Chinese students' extremely neat handwritten compositions have aroused a heated debate among Internet users since photos of the compositions and a teacher's picky remarks were published on Daily Mail Online.

    “Can you believe this essay is handwritten? ” Daily Mail Online asked.

    The website reported on the compositions that looked like they had been machine printed and on the teacher's remarks at Hengshui High School in North China's Hebei Province, one of China's top 100 high schools. The teacher wrote, “not one stroke (笔画) more, not one stroke less” about some compositions that weren't neatly written.

    The story immediately aroused a heated debate among British Internet users and got 652 comments after it was published on Wednesday. Some British readers were amazed by the neat handwriting and attributed (归于)China's growing development to this strict teaching method. A reader named Jim said, “This is another example of why China is rising to the top”, and his comment gained 72 supports. But some readers thought the too-picky method doesn't make sense in helping students learn better English and suppresses（压制） students' creativity.

    Chinese Internet users also expressed different opinions after English newspapers, a user of China's Twitter like Sina Weibo, posted the story along with its comments on Weibo on Thursday. Since then, the post has received 1, 479 comments. Sina Weibo user wenjinzetui said, “Beautiful handwriting proves an ability”, echoing an old Chinese saying that the style is the man. However, another Weibo user, honorificabilitus, said, “It's meaningless to pursue that neat English handwriting, since learning language is for communicating, let alone English students don't write that neatly. ”

    There are also many Weibo users showing worry about this too-strict teaching method, as weibo user li-owl-stop said, “We should reflect the Chinese-style education, and it's hard to imagine what would happen if all the schools in China adopted the teaching method at Hengshui High School. ”

    I must have looked deep in thought, or as deep in thought as an 11-year-old man can, when my grandmother glanced up from her weeding to ask, "You have something on your mind, don't you?"

    "Yes, I was thinking that someday I want to be an Olympic speedskating champion like my hero, Eric Heiden, I want to be a doctor like my parents and I want to help children in Africa."

    I immediately knew I had confided in the right person when a knowing smile broke across her face. "Johann, of course! You can do anything you want to do!" she said simply. And with my grandmother's support, I set out to pursue my passions.

    14 years later, I was well ready to take hold of my first dream: becoming an Olympic champion. The Olympics in 1994 were in my home country, Norway. As I entered the Olympic stadium, I wasn't the best athlete, and many had doubts about my ability to perform well. But I had something special working for me. I had a woman in the first row who believed in me following my passions just as much as I did. For the first time ever, my grandmother was going to see me skate.

    It happened. Breaking a world record, I won the gold.

    As I stood on the podium(领奖台) that I had dreamed about my entire life, a curious question popped into my head. Why me? Why did I win, given all the other incredible competitors out there? The reason had to be more than a grandmother who shared a belief in her grandson's dream. The question led me to only one answer: because I wanted to make a difference in the world, and with all the media attention on my success, I could.

    I immediately knew what that difference had to be: hope in the lives of the children in Africa. Six months earlier, I'd been invited to Eritrea as an ambassador for Olympic Aid.

    I think it was October, 1982. A friend had business dealings in the city of Reno, Nevada, and I was asked to accompany her on an overnight trip. While she conducted her business, I was aimlessly wandering down

    Virginia Street，heading into a most gloriously beautiful sunset. I had a strong wish to speak to someone on the street to share that beauty, but I couldn't make eye contact with anyone. Quickly I went into a department store and asked the lady behind the counter if she could come outside for just a minute. She looked at me as

though I were from some other planet and said, “Well…” Surprisingly, she followed me out.

    When she got outside I said to her, “Just look at that sunset! Nobody out here was looking at it and I just had to share it with someone.”

    For a few seconds we just looked. Then I said, “God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

    I thanked her for coming out to see it and sharing the beauty.

    Four years later my situation had changed a lot. I had come to the end of a twenty-year marriage. I was alone and on my own for the first time in my life. One day, while my clothes were going around, I picked up aUnity Magazine and read an article about a woman who had been in similar situation. She had come to the end of a marriage, moved to a strange community, and the only job she could find was one she disliked: cosmetic sales in a department store. We had a lot in common.

    Then something happened to her that changed everything. She said a woman came into her department store and asked her to step outside to look at a sunset. The stranger had said, “God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.”, and she had realized the truth in that sentence and that she simply had not been seeing it. From that moment on, she turned her life around.  

    On a recent spring morning. Susan Alexander, a retired government intelligence analyst, left her Maryland home, climbed into her Volkswagen Passat and drove about three miles to pick up two strangers. She battled rush-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway and George Washington Memorial Parkway before dropping them off at Reagan National Airport. She didn't earn a cent for her trouble, and that was the point.

    Alexander is a member of the Silver Spring Time Bank-one of more than 100 such exchanges around the world trying to build community by exchanging time credits for services instead of dollars and cents. "I have time," she said. "I like giving the gift of time to other people."

    In Alexander's case, passengers Mary and Al Liepold were grateful for the ride, but it wasn't charity. Mary, a retired writer and editor for nonprofit organizations, used time credits she banked for editing work and baking. Senior citizens who don't drive, the Liepolds cashed in their credits to catch a flight to Montreal for a five-day vacation.

    Without money changing hands or shifting between virtual accounts, the airport drop-off was more like a coffee party than a taxi ride. Driver and passengers chatted about projects they've completed for the time bank, and no one raised an eyebrow when Mary said she likes "to avoid the conventional economy."

    "The beauty of this is that you make friends," Mary Liepold said. "You don't just get services."

    The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, l,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money." You get to save that money that you would have spent," she said. "You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus that's part of an exchange. "

    A deal performed partly to make friends would seem to go against classical economics and one of Benjamin Franklin's most memorable sayings: "Time is money." To those at the forefront of modem time-banking, that is the appeal.

    A few weeks ago, I sat with a California farmer named Dave Ribeiro. I asked him what he wished to know about farmers. He smiled and said, "That we walk among you. We look like you and talk like you. We have advanced degrees and hobbies, just like you."

    Take Dave for example: He's a young man with a music degree. And if you walked past him on the street, you'd never think, "There goes a farmer."

    Is someone like Dave who you picture when you think of a farmer? Probably not. I think that most people would picture a man in his overalls(工作服). I can tell you, that does not represent Dave or any of the many other farmers I have gotten to know.

    Not only do we have to throw out our previous impression of farmers, but farming as a whole doesn't look much like it used to either. We recently sent a team out to see what modern farming looks like, and they found farmers to be completely different from our usual ideas about them and also came across them in some unexpected places.

    In a parking lot in a neighborhood of Brooklyn, they met a new crop of young farmers who were trying to bring fresh greens closer to eaters in the city by growing them in high-tech indoor vertical(垂直的) farms. In a Florida field under the fight path of an airport, they discovered farmers with university degrees growing plants that might someday fuel our cars. And in a modern farm in California, they observed how farmers were using technology to take the best possible care of their animals.

    These farmers all spend their days in very different ways—none of them looks like the previous farmer we have in our mind—but they're all working on new ways to feed our planet. Not only do we need to change our idea of what farming looks like, but we also need to change our view of where solutions can come from. Feeding all of us is going to take all of us working together.