More than a decade ago, cognitive scientists John Bransfgord and Daniel Schwartz, both then at Vanderbilt University, found that knowledge was not the ability to retain facts or apply previous knowledge to a new situation but a quality they called "preparation for future learning." The researches asked fifth graders and college students to create a recovery plan to protect bald eagles from extinction. Shockingly, the two groups came up with plans of similar quality (though the college students had better spelling skills). From the standpoint of a traditional educator, this outcome indicated that schooling had failed to help students think about ecosystems and extinction, major scientific ideas.

    The researches decided to go deeper, however. They asked both groups to generate questions about important issues needed to create recovery plans. On this task, they found large differences. College students focused on critical issues. The college students had cultivated the ability to ask questions, the foundation of critical thinking. They had learned how to learn.

    Museums and other institutions of informal learning may be more suitable to teach this skill than elementary and secondly schools. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, we recently studied how learning to ask good questions can affect the quality of people's scientific inquiry. We found that when we taught participants to ask "What if?" and "How can?" questions that nobody present would know the answer to and that would spark exploration, they engaged in better inquiry at the next exhibit—asking more questions, performing more experiments and making better interpretations of their results. Specially, their questions became more comprehensive at the new exhibit.

    This type of learning is not limited to museums of institutional settings. Informal learning environment tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depend on them being able to make critical decisions about their own medical treatment, says, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust informal system that gives no grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends.

    When we think about happiness, we usually think of something surprising and unexpected, a top great delight.

    For a child, happiness has a magic quality. I remember playing police and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at tops of pleasure is easily seen, such as winning a race or getting a new bike.

    For teenagers, or people under 20, the idea of happiness changes. Suddenly it's conditional on such things as excitement, love, and popularity. I can still feel the pain of not being invited to a party that almost everyone else was going to. I also recall the great happiness of being invited at another event to dance with a very handsome young man.

    In adulthood the things that bring great joy — birth, love, marriage — also bring responsibility and the risk of loss. Love may not last; loved ones die. For adults, happiness is complex.

    My dictionary explains “happy” as “lucky” or “ fortunate”, but I think a better explanation of happiness is “ the ability to enjoy something”. The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It's easy for us not to notice the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to love where we please, and even good health. Nowadays, with so many choices and much pleasure, we have turned happiness into one more thing we have. We think we own the right to have it, which makes us extremely unhappy. So we try hard to get it and consider it to be the same as wealth and success, without noticing that the people who have those things aren't necessarily happier.

    While happiness may be more complex for us, the answer is the same as ever. Happiness isn't about what happens to us. It's the ability to find a positive for every negative, and view a difficulty as a challenge. Don't be sad for what we don't have, but enjoy what we do possess.

    Proper diet and regular exercise seem to be the only methods for losing weight.However,the importance of water should be added in the process.While medical science has proven the positive effects of water,most people still do not drink enough each day.

    The reason why water is so important for weight loss has something to do with metabolism（新陈代谢）of fat. The liver（肝脏）is in charge of this process when it comes to turning stored fat in-to energy.However,the liver is also responsible for helping the kidneys（肾脏）that need enough water in order to function properly.The liver has to perform all the functions of the kidneys on its own when they are short of water.This means the liver doesn't have enough energy to metabolize fat.So,drinking water allows the kidneys to focus on their job and the liver to focus on its job.

    Also,studies have shown that water can make us feel full when drunk before meals.Without even making an effort,most people who drink a glass of water before a meal will eat 33% less.This is due in part to the fact that they simply get fuller quicker because the water is taking up space.The other reason is that the food will expand as soon as it hits the water-filled stomach.

    Water is important for every aspect of the health of the human body.By drinking more water and improving the health of the body,weight loss goals can be achieved with greater ease.

    An Indian movie about two sisters has become a huge hit in China. The Hindi language film, called Dangal, has earned almost $ 170 million in China since its release there on May 5.

    Much has been written about why Dangal has enjoyed such big success in China. Some people say one reason is that the film's star and producer, Aamir Khan. He is famous in India's Bollywood film industry. Two of his earlier films were also big hits in China.

    Khan's popularity was clear after he got more than 600,000 followers on the Chinese social media service Sina Weibo within two months of joining. But he is not the only reason that the Him strongly connects with audience across China. Media has pointed out how it shows similarities between parental systems in China and India.

    Dangal is based on the true story of a man who enjoyed the sport of wrestling (摔跤). He competed as a wrestler, but never could achieve his lifelong dream: winning a gold medal. As a father, he wanted his son to win the medal. But his wife only gives birth to daughters. So he finally decides to train them to be world-class wrestlers.

    The movie is more serious than most Bollywood productions, which tell happy love stories and include colorful music and dance performances.

    Edward Chan is a professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He says the strict way of parenting in the film is something people in China can easily relate to. “I think the father role described by the movie in India is quite similar to the culture, especially the traditional culture in China.”

    The Chinese government-supported Global Times newspaper pointed that movie critics (评论家) in China did not like Dangal. Most of them agree with the fact that the father in the film was forceful in pushing his daughters to become wrestlers. But the film Dangal is really aimed to educate children to work for their dreams.

    In the fall of 1985, I was a bright-eyed girl heading off to Howard University, aiming at a legal career and dreaming of sitting on a Supreme Court bench somewhere. Twenty-one years later I am still a bright-eyed dreamer and one with quite a different tale to tell.

    My grandma, an amazing woman, graduated from college at the age of 65. She was the first in our family to reach that goal. But one year after I started college, she developed cancer. I made the choice to withdraw from college to care for her. It meant that school and my personal dream would have to wait.

    Then I got married with another dream: building my family with a combination of adopted and biological children. In 1999, we adopted our first son. To lay eyes on him was fantastic－and very emotional. A year later came our second adopted boy. Then followed son No.3. In 2003, I gave birth to another boy.

    You can imagine how fully occupied I became, raising four boys under the age of 8! Our home was a complete zoo－a joyous zoo. Not surprising, I never did make it back to college fulltime. But I never gave up on the dream either. I had only one choice: to find a way. That meant taking as few as one class each semester.

    The hardest part was feeling guilty about the time I spent away from the boys. They often wanted me to stay home with them. There certainly were times I wanted to quit, but I knew I should set an example for them to follow through the rest of their lives.

    In 2007, I graduated from the University of North Carolina. It took me over 21 years to get my college degree!

    I am not special, just single-minded. It always struck me that when you're looking at a big challenge from the outside, it looks huge, but when you're in the midst of it, it just seems normal. Everything you want won't arrive in your life on one day. It's a process. Remember: little steps add up to big dreams.

    My students entered the art room with their usual eagerness to see what they would be learning in today's class. Little did they know they were going to be students for a new teaching method that is spreading the nation.

    I often use videos as previews and supplements (补充) to our art lessons providing students with a variety of artists showing their skills in real-life situations outside the classroom. Finding a new painting technique called glue batik(胶水蜡染),  I thought of something new I hadn't tried before!  How awesome would it be to learn a new technique together with artists? The lesson was planned, presented to the students without any introduction or set objectives. I also asked the students to watch and pause the video as often as they needed to.

    They watched as the artist explained and showed her skills, taking notes on her steps and results. After the video, they shared what they felt the artist's objectives were, her end result using art vocabulary as well as the steps they would need to know to present their own examples. Then they began creating their works using the glue batik technique.

    Surfing the Internet a couple of weeks later, I found that the teaching method I used sounded very familiar to a new movement in education called flipped teaching, which was developed by Jonathan Bergmann. He asked his students to watch video lectures at home and do exercises (homework) in class under supervision (监督). He found that grades went up and he also found time for other types of activities, which Bergmann states are more important than the videos.

    Back to my art class, the students were learning to get ideas, make predictions, and explain reasoning to their classmates. Together they compared, asked questions and made discoveries as they presented the technique.