Do you want to get home from work knowing you have made a real difference in someone's life?

    If yes, don't care about sex or age! Come and join us, then you'll make it!

Position: Volunteer Social Care Assistant

(No Pay with Free Meals)

Place: Manchester

Hours: Part Time

    We are now looking for volunteers to support people with learning disabilities to live active lives! Only 4 days left. Don't miss the chance of lending your warm hands to help others!

Role:

    You will provide people with learning disabilities with all aspects of their daily lives. You will help them to develop new skills. You will help them to protect their rights and their safety. But your primary concern is to let them know they are valued.

Skills and Experience Required:

    You will have the right values and great listening skills. You will be honest and patient. You will have the ability to drive a car and to communicate in fluent written and spoken English since you'll have to help those people with different learning disabilities. Previous care-related experience will be a great advantage for you.

    The most frightening words in the English language are, “Our computer is down.” You hear it more and more when you are on business. The other day I was at the airport waiting for a ticket to Washington and the girl in the ticket office said, “I'm sorry, I can't sell you a ticket. Our computer is down.”

    “If your computer is down, just write me out a ticket.”

    “I can't write you out a ticket. The computer is the only one allowed to do so.”

    I looked down on the computer and every passenger was just standing there drinking coffee and staring at the black screen. Then I asked her, “What do all your people do?”

    “We give the computer the information about your trip, and then it tells us whether you can fly with us or not.”

    “So when it goes down, you go down with it.”

    “That's good, sir.”

    “How long will the computer be down?” I wanted to know.

    “I have no idea. Sometimes it's down for 10 minutes, sometimes for two hours. There's no way we can find out without asking the computer, and since it's down it won't answer us.”

    After the girl told me they had no backup(备用) computer, I said. “Let's forget the computer. What about your planes? They're still flying, aren't they?”

    “I couldn't tell without asking the computer.”

    “Maybe I could just go to the gate and ask the pilot if he's flying to Washington, ” I suggested.

    “I wouldn't know what gate to send you to. Even if the pilot was going to Washington, he couldn't't take you if you didn't't have a ticket.”

    “Is there any other airline flying to Washington within the next few hours?”

    “I wouldn't know,” she said, pointing at the dark screen. “Only 'IT' knows. 'IT' can't tell me.

    By this time there were quite a few people standing in lines. The word soon spread to other travelers that the computer was down. Some people went white, some people started to cry and still others kicked their luggage.

    When it comes to generation gap (代沟), we usually think of different tastes in music, or pastimes. But now the generation gap is handwriting. After one teacher in Tennessee discovered that she had students who couldn't read what she was writing on the board, she posted it on the Internet saying that handwriting should be taught in schools.

    Others who are against it claim that handwriting has become out of time in our modern world. Typed words have become a main form of communication. Once a practical skill, handwriting is no longer used by most of Americans. It is no longer taught in schools, and some claim that the time that it would take to teach it could be put to better use, for example, by teaching the technical skills.

    But even in today's world there are still plenty of reasons to pick up a pen and write on the paper. In America, signatures (签字) by hand are still often required, for example, signing for a registered letter and buying a house. And original signatures are much more difficult to fake (伪造).

    There is also strong evidence that writing by hand is good for the mind. It makes a different part of the brain active and improves fine moving skills in young children. People are also more likely to remember what they write by hand than what they type, and the process of writing by hand has been shown to stimulate ideas. Not only those, studies have shown that kids who write by hand learn to read and spell earlier than those who don't.

    Yes, we live in a modern world, but we live in a modern world of basic and important values.

    Sixteen years ago, I learned an important life lesson in the back of a New York City taxi.

    I was on my way to Grand Central Station, and we were driving in the right lane when a black car suddenly sped out of a parking space right in front of us.

    My driver fit the brakes hard, skidded, and missed the other car by a few inches. The driver of the other car, the man who had just nearly caused a huge accident, started shouting at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at him. He was really friendly!

    “Why did you just do that?” I asked him. “This guy almost destroyed your car and could have sent us to the hospital!”

    This was when my taxi driver told me what I now call “the Law of Garbage Trucks”.

    “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of anger, and full of disappointment,” he said. “As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it, and if you let them do, they'll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, just smile, wave, wish them will, and move on. You'll be happier because of what you have done.”

    I started thinking, how often do I let Garbage Trucks run right over me? And how often do I take their garbage and dump it on other people—at work, at home, or on the street? It was on that day that I said, “I'm not going to dump anymore.”

    Literature is an important part of a total language arts program at all grade levels because of the many benefits it offers.

    Literature provides pleasure to listeners and readers. It is a relaxing escape from daily problems, and it fills leisure moments. Making time for recreational reading and using high-quality literature help to develop enthusiastic readers and improve achievement. Developing a love of literature as a recreational activity is possibly the most important outcome of a literature program.

    Literature builds experience. Through reading, children expand their horizons through vicarious(引起共鸣的)experiences. They visit new places, gain new experiences, and meet new people. They learn about the past as well as the present and learn about a variety of cultures, including their own. They discover the common goals and similar emotions found in people of all times and places. Nory Ryan's Song by Patricia Reilly, Giff, a hard survival story, is set in Ireland during the potato hunger of I845,and Patricia Polacco's The Butterfly, deals with Nazis, resistance, and Jewish persecution(迫害)during World War II.

    Literature provides a language model for those who hear and read it. Good literature exposes children to correct sentence patterns, standard story structures, and varied word usage. Children for whom English is a second language can improve their English with the interesting context, and all children benefit from new vocabulary that is woven into the stories.

    Literature develops thinking skills. Discussions of literature bring out reasoning related to sequence; cause and effect; character motivation; predictions; visualization of actions, characters, and settings; critical analysis of the story; and creative responses.

    Literature helps children deal with their problems. By finding out about the problems of others through books, children receive insights into dealing with their own problems, a process called bibliotherapy. Children might identify with Gilly, living angrily in a foster home in Katherine Paterson's The Great Gilly Hopkins, or with Mary Alice, a city girl forced to live with her grandma in a "hick town" in Richard Peck's A Year Down Yonder.

    Darwin noted that some human emotional expressions might have started as part of a physiological function: for example, exposing the teeth to bite food. The function, however, took on meaning and became a form of communication which signals anger.

    The same may be true for the animals. Baby monkeys cry for attention. They also cry to signal to an adult that they want to be carried.

    “Chimpanzees do make upset voice when they are being weaned (断奶) by their mothers or have lost their mothers or another individual,” says Anne Pusey, a professor at the University of Minnesota. “They whimper (呜咽) and cry and scream. When we hear these calls, the emotion involved seems obvious. However, they do not weep in the sense of producing tears. I have seen an adolescent male whimpering when he lost sight of his older brother with whom he had been traveling.”

    Babies of many mammalian species, including rats, cry. Moreover, when a baby rat cries, often his mother brings the fallen pup back into the nest. This is probably a straightforward communication, as it is with humans. However, psychologists at the University of Iowa aren't convinced.

    The Iowan researchers can cause the same crying sounds by producing large decreases and then increases in blood flow. The blood flow also goes down when baby rats get cold. Thus, they conclude baby rats cry in the same way that we sneeze. Of course the rat baby could be crying because he's cold and wants his mother to know.

    “All young mammals make cries when separated from their mother,” says Jaak Panksepp, a psychologist at Bowling Green State University. “If you're willing to call this crying, then certainly other animals show this emotional response.” he says, “Some of us take seriously that animals do have emotions.”