Do you know an outstanding junior high or high school teacher, coach, guidance counselor, librarian，or headmaster? Nominate (提名)that special teacher you'll always remember and give him/her the chance to be recognized in a famous national magazine through "Educators of the Year Contest"!

Prizes

    Cash awards will be given to those from across the country who are given the honor of Educators of the Year. Besides, your winning essays will also be published in our magazine.

Guidelines

    We will only consider essays written by teens, and nominations must be for junior high or high school educators only. Elementary school educators are not suitable.

    Convince us your educator is special. Tell us about his or her style of teaching, his or her role in school activities, and community service. What has your educator done for the entire school, your class, for you or another student? Give examples with specific details. Keep your essay between 200 and 1,000 words. Remember to include the first and last name, position, and school of your educator in your essay.

Don't forget to submit (提交)your essays through our website. You can also read our submission guidelines for more information on this website.

The Deadline

    The deadline for submitting your essays is December 30. Your essays are accepted and will appear in our magazine all over the year. Winners will be made public after the January issue is published.

    Drive through any suburb in the U.S. today,and it's hard to miss the bins that have become companions to America's trash cans.Recycling has become commonplace,as people recognize the need to care for the environment. Yet most people's recycling consciousness extends only as far as paper,bottles,and cans.People seldom find themselves facing the growing problem of e-waste.

    E-waste rapidly increases as the techno-fashionable frequently upgrade to the most advanced devices,and the majority of them end up in landfills（垃圾填埋地）.Some people who track such waste say that users throw away nearly 2 million tons of TVs,VCRs,computers,cell phones,and other electronics every year.Unless we can find a safe replacement,this e-waste may get into the ground and poison the water with dangerous toxins（毒素）,such as lead, mercury,and arsenic.Burning the waste also dangerously contaminates the air.

    However,e-waste often contains reusable silver.gold.and other electrical materials.Recycling these materials reduces environmental problems by reducing both landfill waste and the need to look for such metals,which can destroy ecosystems.

    A growing number of states have adopted laws to ban dumping e-waste.Still,less than a quarter of this refuse will reach lawful recycling programs.Some companies advertising safe disposal（处置）in fact merely ship the waste to some developing countries,where it still ends up in landfills.These organizations prevent progress by unsafely disposing of waste in an out-of-sight,out-of-mind location.

    However,the small but growing number of cities and corporations that do handle e-waste responsibly represents progress toward making the world a cleaner,better place for us all.

    Last summer, two nineteenth-century cottages were rescued from remote farm fields in Montana, to be moved to an Art Deco building in San Francisco. The houses were made of wood. These cottages once housed early settlers as they worked the dry Montana soil; now they hold Twitter engineers.

    The cottages could be an example of the industry' s odd love affair with “low technology,” a concept associated with the natural world, and with old-school craftsmanship (手艺) that exists long before the Internet era. Low technology is not virtual (虚拟的) —so, to take advantage of it, Internet companies have had to get creative. The rescued wood cottages, fitted by hand in the late eighteen-hundreds, are an obvious example, but Twitter's designs lie on the extreme end. Other companies are using a broader interpretation (阐释) of low technology that focuses on nature.

    Amazon is building three glass spheres filled with trees, so that employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.” At Google's office, an entire floor is carpeted in glass. Facebook's second Menlo Park campus will have a rooftop park with a walking trail.

    Olle Lundberg, the founder of Lundberg Design, has worked with many tech companies over the years. “We have lost the connection to the maker in our lives, and our tech engineers are the ones who feel impoverished (贫乏的) , because they're surrounded by the digital world,” he says. “They're looking for a way to regain their individual identity, and we've found that introducing real crafts is one way to do that.”

    This craft based theory is rooted in history, William Morris, the English artist and writer, turned back to pre-industrial arts in the eighteen-sixties, just after the Industrial Revolution. The Arts and Crafts movement defined itself against machines. “Without creative human occupation, people became disconnected from life,” Morris said.

    Research has shown that natural environments can restore(恢复) our mental capacities. In Japan, patients are encouraged to “forest-bathe,” taking walks through woods to lower their blood pressure.

    These health benefits apply to the workplace as well. Rachel Kaplvin, a professor of environmental psychology, has spent years researching the restorative effects of natural environment. Her research found that workers with access to nature at the office—even simple views of trees and flowers—felt their jobs were less stressful and more satisfying. If low-tech offices can potentially nourish the brains and improve the mental health of employees then, fine, bring on the cottages.

    "It can't be done." Boyan Slat heard this over and over when he first proposed a way to clean up millions of tons of plastic polluting our oceans. Almost anyone else would have given up in frustration and despair. But 20-year-old Slat hasn't: been discouraged but committed to his dream. "Human history is basically a list of things that couldn't be done, and then were done," he says. Today, slat and his team at The Ocean Cleanup are well on their way to proving the critics wrong. Good news for the planet.

    ⑴_______.

    Slat, who grew up in the city of Delft in the Netherlands, was on a diving trip in Greece three years ago when he was deeply impressed by plastic, "There were more plastic bags than fish," he says. "That moment I realized it was a huge issue and that environmental issues are really the biggest problems my generation will face."

That fall, Slat, then 17, decided to study plastic pollution as part of a high school project. Soon, Slat learned that no one had yet come up with practical way to clean up this massive garbage patches. Most proposed solutions involved "fishing" up the plastic using ships equipped with nets﹣which, as Slat discovered, would likely take more than 1,000 years, cost too much, let off too much sea life along with the trash.

    Slat proposed an alternative that mostly avoided these problems﹣a solar﹣powered system using a floating plastic tube which will go around the garbage and trap it is 600 meters long, A big screen hangs down from it, about three metres into the water. Wind, waves and ocean currents will push the trash toward the tube. （Fish can swim under the screen） A ship will pick up the trash and take it back to the shore to sort and recycle it into oil and other products. Best of all, Slat predicted his system could clean up the North Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii where a lot of floating garbage exists, within five to 10 years.

    ⑵________.

    The following, Slat entered the aerospace engineering program at the Delft University of Technology and officially announced his ocean cleanup concept at TEDx Delft. But nothing much moved forward,

    Slat found himself continually absent﹣minded in classes, looking for ways to improve his concept. "It wouldn't let go. I finally decided to put both university and my social life on hold to focus all my time on developing this idea. I wasn't sure if it would succeed, but considering the scale of problem I thought it was important to at least try." He says.

    With this family's blessing, Slat began in earnest organizing a team of volunteers and employees for The Ocean Cleanup, which now numbers about 100.

    ⑶_______.

    In answer to opposition, Slat and his team raised ＄100,000 from a crowd funding campaign and began testing a 40﹣meter collecting barrier near the Azores Islands last March. In June, they released a 500+ page possibility study.

Over the next three to four years, Slat will push toward a fully operational large﹣scale project by testing a series of longer and longer barriers. He's currently seeking to crowd fund ＄2 million to finance it. Incidentally, The Ocean Cleanup is also working on a plan to stop plastic from washing into the oceans in the first place. "It's just the other problem that is equally important." Slat says. "It's something everyone is able to help with, and we also have some technologies in the pipeline."

    As for school, Slat doesn't miss it﹣except maybe for the social﹣part, which he hopes to （恢复） a bit once his team takes on more of the workload. "I don't have time for things like that right now, but I really can't complain. I can imagine doing something more fun than being able to have an idea and then actually making it into a reality." he says.

    Children have their own rules in playing games. They seldom need a referee (裁判) and rarely trouble to keep scores. They don't care much about who wins or loses, and it doesn't seem to worry them if the game is not finished. Yet, they like games that depend a lot on luck, so that their personal abilities cannot be directly compared. They also enjoyed games that move in stages, in which each stage, the choosing of leaders, the picking-up of sides, or the determining of which side shall start, is almost a game in itself.

    Grown-ups can hardly find children's game exciting, and they often feel puzzled at why their kids play such simple game again and again. However, it is found that a child plays games for very important reasons. He can be a good player without having to think whether he is a popular person, and he can find himself being a useful partner to someone of whom he is ordinary afraid. He becomes a leader when it comes to his turn. He can be confident, too, in particular games, that it is his place to give orders, to pretend to be dead, to throw a ball actually at someone, or to kiss someone he has caught.

    It appears to us that when children play a game they imagine a situation under their control. Everyone knows the rules, and more importantly, everyone plays according to the rules. Those rules may be childish, but they make sure that every child has a chance to win.

Explore Nice in France - how car travel makes for a memorable holiday.

A classic option to explore the celebrated city of France, such as Nice is through hard travel. Cruising through the South of France, there are museums and restaurants to experience. Visiting these attractions is most convenient with a car. As hiring a car in Nice from the airport is simple. One can sit back and drive through the wonderful country lands without a care in the world. The west side has small hills while the east extends to the Mediterranean Sea. Peaceful vineyards, quiet villages at a rich life awaits you if you drive through the countryside.

Restaurants

The kitchen delights that Nice offers are the cities chief attraction. The Cours Saleya market, offers fine delicacies while sipping the Provencal wine is another soothing experience. Overall, Coted' Azur can be put as the gastronomic capital of France.

Beaches

Being along the coastline，Nice offers some really warm and relaxing beaches to its tourists lined with cosy seaside apartments and hotels.

Tips for Hiring a Car

Choose a car which can easily accommodate you and your family without being too big-- Traffic can be a major issue in some cities.

A GPS navigation system aids in traveling without getting lost and also helps in saving time.

Check with various number of car hire companies for the different prices so that you do not end up with an expensive package. Traveling to France has perhaps been on the wish lists of every travel-hungry person. And you can make your trip even more memorable by traveling through the country in the car.