. Especially with this year's large crop, leaving a car unlocked in my neighborhood is an invitation for someone to fill it with zucchini（西葫芦）.

    My sister, Sharon, recently had a good year for tomatoes. She and her family had eaten and canned so many that they had begun to feel their skin turn slightly red. That's when she decided it was time to share her blessings. She started calling everyone she knew. When that failed, she began asking everyone in the neighborhood, eventually finding a neighbor delighted to have the tomatoes. "Feel free to take whatever you want, "Sharon told her. Later that day, Sharon found that her garden had indeed been harvested. She felt happy that she could help someone and that the food didn't go to waste.

    A few days later, Sharon answered the door. There was the neighbor, holding a hot loaf of bread. The neighbor smiled pleasantly, "I wanted to thank you for all of the tomatoes, and I have to admit that I took a few other things and hoped you wouldn't mind. "

    Sharon couldn't think of anything else in her garden that had been worth harvesting and said so. "Oh, but you did, "the neighbor said. "You had some of the prettiest zucchini I've ever seen. "

    Sharon was confused. They hadn't even planted any zucchini. But her neighbor insisted that there really were bright-green zucchini in her garden. Sharon felt curious and decided to go to see where the zucchini had grown. The two of them walked together into the backyard. When the neighbor pointed at the long green vegetables, Sharon smiled. "Well, actually, those are cucumbers（黄瓜）that we never harvested, because they got too big, soft and bitter for eating. "

    The neighbor looked at Sharon, shock written all over her face. She gulped（哽住）a few times, and then, smiling, held out the bread, part of a batch she had shared all over the neighborhood. "I brought you a nice loaf of cucumber bread. I hope you like it. "

    Judy Wright and her husband decided to move closer to their son, Chris, who lived in Georgia. About a month after the move, Judy fell ill, suffering from her ongoing (不间断的) battle against Parkinson disease.

    Her condition worsened rapidly and she required medical care at home. The family hired a nursing aid who canceled at the last minute. Instead, a woman named TunDe Hector showed up in her place.

    One day, TunDe shared a story with Judy and her family. She remembered a particularly difficult day in 2014, when a stranger had helped her with a kind gesture. She had run out of gas, and with only $5 in her pocket, was walking to a gas station. A man saw her walking and turned his car around. He paid for her gas and gave her all the cash left in his wallet. Upon hearing the story, Judy's son, Chris, took off his hat and said, "That was me!" He was the stranger that had helped TunDe on that difficult day.

    During the care of Judy, the Wright family learned about TunDe's family and her own dream. The nursing aid, TunDe hoped that one day she could become an OB-GYN nurse. Her tuition was past due (逾期) and she had a family to care for, but she was determined to achieve that goal for herself and her family.

    Judy died on July 9,2017. Instead of flowers, her family asked mourners (悼念者) to donate to TunDe's education, to assist her in paying for her nursing school. In less than a week, they raised more than $8,000 and presented her with the surprise check.

    Like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I'm a slightly different person in each of my languages­more confident in English, more relaxed in French, more emotional in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass (指南针) also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I'm using at the time?

    Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. The findings of several recent studies suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas (困境), they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

    In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa  volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the "trolley problem": imagine that a runaway trolley is moving quickly toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can move the trolley to a different set of tracks, therefore sparing the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?

    Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People tend to be very hesitant to say they would do this, even though in both situations, one person is sacrificed to save five. But Costa and his colleagues found that presenting the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their stated willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.

    Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing ways of thinking­one of these, a quick, natural "feeling," and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more careful way simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language signals our cognitive (认知的) system to prepare for difficult activity.

    An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages are filled with greater emotions than are those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less filled with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood.

    There's strong evidence that memory connects a language with the experiences and interactions through which that language was learned. For example, people who are bilingual (双语的) are more likely to recall an experience if reminded in the language in which that event occurred. Our childhood languages, learned in the middle of passionate emotion, become filled with deep feeling. By comparison, languages acquired late in life, especially if they are learned through limited interactions in the classroom or dully delivered over computer screens and headphones, enter our minds lacking the emotionality that is present for their native speakers.

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recently declared children's mental health is a national crisis. 

In December 2021, Dr. Murthy issued a report to highlight the additional pressures the economic depression had put on the country's youth, and the urgent need to address this. The impact of this crisis is far-reaching, and new research shows that it's affecting parents' well-being, plus their ability to succeed at work and provide for their families. 

"On Our Sleeves, a national movement that aims to break shame around children's mental health, surveyed more than 3,000 working parents across the US and found that 8 in 10 parents have been very concerned about their child's mental health and development or behavior in the past two years. Children's mental health concerns have been hiding in plain sight for many years, surrounded by confusion and shame," says Marti Bledsoe Post, the director of On Our Sleeves. 

The survey found that 53% of working parents have missed work at least once per month to deal with their children's mental health. And 71% of parents said issues with their child's mental or emotional well-being made the stresses of work much more difficult to cope with. 

"Employers need to know that many of their employees are struggling and it is impinging their work as a result," says Marti. "Our mission with On Our Sleeves is to provide every family in America access to free, evidence-based educational resources. We see this study as incredibly important in starting the conversation and providing solutions for working families."

As Marti points out, for some parents, taking a child to weekly therapy (心理治疗) appointments and attending meetings at school consume a lot of time. These parents should be helped.