【推荐2】Your children’s teacher will be providing extra time for test preparation. This school year’s test will be held on January 8 and 9. The test preparation time is open to all students, and we strongly encourage your children to attend.

This year we are changing the time for our test preparation: it will be on Thursday mornings from 8:10 to 8:50. This helps children who ride the bus and cannot stay for the after-school period. It also helps avoid conflicts with after-school activities.

Danielle and Marina will be working with the recent new test takers 6 days on the following Thursdays: 15th, Nov; 29th, Nov; 6th, Dec; 13th, Dec.; 20th, Dec. and 3rd, Jan.

Besides the test preparation lectures on these dates, teachers are already putting test preparation into their usual courses. We are finding that we can help our students to be both skillful and whole-hearted readers and test takers — after all, we all know that the best test preparation is good reading and writing training.

What can you do at home? Again, the best and most effective test preparation for the ELA test is reading and more reading. The research is quite clear — students who do well in the tests are those who are good readers. Reading not only builds reading ability, it also helps build confidence — important for successful test taking! But do discourage your children from spending too much time on books that are too hard or even a bit too hard. Children best develop comprehension skills when they are reading books just right for them (too easy doesn’t hurt here either).

Finally, on Friday, December 7, we will have a morning lecture on the ELA. Please pay attention!

【推荐3】One wet, rainy April afternoon Miss O’ Shay, the principal, sent for Nancy Lee to stop by her office as school closed. Pupils without umbrellas or raincoats crowded in doorways hoping to make it home between showers. Outside the skies were grey, Nancy Lee’s thoughts were suddenly grey, too.

She did not think she had done anything wrong, yet that tight (紧的) little knot came in her throat just the same as she came near Miss O’ Shay’s door. Perhaps she had banged her locker too often and too hard. Perhaps the note in French she had written to Sallie halfway across the study hall just for fun had never got to Sallie but into Miss O’ Shay’s hands instead.

She knocked on Miss O’ Shay’s door. That familiarly solid and competent voice said, “Come in.”

Miss O’ Shay had a way of making you feel welcome, even if you came to be punished.

“Sit down, Nancy Lee Johnson.” said Miss O’ Shay. “I have something to tell you.” Nancy Lee sat down, “But I must ask you to promise not to tell anyone yet.”

“I won’t, Miss O’ Shay,” Nancy Lee said, wondering what on earth the principal had to say to her.

“You are about to graduate.” Miss O’ Shay said, “And we shall miss you. You have been an excellent student, Nancy, and you will not be without honors (荣誉) on the senior list.as I am sure you know.”

At that point there was a light knock on the door. Miss O’ Shay called out, “Come in,” and Miss Dietrich entered. “May I be part of this, too?” she asked, tall and smiling.

“Of course,” Miss O’ Shay said. “I was just telling Nancy Lee what we thought of her. But I hadn’t got around to giving her the news, Perhaps, Miss Dietrich, you’d like to tell her yourself.

Miss Dietrich was always direct, “Nancy Lee.” she said, “your picture has won the Artist Club scholarship.”

The brown girl’s eyes widened, her heart jumped, then her throat tightened again. She tried to smile, but instead tears came to her eyes.

“Dear Nancy Lee,” Miss O’ Shay said, “we are so happy for you.” The elderly white woman took her hand and shook it warmly while Miss Dietrich smiled with pride.

Nancy Lee must have danced all the way home. She never remembered quite how she got there through the rain. She hoped she had been calm. But certainly she hadn’t stopped to tell anybody her secret on the way. Raindrops, smiles, and tears mingled on her brown face.

She hoped her mother hadn’t yet got home and that the house was empty.

【推荐1】The work-life balance is dead. By this, I’m not advocating that you should give up your pursuit of having a fulfilling career and a thriving personal life, and I’m definitely not saying that you have to give up one to have the other. I also acknowledge that we have a work-life problem, but I’m arguing that the concept of balance has never been helpful, because it’s too limiting. You see, our language makes a difference, and how we refer to things matters because it affects our thinking and therefore our actions.

At the minimum, most of us work because we want to be able to support ourselves, our families, and the people around us. In the ideal world, we’re all doing work that we’re proud of and that provides meaning and purpose to us. But even if your job doesn’t give you shivers of joy each new day, working is a part of what each of us does and the contribution we make to society. When you separate work and life, it’s a little bit harder to make that connection. But when you think of work as part of a full life and a complete experience, it becomes easier to see that success in one aspect often supports another.

Losing your balance and falling isn’t pleasant. A goal to balance suggests that things could quickly get off the balance, and that causes terrible outcomes. It’s more constructive to think of solutions that continue to evolve over shifts in life and work. Rather than falling or failing, you may have good days or better days or not-so-good days. These variations are normal, and it’s more useful to think of life as something that is ever evolving and changing, rather than a high-risk enterprise where things could go wrong with one misstep.

How we talk to ourselves matters, and how we talk about issues makes a difference. Let’s bury “work-life balance” and think bigger and better about work-life fulfillment to do a little less balancing and a lot more living.

【推荐2】The quote “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” by English author David Mitchell may seem cryptic (含义隐晦的) and silly to many. But if you reflect on the meaning of this statement there’s actually something very deep about it.

The more experiences you have in life, the more you will find yourself diverging out (分歧) into new and different places, both physically and mentally. If you travel far enough, you will eventually find yourself back at the same place you started from, but your mind will be stretched by all of your journeys along the way. There are a few different ways we can interpret a phrase like travelling far enough. If you think about it literally, there is probably some amount of distance that we need to go. In doing so when we get to our destination, we will see everything with new eyes.

We may be surprised by what we see and change our outlook on life. This interpretation could apply to how people interact in their everyday lives. People have prejudices, stereotypes (刻板印象) and judgments towards other people based on where they live or grew up. When we travel outside those communities or countries, we learn to appreciate those differences rather than hold them against others.

Another interpretation is one that focuses on feeling confident and comfortable with ourselves while being far away from where we normally hang out and spend time, at home or work. It’s easy to get on a track where we see our habits and routine as comforting. But it’s important that we push our boundaries if we are ever going to make any kind of progress in life.

So take a leap into unknown territory. Explore places that you haven’t been to before. You can change your viewpoint and gain some perspective on who you are as a person.