【推荐2】Not Even Wrong

My eight-year-old son, lack, is a boy with autism (孤独症). Even though I always hear from others that he is very bright and he is making enough progress to meet goals, I am still anxious walking into their parents’ meetings.

Last fall’s parents’ meeting was even worse for me. I noticed Jack making a great effort to keep up with others. Some parents watched Jack and whispered (窃窃私语) and no children were willing to play with him. I started to see the social divide between Jack and his peers (同龄人) widening.

After the parents’ meeting, his teacher spent long time talking to me. She told me that it was getting more difficult for Jack to meet goals just because he was bright. Some teachers and students always complained (抱怨) about Jack’s actions. She also advised me to think about whether the normal class was the best setting for him. Hearing these words, I was very upset.

Then she blew my mind. She showed me one example of Jack’s works and said, “I didn’t know how to grade this. It’s not even wrong, but it’s not right.” I grasped when she said “not even wrong”, which is the name of one of my favorite books on autism, by Paul Collins. The book says a girl whose idea is so far off base but it is not even wrong. It perfectly describes autism and it perfectly describes Jack.

In his book, Paul Collins wrote, “Children with autism are like the square pegs (钉，桩). Hitting a square peg into a round hole is hard work. What’s worse, it’s destroying the square pegs.”

As a mother of a boy with autism, I want to help find more square holes. I want this world to be a world where it is okay to be a square peg without having to pretend to be round. We have been hammering (锤打) square pegs into round holes for a long time. Now we should put down the hammers. And I hope that some of those kids told their parents. And I hope that some of you read this and tell your kids. And I hope that we, all of us together, CAN change the world.

【推荐3】When I first saw my dog, she was about the size of a little rabbit, so fluffy (毛茸茸的) that I could barely see her eyes. She just lay in the corner of the cage, absolutely terrified of me and my family. We fell in love with her at first sight and took her home immediately.

In our first few weeks as dog owners, my family witnessed our dog use the house as her toilet, chew on our chairs, eat our socks and shoes and bark at all hours of the night. Despite the countless dog parenting books that my mother had read before we adopted our dog, we were not prepared for the lovely trouble-making fluffball that came our way.

We entered her in a puppy class, where she could learn how to be a man’s best friend, and spent hours upon hours trying to train her by giving her meat flavored treats for any sign of good behavior. Unfortunately for us, the puppy class teacher and my father, who can’t say no to the puppy dog face, gave her far too many treats for behavior both good and bad, and now, at age 3, my dog is a master con artist (行骗高手).

She purposefully steals towels, napkins, tissues, socks, cardboard boxes, plastic wrap and anything else forbidden, just because she knows that we will do anything to get it back from her. She takes all sorts of things, not wanting them at all, and just sleeps on them, waiting for someone to notice her tricks. It is her way of saying that if we don’t give her whatever she wants, she will cause us endless trouble.

And what can I do with her? She’s my baby puppy after all.

【推荐1】Soaring to 29, 035 feet, the famous Mount Everest had long been considered unclimbable due to the freezing weather, the obvious potential fall from cliffs and the effects of the extreme high altitude, often called “mountain sickness.” But that was to be changed by Edmund Hillary.

When he was invited to join the British Everest expedition in 1953, Edmund Hillary was a highly capable climber. The glacier-covered peaks in his hometown in New Zealand proved a perfect training ground for the Himalaya. It was his fourth Himalayan expedition in just over two years and he was at the peak of fitness.

On May 28, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, an experienced Sherpa (夏尔巴人) set out and reached the South Summit by 9 a. m. next day. But after that, the ridge (山脊) slightly fell before rising suddenly in a rocky spur (尖坡) about 17 meters high just before the true summit. The formation is difficult to climb due to its extreme pitch because a mistake would be deadly. Scratching at the snow with his ax, Hillary managed to overcome this enormous obstacle, later to be known as the Hillary Step.

At 11:30 a. m, the two men found themselves standing at the top of the world. “Not until we were about 50 feet of the top was I ever completely convinced that we were actually going to reach the summit.” Hillary later recounted, “Of course I was very, very pleased to be on the summit, but my first thought was a little bit of surprise. After all, this is the ambition of all mountaineers.”

Emerging as the first to summit Mount Everest, Hillary Hillary continued by helping explore Antarctica, and establishing the Himalayan Trust (信托基金), through which he provided a number of beneficial services to the Himalayan peoples. He also a sizeable legacy that mountain climbers have chased ever since. As a young climber said, “It was not just Hillary and Tenzing that reached the summit of Mount Everest. It was all of humanity. Suddenly, all of us could go.”

【推荐2】Climbers targeting peaks above 5,000 meters in the Tibet autonomous region, including the north side of Qomolangma, now have to apply for a permit, according to a rule issued by Chinese sports authorities.

To make climbing safer, or at least less deadly, the General Administration of Sport and the sports bureau of Tibet released a notification (通知) requiring climbers to send an application to the bureau at least a month in advance of their planned climb. It said climbing without permits will be strictly forbidden.

“In recent years, cases of injuries, missing people and deaths have been witnessed as a result of illegal climbing,” the notification said. “Climbing is a highly professional sport with high risk. Most illegal climbers lack professional skills, facilities and tour guides. Such activities will interfere with orderly climbing and bring risks, not only to the climbers themselves but also rescuers. They will also lead to a loss of personal or national property.”

Applications will need to detail each individual climber’s personal information, proposed climbing routes and related plans. Climbers are also being asked to obey related rules to protect mountain environments. The notification also urged regional government departments to strengthen safety checks and the prohibition of illegal climbing, encourage residents to join regular patrols near major climbing routes and promote public education on climbing safety.

In a previous interview with China Daily, Kul Bahadur Gurung, general secretary of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, said difficult weather conditions, lack of experience and support personnel, and the commercialization (商业化) of expeditions were the main reasons for the high death toll on the world’s highest peak. “Since the number of people reaching the summit of Everest is increasing, everyone thinks it is easier to climb and everyone can climb, which is a totally false idea,” he said.

【推荐3】People climbing Qomolangma are two times as likely to reach the top and less likely to die on the climb than 20 years ago, a new study finds. Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level on the earth. It reaches 8,848.86 meters into the sky. Between2006 and 2020, around two thirds of climbers were successful in their attempt to reach the top. In the 15 years before that, only about one-third went all the way to the top.

The study was a project of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, Davis. They found that the risk of dying on the mountain was 0.5 percent for women and 1.1 percent for men in recent years. That is down from 1.9 percent and 1.7 percent in the period from 1990 and 2005.

The study noted that on a single day in May of last year, 396 climbers had gathered at the narrow path just below the top. The area, known as the “death zone”, is so narrow that only a small number of climbers can pass through, one directly behind another.

A picture of climbers waiting their turn to go up and down through the death zone became famous as it was shared online. Yet researchers say the crowds were not the main reason for the deaths last year. However, overcrowding does make the climb more dangerous. If crowding slows climbers (as is expected), this increases their exposure to the elements, which should increase risk of an accident or illness. An unexpected storm, earthquake, or landslide could be disastrous.

Climbers have expressed concern that Nepal was giving anyone willing to pay the government $11,000 authorization to climb Everest.