I'm a 34-year-old man, married, lived in a nice house, and have a successful career as an educational consultant. But my life was not always so great. I had a learning disability from an early age. I went to a special school where I got plenty of extra help. Still, I suffered the rest of my school days in public schools.

       My life improved remarkably when I discovered art. The art world gave me a chance to express myself without words. I went to a workshop and gradually got good at making things with clay(黏土). Here I learned my first important lesson: disabled as I was in language. I could still be smart and well express myself with clay. And my confidence came along.

I got my next lesson from rock climbing. It was a fun thing but I was scared from the start. I soon noticed it wasn't a talent thing; it was practice. So I did it more. After about five years of climbing, I found myself in Yosemite Valley on a big wall. I learned that if you fall in love with something and do it all the time, you will get better at it.

       Later I decided to apply my previous experience to learning how to read and write. Every day I practiced reading and writing, which I used to avoid as much as possible. After two hard years, I was literate.

       Having gone through the long process with art, rock climbing, and reading and writing, now I've got to a point in my life where I know I am smart enough to dive into an area that is totally unknown, hard, but interesting.

    Currently offered by some famous universities, MOOCs are attractive to people who do not have the financial resources to meet the growing costs of university education, or who do not have formal qualifications. They also allow participants to study at their own pace.

    The potential for MOOCs to deliver education is obviously vast—they could be considered as a huge step forwards in widening participation. They also have the potential to provide a unique window on universities that offer popular and valuable courses, they may attract some participants to register for formal fee-paying programmes at the same or other universities and are likely to promote new ways of on-line education.

    However, it is still very early days for MOOCs. The quality of the education provision is highly variable, with many courses offering only recordings of lectures, and delivery is particularly difficult in some special fields that require practical classes, research projects or extensive library access. Besides, wider engagement with participants requires very considerable resource. Even limited feedback or examination becomes a major task if there are several thousand students in the class.

Considering the challenges, some people argue MOOCs will soon evaporate (蒸发). But they certainly provide good opportunity for widening higher education, are a means of raising awareness of universities to audiences of tens or hundreds of thousands, and are well worthy of serious consideration.

    Should schoolchildren have jobs?

    Now at school, the last thing you probably want to do is spend your weekends going to work. There is homework to do and sport to play{#blank#}1{#/blank#} When I was a teenager I had a Saturday job in a supermarket: stacking(摆放)shelves and working at the checkout.

    Today in the UK you are allowed to work from the age of 13, and many children do take up part-time jobs{#blank#}2{#/blank#}Teenagers agree that it teaches valuable lessons about working with adults and also about managing your money. So, that's no bad thing!

    Some research has shown that not taking on a Saturday or holiday job could be harmful to a person later on. But despite this, recent statistics have shown that the number of schoolchildren in the UK with a part-time job has fallen by a fifth in the past five years.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Probably not. Some experts feel that young people feel going out to work will affect their performance at school, and they are under more pressure now to study hard and get good exam results. However, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College leaders, told BBC News “Properly regulated part-time work is a good way of helping young people learn skills that they will need in their working lives”. In reality, it's all about getting the right balance between doing part-time work and having enough time to study and rest.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}One 13 year old girl called Rachel, who has a Saturday job in a shop, told the BBC that “I enjoy my job because I'm earning money and it helps increase my confidence in speaking to people and socializing with people I work with.” That seems like something worth getting up on a Saturday morning{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. Do you do a part-time job when you are at school?

B. So you are not free to do what you are feeling like doing.

C. It is a waste of time and does no good to your career prospect.

D. It's a waste of independence and a useful thing to put on your CV (简历).

E. Does this mean that British teenagers? Are now more afraid of hard work?

F. But your parents probably persuade you to find a job and get some life experience.

G. Many young people actually want to work because it gives them a sense of freedom.

Music is a Universal Language

    “Music is the universal language of mankind.” – Henry Longfellow

    Everyone has the inborn ability to understand and enjoy music. There are many theories as to why this is, but it has become a part of human beings. Since the beginning, humans have expressed themselves through music. Simple tribal rhythms evolved into many types of more complex music, including classical, rock, jazz, and R&B. While the styles between these many types of music may vary, everyone is able to understand and relate to them.

    What are the essential parts of a language? Every language uses vocabulary, or a set of words, to create sentences that convey messages. The tone and style of the sentences convey different feelings or emotions. Music is exactly the same way. Twelve tones, or notes, are combined to create phrases that also convey emotion. Music can even be written, like most other languages. Conversations even take place in music. Two saxophonists can play melodies back and forth, expressing different styles and feelings, building off of each other, responding to each other. Music changes over the years like other languages. Most people who speak fluent English cannot read one of Shakespeare's plays because the language has changed so much. Music is also affected by time, and over a long period, many new types of music and instruments have emerged to create different sounds and convey different messages. There are so many similarities between vocal language and music that they must be same.

    I recently had a chance to experience conversation through music. In 2008, I traveled to Manila, Philippines to participate in a high school jazz exchange where many students from all over Asia came together to share their talents. Everyone was mixed into different small groups to prepare for a concert at the end of week. Few people spoke fluent English so vocal communication was very tough. However, it wasn't needed. Everyone seemed to understand each other simply through the music and there were few times where direct translation was needed. At the performance, every group played for a live audience. They all sounded phenomenal and it felt like they were in perfect time and harmony. During my group's performance, I was able to improvise with a Korean boy who spoke very little English. But we managed to have a conversation through our instruments, building off each other's riffs until we were creating our own melody on the fly. It was a great experience.

    Because of the many similarities that music shares with other languages, it is a very effective way to communicate with others. Music brings us together, connects us with other people, and allows us to express ourselves in ways that are different from speech and writing. It has the ability to convey emotions and messages to the core of people, which is why Henry Longfellow is absolutely correct when he states that “music is the universal language of mankind.”

    Music is a Universal Language

    It's important that parents talk with their kids. But some kids hardly talk to their parents. How can parents get their kids to talk to them more? Here is how I do it.

    From the time my boys were little, we had strict rules about screen time in the car. We did not watch movies unless we were going to be in the car for more than an hour. Now that they are older, we have the same rule about earphones, let alone phones.

    I have watched about 11 billion YouTube videos featuring everything from stupid kid stunts (特技) to stupid professional stunts and sports highlights. These are not interesting to me but they are interesting to my kids, so I watched them all. I also try to find funny things in the news to use as conversation starters.

    Listening is the key to more talking, right? But sometimes kids just need to talk instead of having a two-way exchange. Or there are other kids in s the car who have somehow forgotten that the driver is an actual mom, and they talk about some serious news. I just listen to them quietly. Make note of things to circle back to if necessary. Just let the words flow when what they really need is your listening.

    My kids love stories about the older days. They want stories about me falling in the dining hall, getting in trouble at school or crashing my car, but not the, “I walked 10 miles to school in the snow”. Luckily I have plenty of examples and provide just enough information to cause questions for more details.

Why the youth sense anger in faces

    We tend to believe that older people are more positive and younger people are more sensitive to social cues (暗示).

    Recently scientists investigated this idea by testing 10,000 men and women. They wanted to see if age affected a person's ability to identify facial emotions, such as fear and anger.

    The researchers from McLean Hospital in the US used a Web-based platform to collect happiness data. It showed the participants two headshots (头部特写)of random people. They were then asked to identify which subject was angrier, happier, or more fearful.

    The research found that younger people were able to better identify angry and fearful facial cues than older people.

    "From studies and anecdotal evidence, we know that the everyday experiences of an adolescent are different from an older person, but we wanted to understand how these experiences might be linked with differences in basic emotion understanding,wrote Laura Germine, the study's senior author.

    But what is it that makes young people more sensitive?

    "This is the exact age when young people are most sensitive to forms of negative social cues, such as bullying," Lauren Rutter, the study's lead author, told Science Daily. "The normal development of anger sensitivity can contribute to some of the challenges that arise during this phase of development.

    On the contrary  across the whole 10,000-person survey, researchers found no decline in the perception (感知)of happiness among older participants.

    "What's remarkable is that we see declines in many visual perceptual abilities as we get older, but here we did not see such declines in the perception of happiness, Germine told Neuro Science News.

    She added that these findings fit well with other researches, showing that older adults tend to have more positive emotions and a positive outlook.

    Following the paper's release, Rutter told Neuro Science News that gathering their primary research online allowed the team to research into a "much larger and more diverse sample set" than previous studies.