【推荐2】By day, Robert Titterton is a lawyer. In his spare on stage beside pianist Maria Raspopova — not as a musician but as her page turner. “I’m not a trained musician, but I’ve learnt to read music so I can help Maria in her performance.”

Mr Titterton is chairman of the Omega Ensemble but has been the group’s official page turner for the past four years. His job is to sit beside the pianist and turn the pages of the score so the musician doesn’t have to break the flow of sound by doing it themselves. He said he became just as nervous as those playing instruments on stage.

“A lot of skills are needed for the job. You have to make sure you don’t turn two pages at once and make sure you find the repeats in the music when you have to go back to the right spot.” Mr Titterton explained.

【推荐3】Seated at the grand piano in MIT’s Killian Hall last fall, first-year student Jacqueline Wang played one piece of Mozart’s music. When she’d finished, Mi-Eun Kim, a pianist and lecturer at MIT, asked her to move to the back of the hall. Kim tapped at an iPad. Suddenly, the music Wang had just played poured forth again from the piano - its keys sinking and rising just as they had with Wang’s fingers on them. Wang stood with a confused expression, taking in a repeat of her own performance.

This unusual lesson took place during a three-week residency (驻留期) of the Steinway Spirio|r, a piano that obtains the data of live performances and offers students new possibilities for studying and experimenting with music.

Wang was one of several participants to have the experience of hearing herself play while watching the data of her performance move up and down across a screen: color-coded rectangles (矩形) indicating the speed and duration of each note, and a moving line charting her use of the damper pedal (阻尼踏板). Wang could even edit her own performance when Kim suggested her rhythmic use of the pedal might be unnecessary. Using the iPad interface to erase the pedaling entirely, they listened to the playback again, the notes gaining new clarity,

For Wang, the session introduced an element she’d never experienced since beginning her piano studies. The visual display of how long each key was played and with what speed gave her a more precise demonstration of the ideas of voicing and evenness.

Playing the piano is one of the most complex activities that humans do with their hands. Some people might think the new technology will replace the pianist. In Kim’s view, that human complexity is complemented by this kind of technical possibility. But it doesn’t mean all of the things that go into learning music will be abandoned. It’s going to be an invaluable third partner: the student, the teacher, and the Spirio | r. It’s going to play a necessary role in lots of musical efforts.

【推荐1】Nearly everyone knows eBay is a website where you can buy and sell pretty much anything. There are other Internet auction (拍卖) sites, but none come close to eBay for brand-name recognition. And for good reason: eBay is the largest English-language online auction site in the world. Buyers come to eBay for the best chance of finding the particular thing they want. Sellers come for the largest pool of buyers, which they hope means the best chance of selling at the highest possible price.

Buying things on eBay is pretty simple. You can type a term into the search field, or click through the categories list to get to what you want. Inside an individual item listing, you’ll see the current asking price, and a little button to click if you wish to place your own bid. Enter a price, occasionally come back to see if someone has bid higher than you and wait for the end of the auction period. If your bid is the highest, you win! Now all you have to do is arrange payment and shipping method with the seller. eBay is only in the business of putting buyers and sellers together for a small fee from the seller. It doesn’t handle the actual payment or shipping of goods. In other words, it isn’t a big department store, or a warehouse. It’s the owner of a flea market, and you have to do your own deals with the individual sellers in their virtual stalls.

To be a skillful eBay buyer, you should learn when to trust sellers and how a proxy (代理人) bid can save you from going online every half-hour to up your bid. Experienced eBay users also know how to use escrows (公正托管) to guarantee goods, and how to avoid selling tricks such as fake bids that push up prices. The more often you buy on eBay, the more you learn.

【推荐2】Examining the classroom practices of National Teacher of the Year winners and finalists, the study, by Michigan State University scholars, suggests successful educators aren’t afraid to push the boundaries by adding real world, cross-disciplinary（跨学科的）themes into their lessons.

The study, published online in the journal Teachers College Record, is one of the first in depth investigations of how teachers use creativity in the classroom.

“The best teachers are taking their own creative interests – from rap music to cooking to kickboxing – and are finding ways to include these into the curriculum,” said Danah Henriksen, lead author of the study. “They’re bringing together different subject matters and finding areas of connections so students can learn both in interesting ways.”

America’s test-driven educational policy, Henriksen argues, has impeded creativity in teaching and learning. Many teachers today struggle to balance high-stakes（高风险）testing and responsibility to act flexibly and independently in their classrooms.

“I think that there’s a lot of fear.” one of the award-winning teachers says in the study, “And when teachers are teaching in fear, they take few risks, for they have to consider exams and academic performance.”

The findings have major implications（含意）for teaching and learning. Teachers’ unique creative interests should be brought into classroom lessons, along with arts and music across varied academic content. Teacher education programs and professiona1 development courses should include a focus on real world. Administrators and policymakers should support opportunities for teachers to take creative and intellectua1 risks in their work.

“If we want teachers to be creative, we need to provide them with opportunities to bring those outside interests into their professional life,” said Mishra, study co-author and MSU professor of educational psychology and educational technology. “The point is to find what works for you, what is your passion and interest and how can you put that into what your students are learning. Finally, we teach who we are. That’s the most powerful finding.”

【推荐2】It’s mid-afternoon. You’re full from lunch. The day is warm. You’re starting to feel sleepy. Should you give in to the comfort of a nap (打盹)? In point of advantage, it is worth it. Though there is some disagreement as to whether napping benefits everyone, research suggests naps can boost at least some people’s mental process of understanding in the short term.

Several studies find that a well-timed nap can provide a short-term boost in brainpower. For example, scientists reviewed past research that focused on healthy participants with regular sleep cycles. That review, published in 2009 in the Journal of Sleep Research, shows that napping improves factors ranging from reaction time to alertness (警觉) to memory performance.

“A brief nap can also inspire people with creativity,” a 2021 study in Science Advances found. In that research, participants were given math problems that could be solved with an easy short cut that they weren’t told about. Some participants were encouraged to take a brief nap before tackling the problems. The researchers found those who napped-and spent even just 30 seconds in the first, lightest phase of sleep — were 2.7 times more likely to figure out the short cut than those who stayed awake. But entering a deeper sleep phase had a negative effect on this creative insight. In other words, there may be a “sweet spot” of mental relaxation that clears the way for moments of inspiration.

“Timing your naps right can reduce sleep inertia (睡眠惯性),” says Natalie Dautovich, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. “A 20-minute nap is recharging and 60 to 90 minutes of sleep can be even more restorative. The nap to avoid is the one lasting more than 20 minutes and less than 60 minutes, which is most likely to lead to sleep inertia.”

“The short-term benefits of naps are well established, but pinning down the relationship between naps and any specific health outcomes, long-term effects of napping, is not always simple. For example, greater daytime sleepiness is symptomatic of many health conditions, and therefore napping may not necessarily be the cause of these conditions but rather a consequence,” says Victoria Garfield, a professor of University College London.

【推荐3】By day, Robert Titterton is a lawyer. In his spare on stage beside pianist Maria Raspopova — not as a musician but as her page turner. “I’m not a trained musician, but I’ve learnt to read music so I can help Maria in her performance.”

Mr Titterton is chairman of the Omega Ensemble but has been the group’s official page turner for the past four years. His job is to sit beside   the pianist and turn the pages of the score so the musician doesn’t have to break the flow of sound by doing it themselves. He said he became just as nervous as those playing instruments on stage.

“A lot of skills are needed for the job. You have to make sure you don’t turn two pages at once and make sure you find the repeats in the music   when you have to go back to the right spot.” Mr Titterton explained.

Being a page turner requires plenty of practice. Some pieces of music can go for 40 minutes and require up to 50 page turns, including back turns for repeat passages. Silent onstage communication is key, and each pianist has their own style of “nodding” to indicate a page turn which they need to practise with their page turner.

But like all performances, there are moments when things go wrong. “I was turning the page to get ready for the next page, but the draft wind from the turn caused the spare pages to fall off the stand,” Mr Titterton said, “Luckily I was able to catch them and put them back.”

Most page turners are piano students or up-and-coming concert pianists, although Ms Raspopova has once asked her husband to   help her out on stage.

“My husband is the worst page turner,” she laughed. “He’s interested in the music, feeling every note, and I have to say: ‘Turn, turn!’ “Robert is the best page turner I’ve had in my entire life.”

Which of the following best describes Titterton’s job on stage?