【推荐1】As a kid, I hated having to memorise those long-winded speeches of Macbeth and Hamlet. Only later did I realise how brilliant Shakespeare was and how knowing his plays gives you a facility for language and deep insight into human psychology.

Now, 400 years later, in today’s world, quick rewards, and smooth-talking influencers, the dishonest characters in Shakespeare’s works are still very much alive. For instance, whenever I see a politician defend himself on TV with righteous indignation (义愤填膺), I remember a line from the play Hamlet: “The Lady doth protest too much, me-thinks.” It is spoken in response to the overacting of a character in the play created by Prince Hamlet to prove his uncle had killed his father. Today the phrase is commonly used to indicate doubt of someone’s sincerity.

A good education grounds you in permanent wisdom that helps you cope with all your victories and disasters. Learning algebra (代数) and statistics helps you make better financial decisions and basic knowledge about economics helps you get out of the stock market before the bubble bursts. I know how hard it can be for your teenage brain to focus on things that don’t make sense in your life right now. But my advice is to do it anyway because one day this knowledge will come in handy.

Take, for example, the 18th century English economist and scholar Thomas Robert Malthus wrote about how the human population was growing at too fast a rate to be sustainable. After reading his works Charles Darwin developed the theory of biological evolution.

People often say that in the age of AI, you don’t look for jobs you look for opportunities instead. To recognize these, you will need to be prepared. More specifically, you should cherish the opportunity to learn new things while never losing sight of the basic principle. The great thing about being grounded in the basics of different areas of study is that you can mix and match them to apply them to all sorts of situations.

【推荐2】Fooling their parents about school was so simple; Robert and Anthony Duran made it a habit.

The twins played hooky from their high school—spending their days playing basketball and listening to music—for two entire years, skipping their freshman and sophomore years. But their truancy (旷课) was discovered when the boys’ father called their high school earlier this month to request the report cards that his sons had repeatedly “forgotten”. “Believe me, I was very upset with them—with myself mostly,” Armando Duran told a local newspaper after school officials alerted him to his sons’ absenteeism.

District policy considers students who are absent more than 50 days to be dropouts. So how to help teenagers facing the problem? Here is the solution. They can enroll in an accelerated career academy to make up their missed credits and plan to graduate a year behind their classmates. Imagine learning maths by calculating how much bears eat each day or by studying the habits of birds in an aviary (鸟舍).

About 100 students will have such opportunities when the school district—in collaboration with the local park service—opens a middle school at the zoo in the city’s 430-acre park. A school building near a park entrance will be used as a central meeting place, but the park grounds are intended to be the real classroom, school officials said. Students can wear zoo uniforms and perform certain tasks during the day, such as feeding the animals.

“The idea is to use the park campus as the school, where kids are likely to get more interested in learning and tend to develop their comprehensive and practical skills beyond textbooks.” said Arthur, the person in charge of the 23,000-student school district. Mr. Zarrella, a teacher in the community, said he is expecting science classes in the park’s greenhouses and history lessons in the park’s museum. “It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “I’ve always felt it has the potential for being an exciting place for kids to learn.”

【推荐3】School is still out for the summer, but at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C., students are hard at work outdoors. In a garden filled with flowers and beds bursting with vegetables and herbs, nearly a dozen teenagers are harvesting vegetables for the weekend’s farmers market.

Roshawn Little is going into her junior year at Eastern, and has been working in this garden for three years now. During the summer, Little gets paid to work Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a. m. until 2 p.m. with City Blossoms, a nonprofit that brings community gardens to schools in urban areas. She believes that working in the garden has taught her to try all sorts of new things, like eating different kinds of vegetables more often. And she’s taken those healthy behaviors home with her and her eating habits have encouraged her family to buy more fruits and vegetables.

City Blossoms is one of many groups across the country teaming up with local communities to build school gardens, like the one at Eastern. It works with schools to create learning gardens and trains teachers on how to use them to get students engaged and boost academics. These gardens are really outdoor classrooms. For example, the gardens can be used for math lessons, like calculating the area of a plant bed or learning the science of how plants grow.

For the students, the experience can be a nutritional eye-opener, which has totally changed their perceptions of where food comes from, and what it takes to produce food. Partner schools have also seen a 12 to 15 percent increase in the number of students passing standardized tests and 94 percent of teachers reported seeing increased engagement from their students, according to an independent evaluation conducted by PEER Associates.