【推荐1】Ask a man in the street what education is for, and an immediate response might be “for equipping young people with the skills to get a job”. Well, yes，but is education not about a lot more than that?

Indeed, I would argue that it is because our British education holds a higher ideal (理想)- equipping young people with self-confidence and an understanding of the world around them-that it is booming internationally.

Yet I believe that what makes our education great is being threatened by the ever increasing focus on teaching to the test. The focus has arisen because only by testing children can we know what progress they have made. It's a paradox(自相矛盾)，since the curriculum（课程）changes that are taking effect were designed to widen young people's knowledge of the world around them.

But please do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that tests should be withdrawn. I am saying that schools need to have the confidence to aim much higher and wider than teaching to the test. They should put a rich learning experience for students first; the test should be used to validate(证实) learning, not an end in itself.

Teachers count. A good many subject teachers know their departments have been short-changing their students, but they lack the self-confidence and support to move away from teaching to the test. So, what is the secret to getting back on track? What good schools have known all along is that a staffroom full of teachers with a good knowledge of what they are teaching, together with a passion and skill for communicating it, lies at the heart of the best education. Teachers' insistence on putting their love of subjects first will produce more engaged(参与) students. And with more engaged students often come better examination results, greater self- confidence and so on.

Schools should also find the self-confidence to put a focus on inspiring teachers who are keen to broaden what they teach. In this way, I believe educational achievement will improve.

【推荐1】Learning more efficiently is a matter of time, but not in the way you might think. According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, the pioneer of quantitative memory research, you may have a new perspective about it.

The findings

Ebbinghaus is best known for two major findings: the forgetting curve and the learning curve.

The forgetting curve describes how new information fades away. Once you’ve “learned” something new, the fastest drop occurs in just 20 minutes; after a day, the curve levels off.

Within minutes, nearly half of what you’ve “learned” has disappeared.

Or not.

According to Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn, what we learn doesn’t necessarily fade; it just becomes less accessible.

In my case, I hadn’t forgotten a key point. I just didn’t access that information when I needed it.

Working with our memory

Ebbinghaus would have agreed with Carey: He determined that even when we think we’ve forgotten something, some portion of what we learned is still filed away, which makes the process of relearning a lot more efficient.

As Ebbinghaus writes:

Suppose that a poem is relearned by heart. It then becomes evident that, although it seems totally forgotten, it still in a certain sense exists. The second learning requires noticeably less time or noticeably smaller number of repetitions than the first.

That, in a nutshell, is the power of spaced repetition.

The condition is simple. Learn something new, and within a short period of time you’ll forget much of it. Repeat a learning session a day later, and you’ll remember more. Repeat a session two days after that, and you’ll remember even more. The key is to steadily increase the time intervals between relearning sessions.

And forgive yourself for forgetting. Accept that forgetting is actually a key to the process.

Why?

Forgetting is an essential part of learning. Relearning strengthens earlier memories. Relearning creates different context and connections. According to Carey, “‘Some breakdown’ must occur for us to strengthen learning when we revisit the material. Without a little forgetting, you get no benefit from further study. It is what allows learning to build, like an exercised muscle.”

The process of retrieving a memory — especially when you fail — strengthens access. That’s why the best way to study isn’t to reread; the best way to study is to quiz yourself. If you test yourself and answer incorrectly, not only are you more likely to remember the right answer after you look it up, you’ll also remember that you didn’t remember. Forgetting, and therefore repeating information, makes your brain assign that information greater importance.

【推荐2】Just two days into the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, Tropical Storm Cristobal was stirring up in the Gulf of Mexico.

It was the third Atlantic storm powerful enough to get a name this season; no other year on record has seen three named Atlantic storms so early. On average, the third storm forms around August 13, according to Accu Weather Storms like Cristobal are increasingly likely to become major hurricanes The chance of any tropical cyclone (气旋) becoming a major hurricane is increasing as human activity warms the globe.

A study from researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that each new decade over the last 40 years has brought an 8 percent increase in the chance that a storm turns into a major hurricane.

“We have a significantly building body of evidence that these storms have already changed in very substantial (大量的) ways, and all of them are dangerous, ” said James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist a NOAA and the study’s lead author.

The findings, published in May, were based on 40 years of satellite data. Hurricanes are getting stronger and wetter because climate change is causing ocean and air temperatures to climb - 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, and it closed the hottest decade eve recorded Hurricanes feed on warm water.

What's more, higher water temperatures lead to sea. level rise, which increases the risk of flooding during high tides and storms surges. Warmer air also holds more atmospheric waster vapour, which enables tropical storms to strengthen and release more water.

“Almost all of the damage and death caused by hurricanes is done by major hurricanes, ” Kossin told CNN, “Increasing the likelihood of haying major hurricane will certainly increase this risk.”