I arrived at my mother's home for our Saturday family dinner. The smells of food flew over from the kitchen. Mother was pulling out quilt after quilt from the boxes, proudly showing me their beauties. I knew they were all made herself. She was preparing for a quilt show on TV. When we began to fold and put them back into the boxes, I noticed something at the bottom of one box. I pulled it out. “What's this?” I asked.

“Oh?” Mom said, “That's Mama's quilt.”

    I spread the quilt. It looked as if a group of school children had made the pieces together.

 “Grandmother made this?” I asked in surprise. My grandmother was a master at making quilts. This certainly didn't look like any of the quilts she had made.

  “Yes, right before she died. I brought it home with me last year and made some changes,” Mom said, “I'm still working on it. See, this is what I've done so far.”

     I looked at it more closely. She had made a line straight(直的). At the center of the quilt， she had stitched a piece of cloth with these words:    “My mother made many quilts. She didn't get all lines straight. But I think this is beautiful. I want to see it finished. Her last quilt.”

“Oh, this is so nice, Mom.” I said. I was sure now that by completing my grandmother's quilt, my mother was honoring her own mother. I realized that I held in my hands a family treasure. It started with the loving hands of one woman, and continued with the loving hands of another.

    A man was walking along the street when he saw a woman carrying a large box. It was half in and half out of her car. So the man went up and said, “The box looks very heavy. Let me give you a hand.”

 “That's very kind of you,” the woman said, “I'm having a lot of trouble with it. Maybe it sticks (卡住) in the car door.”

 “Together we'll soon move it,” the man said. “I'll get in and take the other end.” And he got in the car.

 “Right,” the man said. “I'm ready,” and he began to push the box hard. For several minutes, the man and the woman tried to move the box. Soon they felt very tired.

    They rested for a moment. Then the woman said, “Let's try again. One, two, three!” They went on moving the box.

    At last, when they were exhausted, the man said, “I'm sorry, but I don't think there's any way to get it out of your car.”

 “Get it out?” the woman cried. “I'm trying to get it in! You know?”

    A man goes into a restaurant one day. His clothes are very nice. He sits down at a table near the window.

    A waiter comes to him and says, “Can I help you, sir?” The man says, “Yes, please. Can I see the menu (菜单)?”

        “Sure,” answers the waiter. The man wants a good meal and he wants a lot of nice dishes. After a moment, the waiter brings them to him. The man has his meal happily. At this time, a boy comes in and sits down besides the man. He asks the waiter to give him ice cream. The man says, “I will be back in 5 minutes.” Then he goes out. After the boy eats his ice cream, he stands up and goes to the door. “Excuse me, your father doesn't give the money for the meal and your ice cream,” the waiter stops him and says.

    “Father? You are wrong. He is not my father. I do not know him. I meet him in the street. He says he'll give me ice cream when I come here at twelve o'clock.”

    Do you know any 9-year-olds who have started their own museums? When Theodore Roosevelt was only nine, he and two of his cousins opened the "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History". The museum was in Theodore's bedroom. It had a total of 12 specimens. On display were a few seashells, some dead insects, and some birds' nests. Young Roosevelt took great pride in his small museum.

    Born in New York in 1858, Theodore Roosevelt was not always healthy. "I was a sickly boy", he once wrote. Roosevelt had a health condition called asthma. He often found it hard to breathe. Instead of playing, he watched nature and then read and wrote about it.

    Roosevelt's interest in nature sometimes got him into trouble. Once, his mother found several dead mice in the icebox. She demanded that the mice be thrown out. This was indeed "a loss to science", Roosevelt said later.

    Because Roosevelt was often sickly as a boy, his body was small and weak. When he was about 12, his father asked him to improve his body. Roosevelt began working out in a gym. He didn't become strong quickly. But he did decide to face life's challenges with a strong will. That determination stayed with Roosevelt his whole life. And eventually his body did get strong. As an adult, he was an active and healthy person. He enjoyed adventures, and he loved the outdoors.

    A toy company named the teddy bear for Theodore "Teddy". After knowing that, Roosevelt refused to shoot a baby bear while hunting.

    In 1900, at the age of 41, Roosevelt was elected Vice President. A year later, President McKinley, was shot and killed. Roosevelt became our 26^th President. At 42, he was the youngest leader the country had ever had.

    Reading Oliver James' Affluenza, I thought about what often happens at home. My 12-year-old daughter is in tears. "I have to take a test tomorrow. I don't understand any of it, "she cries out. After shouting and shutting her door, she calms down enough to go through her notes. The following day I ask her how the test went and she just says "OK, I got a nine".

    "Wow. Well done!" I say, before she finishes with "But I never get a ten!"

    According to James, this obsession with getting top marks has been a bad development, which encourages people to think of education in terms of work and money. To test this, I asked my daughter why she was so worried about her tests. She looked at me as if I was thick. "Well, if I don't get good grades, I won't be able to afford nice things like a car and stuff."

    I was quite surprised, because I don't consider myself a pushy parent. But James suggests and it leaves students feeling failures even if they are very bright. He points to the Danish system (体制) of education as a better model. Creating happy citizens who have good social skills is seen as more important than high achievements at school or the needs of business.

    For me, I cannot remember the last time I had to work out the area of a circle, recite a Shakespeare poem or grammar rules, yet I have lived a happy life. What I really needed to learn at school was how to make polite conversations, or how to avoid getting into debt or how to develop good personality.

    This is in fact similar to what Oliver James really has in mind. And he is looking for schools where students are encouraged to find and follow their own interests, something more like Tongjon.  Tongjon has been developed in some Korean private schools. It is quite different from the more rigid system of learning things by heart that is used in Korea, and indeed in many other school systems around the world.

    As the Russian poet Pushkin said," Inspiration(灵感)is needed in geometry(几何学)just as much as in poetry", and inspiration does not come from endlessly revising for tests or getting worried about them.