Job Posting

Welcome to our school! We are excited that you are thinking about opportunities to work with us. See below for a quick glance at what the job is like and the impact you could have on the children.

About 20 years ago, some 15,000 red pandas wandered the treetops of the Himalaya forests in South Asia. But with the large number of people entering their habitats, these shy and solitary (独处的) creatures can’t meet each other and reproduce. Now the population has declined by more than 50 percent.

To save the red pandas here, Lama and his research team need to know which parts of the forests the remaining pandas are living in. That’s where the tracking devices come in. “Mapping the path they travel will let us know which areas of the forest need to be reforested to connect the most red pandas to one another,” Lama says.

Because red pandas can be hard to spot and catch, no one had ever used GPS collars to study them in the wild. But Lama and his team had a great plan. They first would make sure the animals would be comfortable wearing the collars. So, they tested the collars on two red pandas in a local zoo. “We convinced them to let us measure their necks and fit them with the collars by letting them choose a reward — grapes, apples, or bananas.” Lama says.

Then came the next challenge: catching red pandas. Once they spotted a red panda, a team of vets set up a tall, fence-like tarp (油布) around the base of the tree with a box trap at the bottom. That way when the red panda climbed down the tree surrounded by the tarp, it had no choice but to enter the trap. It was then quickly controlled, collared and released.

From September to December 2019, the team trapped 10 red pandas — six females and four males. Their collars recorded their location every two hours and sent the information to researchers once a day. Over the next year, the team tracked the red pandas’ movements so that they identified where to plant new forests and helped red pandas meet more easily.

It scarcely seems surprising that learning to underline a modal verb, such as “can”, and “may”, does little to help students use them effectively in their own writing. These words are anyway grasped by tiny children without the need to know what they are called. This may tempt the conclusion that the teaching of grammar should be shelved altogether. But there are reasons to reform it rather than throw it away.

Understanding of language is part of a wider education in what makes human beings human. How concepts are turned into sounds, and how those sounds combine to form commands or questions, are issues that have occupied many language experts. What they reveal about the mind has exercised psychologists and cognitive (认知的) scientists.

There are practical reasons to ask children to work hard at grammar, too. One is that a knowledge of it will make learning a foreign language easier. Even if you did know by nature how to make clauses in your native languages as a child — just without instruction — getting to grips with them in German or Russian in later years is simpler if you know how to define and spot them. As it is, many English-speakers come to understand grammar by studying a foreign language, rather than the other way round.

For grammarians keen on future jobs, the natural-language processing field is booming. After many years of poor results, technological wizards have developed programs for automated translation, speech recognition and other services that are actually usable, if far from perfect. These tools may rely more on knowledge of artificial intelligence than of the subjunctive, but linguistic (语言学的) expertise still matters, and may give beginners an edge over competitors whose best language is Python (编程).

Grammar could still be taught better. One small study showed improvement in some students when concepts are linked concretely to writing tasks. A cook does not need to know chemistry to make a delicious soup. But the science of how words combine to make meaning is fascinating and fundamental.