【推荐1】Camille Napier Bernstein

English Teacher

Natick Public Schools, MA

I was excited to discover CourseSites for my work as a public school teacher. I'm happy that my students also like your product. I need it even more this coming school year because I am required to teach different courses.

William Jackson

Assistant Professor

Pierce College, WA

I am most impressed with the flexibility（灵活性）of the Blog feature on CourseSites. This tool has enabled me to design group exercises, and will really support my students to have discussions. While I have not been able to test it for a live class, I have been able to design and review the process and I am confident that the Blogs will be a very valuable tool for my students.

Louis Tharp

Professor

Long Beach City College, CA

I have been using CourseSites for over 10 years, even while traveling all over the USA and halfway around the world. I have had students take my class from different places. During this time I had over 300 live chats, even in the middle of a typhoon （台风）！ So far CourseSites has always been online — up and running・

Nancy Mayer

Language Arts Teacher

Long Beach City College, CA

I want to thank you and your team for creating such a fine website and for providing it for K-12 teachers and students for free. I especially appreciate the flexibility the site has. I also love the test building area. I can use “correct" answers to further explain answers and "incorrect" answers to further teach students. I am very thankful for your work.

【推荐2】A short Chinese man seems to be the tallest in the world right now. Jack Ma (Ma Yun), 50, is executive chairman of a business — to — business online platform. On September 19, his company went public on the New York Stock Exchange, raising $ 25 billion through an IPO, the biggest in history. Ma, a former English teacher, has become the richest man in China.

Born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, Ma grew up as a happy kid. In 1976, at the age of 12, he wanted to learn English. Every morning, he awoke at 5 am, cycled 40 minutes to a hotel near the West Lake where he could chat to foreign tourists. He did it for nine years, rain or shine. The experience made him a fluent English speaker and also opened his eyes to the wider world.

In a 1995 trip to the US, Ma was showed the Internet for the first time. He searched the word “Beer", and found that there was nothing in there about China. Seeing the chance, Ma returned to China and set up a website without even knowing much about computers.

Four years later, Ma and his friends founded a company in Hangzhou, He believed in the Internet business potential when few other Chinese did. People called him “Crazy Jack Ma". But 15 years later, his company has developed into the world's largest e-commerce company, owning two popular shopping websites. It makes more profit online than two biggest foreign shopping websites combined.

No one thinks he's mad now. Ma's favorite line has been printed on the souvenir T-shirts. It reads: "Everybody should have a dream. What if that dream comes true? ”

【推荐3】How far would you go to make a good impression at a new job? A college student in Alabama walked 32 kilometers in the dark to get to his new job.

The story begins with Walter Carr's car breaking down the night before starting a new job. Carr was unable to find a ride. So, he figured out how long it would take to walk from his house to the job in Pelham-32 kilometers away. He left at midnight so that he could make it to the customer's house by 8：00 am the next morning.

Pelham police saw him walking along a highway at 4-00 am. So, they stopped to see if he needed help. After hearing his story, they took him to a restaurant for breakfast and then to a church where he could safely wait until 8：00 am. The police then took Carr to the home of customer Jenny Lamey. Lamey said that even though Carr had just walked the entire night, he refused her offer to rest. He just wanted to start working. While he worked, he talked with the customer, telling her how much he liked her kitchen.

Jenny Lamey later wrote this on Facebook："I just can't tell you how touched I was by Walter and his journey. He is kind and cheerful and he has big dreams! He is hardworking and tough. " She then started a GoFundMe page to help Walter with money to get his car fixed. When the CEO of Bellhops, Luke Marklin, learned of Carr's story, he drove from Tennessee to Alabama to give Walter his own 2014 Ford Escape.

Walter Carr's story touched many others around the United States. Within a few days, people gave over $ 73 ,000 to his GoFundMe page. Carr has decided to give a part of the donations to the Birmingham Education Foundation. And he has received more offers for jobs and scholarships for schools.

Decades of research has demonstrated how junior employees benefit from being mentored (指导). Guidance from senior colleagues has also been shown to enhance mentees’ job performance and satisfaction.     1    

We were especially interested in understanding how mentoring might help mentors who work in stressful occupations. Mental health is a growing concern within occupations that play important social roles, such as medical professionals, firefighters, and police officers. And because policing is one of the most stressful occupations, with high levels of mental health and well-being difficulties, we conducted a study of a formal mentoring program in an English police force.

    2     It was designed to support the development of junior officers by giving them a way to discuss concerns and receive guidance. Our study involved two parts. First, we conducted a field experiment: we compared the mental health of 17 mentor-mentee pairs to a control group of 18 pairs of senior and junior officers that did not participate in the program. Second, we interviewed both the mentees and their mentors separately.

Our experiment results showed that people who served as mentors experienced lower levels of anxiety, and described their job as more meaningful, than those who did not mentor. We learned from our interviews that mentoring afforded senior officers, as well as junior officers, a chance to discuss and reflect on concerns.     3    By acknowledging that these anxieties were common, both mentees and mentors grew more comfortable in discussing them and in sharing different coping mechanisms.

Why does mentoring have this impact on mentors?     4     Despite the pressures that comes with their roles — including abuse, difficult decision making, and the risk of death — police officers tend not to seek support from other officers, including more senior colleagues. This is to avoid negative stigma, a shameful reputation, associated with mental health disorders. Mentoring thereby offered a way to build trust within a relationship that laid a foundation for open and honest communication of sensitive topics.

【推荐1】All Ric O Barry wants is to stop the dolphin-killing, so he is headed to this seaside Japanese town, Taiji. The American activist, who is the star of a new award-winning documentary that portrays the dolphin-killing here, got an unwelcome reception when he showed up here this week for the start of the annual hunt.

His movie, The Cove (海豚湾 ), directed by National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, was released in the United States a month ago but has not yet to come out in Japan.

Scenes in the film, some of which were shot secretly, show fishermen banging on metal poles stuck in the water to create a wall of sound that scares the dolphins — which have supersensitive sonar (声呐系统) — and sends them fleeing into a cove.

There, the fishermen sometimes pick a few to be sold for aquarium shows, for as much as $150, 000. They kill the others, spearing the animals repeatedly until the water turns red. The meat from one dolphin is worth about 50, 000 yen, and is sold at supermarkets across Japan.

Greenpeace and other groups have tried to stop the hunt for years. Activists hope The Cove will bring the issue to more people internationally—and eventually in Japan.

Already, the Australian town of Broome dropped its 28-year sister-city relationship with Taiji last month, partly because of the movie.

“Some regions have a tradition of eating dolphin meat,” said fisheries official Toshinori Uoya. “Dolphin-killing may be negative for our international image, but it is not something orders can stop.”

The town government in Taiji — which has made whales and dolphins its trademark — refused to comment about The Cove, or the growing international criticism against dolphin-killing.

Many in Taiji take the dolphin hunt for granted as part of everyday life. They are defensive about The Cove, seeing themselves as powerless victims of overseas pressure to end a simple and honest way of making a living.

【推荐2】Much meaning can be conveyed, clearly, with our eyes, so it is often said that eyes can speak.

Do you have such kind of experience? In a bus you may look at a stranger, but not too long. And if he is sensing that he is being stared at, he may feel uncomfortable.

The same in daily life. If you are looked at for more than necessary, you will look at yourself up and down, to see if there is anything wrong with you. If nothing goes wrong, you will feel angry toward others’ stare at you that way. Eyes do speak, right?

Looking too long at someone may seem to be rude and aggressive. But things are different when it comes to stare at the opposite sex. If a man glances at a woman for more than 10 seconds and refuses to move his gaze, his intentions are obvious, that is, he wishes to attract her attention, to make her understand that he is admiring her.

However, the normal eye contact for two people engaged in conversation is that the speaker will only look at the listener from time to time, in order to make sure that the listener does pay attention to what the former is speaking, to tell him that he is attentive.

If a speaker looks at you continuously when speaking, as if he tries to dominate you, you will feel uncomfortable. A poor liar usually exposes himself by looking too long at the victim, since he believes in the false idea that to look straight in the eye is a sign of honest communication. Quite the contrary.

In fact, continuous eye contact is confined to lovers only, who will enjoy looking at each other tenderly for a long time, to show affection that words cannot express.

Evidently，eye contact should be done according to the relationship between two people and the specific situation.

We have arrived in the hot, wet city of Bangkok. This is our first trip to Thailand（泰国）. All the different smells make us want to try the food. We are going to at one thing special for dinner tonight. The hotel we are staying in is cheap, and very clean. We plan to stay here for a few days, visit some places in the city, and then travel to Chiang Mai（清迈）in the North.

Bangkok is wonderful and surprising! The places are interesting. We visited the famous market which was on water, and saw a lot of fruits and vegetables. Everything is so colorful, and we have taken hundreds of photos already! Later today cleave for Chiang Mai（清迈）. We will take the train north, stay in Chiang Mai for two days, and then catch a bus to Chiang Rai.（清莱）.

Our trip to Chiang Rai was long and boring. We visited a small village in the mountains. The village people here love the quiet life—no computers or phones. They are the kindest people I have ever met. They always smile and say "hello". Kathy and I can only speak a few words of Thai, so smiling is the best way to show our kindness, I feel good here and hope to be able to come back next year.

【推荐1】Dogs love to get out and stretch their legs, which not only helps to keep them in shape, but enables them to keep the extra pounds off. Pet hiking has been popular recently, getting dogs off the sidewalk.

Three years ago, Denver resident Brittany Redding was stressed out, working 60 hours a week while studying in graduate school full-time. The only thing that helped was taking her four dogs hiking. “That’s when it hit me that I should do that as a job.” she says. After graduating in June 2016, she founded Take a Hike. Her company, like a number of others around the country, takes dogs to explore beyond the neighborhood.

Before taking on the tracks, Brittany meets with each dog and his or her owner to get a sense of the pet’s character. Then she schedules a meet-and-greet with other dogs that will join the hike to be sure to match their personalities. Each hiking is about two hours long and includes transportation to and from the track for around $70 per outing. “Hiking allows dogs lo meet new friends and explore new tracks, smells, and wildlife,” she explains.

Michael Mizenko thinks sending his pet, Ajax, on weekly hikes with Take a Hike has made Ajax a happier dog. Over the past two years, hiking has taught Ajax how to stay off pavement, be more social and remain calm in the car. “It has made him a flexible easygoing guy.” Michael says.

【推荐2】One of the latest trends(趋势) in American childcare is Chinese au pairs.Au Pair in Stamford,Conn.,for example,has got increasing numbers of requests for Chinese au pairs from zero to around 4,000 since 2004.And that’s true all across the country.

“I thought it would be very useful for him to learn Chinese at an early age,”Joseph Stocke,the managing director of a company,says of his 2-year-old son.“I would at least like to give him the chance to use the language in the future.”After only six months of being cared for by a 25-year-old woman from China,the boy can already understand basic Chinese daily expressions,his dad says.

Li Drake,a Chinese native raising two children in Minnesota with an American husband,had another reason for looking for an au pair from China:She didn’t want her children to miss out on their roots.“Because I am Chinese,my husband and I wanted the children to keep exposed to(接触) the language and culture(文化),”she says.

“Staying with a native speaker is better for children than simply sitting in a classroom,” says Suzanne Flynn,a professor in language education of children.“But parents must understand that just one year with an au pair is unlikely to produce wonders.Complete mastery demands continued learning until the age of 10 or 12.”

The popularity of au pairs from China has been strengthened by the increasing numbers of American parents who want their children to learn Chinese.It is expected that American demand for au pairs will continue to rise in the next few years.

【推荐3】The annual marathon in my town occurred as scheduled. My job was to follow behind the runners in an ambulance in case any of them needed medical attention. As the athletes began to pace themselves, the front runners started to disappear. It was then that my eyes were drawn to the woman in blue running shorts and a baggy white T-shirt.

I knew we were already watching our “last runner？” Her feet were turned in, yet her left knee was turned out. Her legs were so crippled（跛足的）and bent that it seemed impossible for her to walk, let alone run a marathon.

The driver and I watched in silence as she slowly moved forward. We would move forward a little bit, then stop and wait for her to gain some distance. Then we’d slowly move forward a little bit more. As I watched her struggle to put one foot in front of the other, I found myself breathing for her and urging her forward. I wanted her to stop, and at the same time, I prayed that she wouldn’t.

Finally, she was the only runner left in sight. I sat on the edge of my seat and watched with respect and amazement as she pushed forward with sheer determination through the last miles. When the finish line came into sight, the cheering crowds had long gone home. Yet, standing straight and proud waited a man. He was holding one end of a ribbon tied to a post. She slowly crossed through, leaving both ends of the ribbon fluttering behind her.

I don’t know this woman’s name, but that day she became a part of my life- a part I often depend on. For her, it wasn’t about beating the other runners or winning a prize. It was about finishing what she had set out to do. When I think things are too difficult or I get those “I-just-can’t-do-it,” I think of the last runner. Then I realize how easy the task before me really is.