Guided Walking Week  April 2016

Dates: April 30th-May 7th 2016

Location: Abdet, Costa Blanca

    A week of guided walking in the mountains around Abdet. Highlights include the climbing of Valencia's highest summit (Sierra de Aitana), traveling completely around the impressive Puig Campana, and several explorations in the Sierra de Aitana. Ancient trails lead through spectacular canyons( 峡谷 ) to abandoned settlements situated high in the mountains. You will discover the snow trader routes which lead from the incredible snow holes high in the mountains down to the villages and towns on the coast. These years, golden eagles have made a return to this area, and you may also see other animals—wild goats, foxes, wild pigs and red squirrels.

    As part of the week you are invited to help clear some local walking paths. This involves clearing collapsed walls and rocks, cutting back fallen trees. This is of course optional and is just for half a day, it's actually great fun!

Price:$499

Includes:

● Accommodation in the beautiful mountain village of Abdet

● All food-good home cooking

● Beer, wine, soft drinks

● Snacks and post walk treats

● Packed lunches & drinks(except café/bar visits)

● Expert guiding

● Photos/Videos of your days in the mountains

● Airport pick-up/return $25 each way(fly to Alicante)

● Single room supplement $75

To book or get further information, please contact info@abdet.com.

    We all know what a brain is. A doctor will tell you that the brain is the organ of the body in the head. It controls our body's functions, movements, emotions and thoughts. But a brain can mean so much more.

    A brain can also simply be a smart person. If a person is called brainy, he is smart and intelligent. If a family has many children but one of them is super smart, you could say, “He's the brains in the family.” And if you are the brains behind something, you are responsible for developing or organizing something. For example, Bill Gates is the brains behind Microsoft.

    Brain trust is a group of experts who give advice. Word experts say the phrase “brain trust” became popular when Franklin D. Roosevelt first ran for president in 1932. Several professors gave him advice on social and political issues（问题）facing the U.S. These professors were called his “brain trust”.

    These ways we use the word “brain” all make sense. But other ways we use the word are not so easy to understand. For example, to understand the next brain expression, you first need to know the word “drain”. As a verb, to drain means to remove something by letting it flew away. So a brain drain may sound like a disease where the brain flows out the ears. But, brain drain is when a country's most educated people leave their countries to live in another. The brains are, sort of, draining out of the country.

    However, if people are responsible for a great idea, you could say they brainstormed it. Here, brainstorm is not an act of weather. It is a process of thinking creatively about a complex topic. For example, business leaders may use brainstorming to create new products, and government leaders may brainstorm to solve problems.

    If people are brainwashed, it does not mean their brains are nice and clean. To brainwash means to make some accept new beliefs by using repeated pressure in a forceful or tricky way. Keep in mind that brainwash is never used in a positive way.

    At the end of last summer my parents' house in Tunstall went up in flames. Several months on, we're still trying to find out exactly what happened, but my parents John and Carole were out when more than half the house was burned to the ground. What was left behind needed to be pulled down and most of the things that were not actually destroyed were so smoke-damaged that they would have to be thrown away.

My parents were both teachers and not the kind of people to fill their house with expensive furniture, so most of their belongings were memories—--including photos and the tracksuit(运动服) that Dad was given when he carried the Olympic torch (火炬). But what really upset me was not the loss of these things.

    Dad had an album(唱片) for every occasion. Once his car got broken into and he was more upset that his cassettes had been nicked(划伤) than about all the rest of the damage. So when I was considering doing something to help after the fire, I immediately thought about his music. We couldn't get the old photos back, but we could replace his CDs and records. Then I started a little page about my dad on the blogging site Tumblr.

    Within a few days, news of what had happened spread by word of mouth, and I was getting messages from friends I hadn't spoken to for years. I also heard from Dad's mates and even from people neither of us had ever met. Soon packages arrived from all over the country. I expected 100CDs if we were lucky, but his new collection would now run into the thousands!

    On Christmas Day, all the records, tapes and CDs were packed into a beautiful box, which of course, was for my dad. A lot of them came from his previous students and he was touched to realize what an effect he had had on their lives. Eventually , he told me, “What could have been a bad Christmas has been a very good one.”

    American high school students are terrible writers, and one education reform group thinks it has an answer: robots. Or, more accurately, robot-readers—computers programmed to scan students' essays and spit out a grade.

    Mark Shermis, professor of the College of Education at the University of Akron, is helping to hold a contest, set up by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (WFHF), which promises $ 100,000 in prize money to programmers who write the best automated grading software. "If you're a high school teacher and you give a writing task, you're walking home with 150 essays," Shermis said. "You're going to need some help."

    Automated essay grading was first proposed in the 1960s, but computers back then were not up to the task. In the late 1990s, as technology improved, several textbooks and testing companies jumped into the field. Today, computers are used to grade essays on South Dakota's student writing assessments and a handful of other exams, including the TOEFL test of English fluency, taken by foreign students.

    The Hewlett contest aims to show that computers can grade as well as English teachers—only much more quickly and without all that depressing red ink. "Automated essay scoring is objective," Shermis said. "And it can be done immediately. If students finish an essay at 10 pm, they will get a result at 10: 01 pm."

    Take, for instance, the Intelligent Essay Assessor, a web-based tool marketed by Pearson Education, Inc. Within seconds, it can analyze an essay for spelling, grammar, organization, and help students to make revisions. The program scans for key words and analyzes semantic (语义的) patterns, and Pearson claims that it can understand the meaning of text much the same as a human reader.

    One day. One lifetime. You can do it! From the museum of modem art to the museum of ancient articles, visit our picks for the world's best museums.

    National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa)

    This museum has a great collection of art spanning the Middle Ages to the present day, including American, Indian, European, Inuit and Canadian works. It offers a unique, near-complete overview of Canadian art—from early Quebec religious work, through Inuit work from the 1950s, to the contemporaries.

    Tokugawa Art Museum (Japan)

    The Tokugawa family reigned over Japan from 1600 to 1868. Under them, the country enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history. This time span is also known as the Edo period, during which the arts flowered in Japan. Artists of this period directly influenced Western masters such as Monet, Gauguin and Whistler and have since gone on to become household names. Other exhibits effectively present, through accurately reproduced environments, aspects of Japanese life at the time.

    Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

    Highlights of this museum's collection include a 4th-century Christian marble bust (半身像) of St. Paul at prayer, and a painting that questions life and our very existence, Gauguin's "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" It's a must—go in the US.

    The Egyptian Museum (Cairo)

    As well as gathering together some of the finest archaeological finds from all Egypt, this museum also provides a rare opportunity to simply pop in and within minutes be standing face-to-face with one of the greatest works of mankind, Tutankhamun's golden mask. A portrait of unbelievable quality, craftsmanship and beauty, the highly polished gold face—at once a god, a king and a teenager—shines like water: delicate, yet untouchable all at the same time.

This year, the Music Educator Award, presented by the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum, went to Annie Ray, the performing arts department chair and orchestra director at Annandale High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. She attended the awards ceremony in Los Angeles and brought home both a $10,000 prize and matching grant （资助） for her school's music program.

Ray created the Crescendo Orchestra for students with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as a parent orchestra that teaches nearly 200 caregivers a year to play the same instrument as their children. She got the idea mostly from the Annandale community, which she says represents over 60 countries, including many refugees and immigrants. "There're many cultures that might typically clash, but they come together in this very beautiful harmony," Ray explained. "And that's really uniquely expressed in the orchestra classroom, where we're just all music-ing together."

Ray says the Crescendo Orchestra is focused on teaching students how to play an instrument, through one-on-one instruction tailored to their needs. The orchestra is about much more than just making music, however. "I really push my students to be brave and go outside of their comfort zone. We have to learn how to work together with others," she says.

Ray, who comes from a family of musicians and has played the harp （竖琴） since the age of five, knows firsthand the impact that a great teacher can make on their students. "Why I am where I am is because a teacher changed my life and made me want to be a music educator," she says.

Ray says her warm reception on the awards ceremony is especially meaningful because not many people understand what exactly music educators do in the classroom or how much their work matters. She says that lack of understanding is one of the biggest challenges facing the profession in general. Moreover, she says her school desperately needs new instruments, and adds that she'll use some of her grant money to buy more.