【推荐1】As a dropout myself, I often feel it is my duty to defend my fellow non-scholars. Common wisdom would have you believe we are the “bad kids", the future criminals, the worst sort of people. But not all dropouts are likely to deal drugs,steal goods from a shop, or shoot pool all day.

My own favorite place to go when skipping school was always the public library. My early retirement meant that at last I had the time to read everything I wanted to. I found reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow a lot more interesting than reading about Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple.

Best of all was the time I finally had to myself. I felt liberated. I had been in school nearly my whole life. I wanted to find out for myself who I was,and until I did,everything else felt like a waste of time.

However, after nearly three years, a series of strange thoughts began to make me anxious and unsure. Images of myself at the age of 35 began to haunt(缠扰）me in my sleep. And a voice in my head began asking over and over,"Who is paying the hot water bills? Who buys the microwave pizza?"The answer, of course, was my poor old parents. Sure,I was having an enjoyable time doing plenty of nothing, discovering myself and all, but that's unfair to them. What parents long to see their child drop out of school,with no plans for the future? Could they be expected to support me forever? Certainly not. I immediately moved out of the house and out of town, in search of a future for myself.

And it is here, in my new home of San Francisco, that I have decided to do what was once unthinkable: go back to school. I plan to take adult education classes and then apply for City College. On the one hand, I can hardly believe I'm doing it: a return to desks, chalkboards, and clocks that tell you when to stop thinking about one thing and start thinking about another. But at City College, I'll be able to take film production, semiotics, and sociology—just because I want to know about them.

So next time you see a dropout, be sympathetic. And please don't push him to do something he doesn't want to do. It never works. He'll come around when he's ready.

Does Failure Really Exist?

If you believe you have failed, then you have. If you believe you don’t have the ability to succeed, then you don’t.     1     The moment you decide to give up or stop working toward your goals, failure is born.

    2    

Most people give themselves an out without even realizing it. They are willing to work hard on reaching their goals, but only until the things get too rough or their energy dies down. Don’t do that! Instead, make up your mind to make your goal happen, no matter what!

    3    

It’s a good idea to set a general timeline, but remember that something will be beyond your control. You can never say exactly when your goal will be reached. If you lock yourself into a given timeline, you might make yourself feel like a failure! Instead, get a general idea of when you’d like your goal to be completed. Then take it one day at a time and focus on making progress instead of reaching the finish line in as little time as possible.

    4    

Difficulties mean only one thing: it’s not time for your goal to be completed yet. That’s it! It doesn’t mean you failed; it doesn’t mean you’re weak; it doesn’t mean you’ll never achieve your goals. It simply means you have not done enough yet. You’ve got to keep moving forward and find a way over, around, or through the difficulties.

【推荐3】I was in the fifth grade and had just moved to Westminster from London when I met Ms. May. Most of my teachers seemed to ignore me; I was one more student among hundreds. Ms. May, however, took a special interest. “You can write,” she said, explaining that she wanted to move me into the honors English class. So did I.

A decade later, when my first novel was published, I went back to Ms. May’s classroom, handing her a copy of my book. “And I wrote this for you.” Ms. May began to cry happily. She’d been considering early retirement, she said, because she felt she wasn’t having enough of an effect on her students. I didn’t know how to make Ms. May understand what she’d done for me: It was because of her that I fell in love with Shakespeare. I learned how to compose an essay. It was her belief in me that gave me the confidence to become a writer. Now I felt I owed her. I told her to forget her idea, and she did.

Fifteen years later, when I heard that she was finally ready to retire, I attended her going-away party. All Ms. May needed to do was say a few words thanking her colleagues for coming. Instead, she stood up and made an exciting speech that began like this, “Those of you are always complaining (抱怨) that kids have changed and that it’s harder to teach these days. You’re getting old and lazy. These kids haven’t changed. You have! Do not give up on these kids!”

When she finished her talk, everyone clapped hands! I went up to Ms. May and gave her a big hug. She smiled with tears rolling down her face. I came to realize that she would miss her teaching life.

【推荐1】Erin Alexander’s sister-in-law recently died, and she was having a hard day. A barista (咖啡师) was too. The coffee machine had broken down and she was clearly stressed. Ms. Alexander ordered an iced green tea, and told her to hang in there. After picking up her order, she noticed a message on the cup: “Erin,” the barista had drawn next to a heart, “your soul is golden.” “I’m not sure I even necessarily know what ‘your soul is golden’ means,” said Ms. Alexander, who laughed and cried while recalling the incident. But the warmth of that small and unexpected gesture, from a stranger who had no idea of what she was going through, moved her deeply. “Of course, I was still really sad,” Ms. Alexander said. “But that little thing made the rest of my day.”

New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, prove just how powerful experiences like Ms. Alexander’s can be. Researchers found that people who perform a random (随意的) act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the receiver will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.

A recent study consisted of eight small experiments that varied in design and participants. In one, for example, people were told they could give a cupcake away to strangers, and were asked to rate their own mood as well as how they believed the receiver would feel. The researchers found that those who got a cupcake as a result of a random act of kindness felt better than the person on the giving end thought they would. “People tend to think that what they are giving is kind of little; maybe it’s relatively unimportant,” Dr. Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, said. “But receivers are less likely to think along those lines. They consider the gesture to be significantly more meaningful because they are also thinking about the fact that someone did something nice for them.”

If you are not already in the habit of performing random kind acts—or if it does not come naturally to you—Marisa Franco, a psychologist, said to start by thinking about what you like to do. “It’s not about you being like, ‘Oh man, now I have to learn how to bake cookies in order to be nice.’ It’s about: What skills and talents do you already have? And how can you turn that into an offering for other people?”

【推荐2】There are plenty of things to be gained from going abroad: new friends, new experiences, new stories. But living in another country may come with a less noticeable benefit, too. Some scientists say it can also make you more creative.

Writers and thinkers love travelling abroad. Ernest Hemingway, for example, drew inspiration for much of his work from his time in Spain and France. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, moved from the U. K. to the U. S. in his 40s to branch out into screenwriting. Mark Twain, who sailed around the coast of the Mediterranean in 1869, wrote in his travelogue Innocents Abroad that travel is "fatal to prejudice and narrow-mindedness."

In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun examining more closely what many people have already learned: that spending time abroad may have the potential to affect mental change. In general, creativity is related to how the brain is wired. Neural pathways are sensitive to change: New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind.

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and imperativeness of thought, 55 says Adam Galinsky, the author of numerous studies on the connection between creativity and international travel. Cognitive flexibility is the mind's ability to jump between different ideas, a key component of creativity. But it's not just about being abroad, Galinsky says: "The key critical process is multicultural engagement, immersion, and adaptation. Someone who lives abroad and doesn't engage with the local culture will likely get less of a creative boost than someone who travels abroad and really engages in the local environment. " In other words, going to Cancun for a week on spring break probably won't make a person any more creative. But going to Cancun and living with local fishermen might.

The researchers also found that the more countries the executives had lived in, the more creative the lines tended to be — but only up to a point. Those who had lived and worked in more than three countries, the study found, still tended to show higher levels of creativity than their peers who had worked in a smaller number of foreign countries. The authors assumed that those who had lived in too many countries hadn’t been able to properly immerse themselves culturally and they were bouncing around too much. "It gets back to this idea of a deeper level of learning that's necessary for these effects to occur, " Galinsky says.

Of course, although a new country is an easy way to leave a "social comfort zone the cultural engagement associated with cognitive change doesn't have to happen abroad. If a plane ticket isn't an option, try taking the subway to a new neighborhood. Sometimes, the research suggests, all that's needed for a creative boost is a fresh cultural scene.

【推荐2】The world’s nights are getting brighter and brighter as light pollution invades darkness almost everywhere. Researchers found that Earth’s artificially lit outdoor area grew by 2% a year from 2012 to 2016. So did night time brightness. Light pollution was even worse than that, according to the German-led team, because the light sensor(感应器) cannot recognize some of the LED lighting that is becoming more widespread, specifically blue light.

“Honestly, I had hoped that with LEDs we were improving the situation. But it turns out quite disappointing.” said Kyba, the lead author of the study.

“Asia, Africa and South America, for the most part, saw an increase in artificial night lighting. More and more places are fixing outdoor lighting, due to its low cost and the growth in communities’ wealth,” the scientists said.

The biological effect from the increasing man-made light is obvious, according to the researchers. People’s sleep can be damaged, which in turn can affect their health. The living behavior of birds, fish, insects and bats can be interrupted. And forget about seeing stars or the Milky Way if the pollution continues.

“Many people are using light at night without really thinking about the cost, ” said Franz Holker, one of the co-authors. “Not just the economic cost, but also the cost that you have to pay for environmental damage.”

【推荐2】One of the fundamental things we really love in cities is order. Order means balance, symmetry （对称）and repetition: the same thing happening again and again, and the left side matching the right side.

Order is one of the reasons why so many people love Paris. But most cities are a complete mess. When it's a mess, it seems like no one is in charge. And that's worrying. It's horrible when everything is jumbled up: a pitched roof next to a flat roof; 3 simple bare box next to a messy car park; high-rise towers that look as if they've been placed at random, like teeth in a yawning mouth.

We generally have a desire to straighten things out. And when we can't, it's frustrating. The same urge is there when we look at cities. Often, it's not skyscrapers that we mind in the city. It's skyscrapers that have been planted there without planning, like they are increasingly appearing in London, while New York or Chicago shows the ordered way that we love.

However, you have to keep something else in mind. Unreasonable order can be just as much of a problem. Too much regularity can be soul-destroying. Too much order feels rigid and alien. It can be indifferent, cold, severe, unkind, or even cruel. So the ideal we're seeking is variety and order.

This is the idea in a square in Tele in the Czech Republic, where every house is the same width and height. But within that ordered partem, every house has been allowed freedom at the level of form and color. We're perfectly in the middle between chaos and boringness here. And that's what humans adore.

So as a general rule: too much mess, and it's off-putting; but too much simple order, and it’s boring.

【推荐3】The Master Gardener Foundation

The Master Gardener Foundation provides free information to the public on environmentally   safe gardening practices and water conservation. The information is research-based and encourages limited use of farm chemicals and fertilizers.

The master gardeners here did much donation work. They donated over 35,000 volunteer hours, serving 40,000 adults and more than 5,200 children. They did this through about 35 plant clinics, 6 demonstration gardens, 4 youth gardens, as well as a classroom program and dozens of workshops. The Master Gardener Foundation provides roughly two-thirds of the financial support for all these valuable activities.

Washington State University currently provides the salary and benefits of the Master Gardener Program. The foundation funds office space and supplies, as well as a part-time program assistant.

Safe and green gardening and water use practices are vital to preserving our environment. The Master Gardener Program seeks to provide this kind of education and information to the citizens for free. It is a highly successful example of cooperation between a foundation and volunteers.

The Master Gardener Foundation is a non-profit organization, and all donations are allowed by law and support the Master Gardener Program and activities.

Please consider a donation to the Master Gardener Foundation and help keep our environment green!