【推荐2】As more and more people speak the global languages of English, Chinese, Spanish, and French, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars (学者) from a number of organizations—UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting (记录) dying languages and the cultures they reflect. Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Centre Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following that tradition. His recently published a book, A Grammar of Thangmi with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture, which grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not satisfied to simply record these voices before they disappear without record. At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials, including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes, which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded, the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project, Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, for the world available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

【推荐3】Katherine Rooks remembers when she first learned that a punctuation mark (标点符号) could be so powerful. The Denver-based writer had sent her high school-aged son a text message — coming home from school. “I could tell from his response that he was offended (冒犯) all of sudden. And when he came home, he walked in the door, came over and said, ‘What did you mean by this?’” Rooks was confused. How could a simple text message send confusion?

“And so we looked at the text together and I said. ‘Well, I meant, see you later, or something. I don’t remember exactly what it said.’ And he said, ‘But you ended with a period (句号)! I thought you were really angry!’” Rooks wasn’t angry, and she explained to her son that periods are how you end a sentence.

But in text messaging — at least for younger adults — periods do more than just end a sentence: they also can set tone. Gretchen McCulloch, linguist (语言学家) said that when it comes to text messaging, the period has lost its original purpose because rather than needing a symbol to indicate the end of a sentence, you can simply hit send at the end of your message. That doesn’t mean the period has lost all purposes in text messaging. Now it can be used to indicate the gravity of a situation or a sense of finality (终结).

However, caution is needed, said McCulloch, noting that problems can start to arise when you combine a period with a positive emotion, such as “Sure.” or “Sounds good.” “Now you’ve got positive words and serious punctuation and the clash between them is what creates that sense of passive-aggression (消极对抗),” said McCulloch.

Our language has developed, and “what we have done with our incredible linguistic genius is finding ways to insert some kind of emotional, interpersonal information into texting,” said Celia Klin, a psychology professor at Binghamton University. “And what we have is things like periods, emoticons and other kinds of punctuation. So people have repurposed the period to mean something else.” And that something else is passive-aggression.

【推荐1】I thought we all knew why independent school students do better than those in the state sector(公立学校). They have more money, more funding and better resources and they don’t have the more challenging students we get in the state sector.

That was before I became a teacher-researcher in a two-year project led by my college, aiming to find the best way to support high-ability students. With funding from the London Schools Excellence Fund, we teamed up with some of the country’s top private schools, like Eton and St Paul’s, as well as a number of state schools, to find out how to bring the knowledge-rich learning that characterizes independent schools into the state sector.

Before the project, I hadn’t had much contact with people who had been educated there. But the first thing I found when I visited was that teachers are the same. In the independent sector, they have challenges too—just different ones.

After two years, our research project has produced a huge set of findings.

One of the most useful findings was the importance of independent learning habits outside the classroom. I realized that although I was always telling students that they needed to do four to five hours of private study a week, they didn’t have a clear idea of what this could look like beyond making notes. So I set them different activities including reading articles, doing activities and completing examination questions.

I started to put much more emphasis on activities outside the classroom, like researching topics beyond the syllabus(教学大纲) or discussing things in the news. And I praised anyone who asked questions in class, so we created a culture where students were proud to ask a question rather than seeing it as a way of flagging up the fact that they hadn’t understood something.

My research is beginning to have a real influence. My students now come to class and tell me what they want to know about. But they no longer expect me to do the research—they want to find out for themselves. At the end of the year I gave students a questionnaire on independent learning. One wrote, “Independent learning would limit the help I got from other students. It helps you to think for yourself.”

【推荐2】Pa went to the city to look for work.

Every night, I lie awake in bed and wait for the train to stop. Wait to hear the sound of his work boots dropping on the step by the kitchen door. Every night, the train goes by for someone else’s pa coming home. Not mine, not yet. Every night, I go to sleep with the sound of train wheels in my head, whispering, “Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow. ”

The smell of coffee wakes me. I run into the kitchen. There he is. Pa lifts me onto his shoulders and pretends to stagger from my weight. “You’ve gotten so big as a horse. I can hardly lift you up anymore. ” He puts me down, and I stare at the two bags on the table. One says FLOUR, the other, SUGAR.

Ma says, “I’m going to bake a pie for your pa’s homecoming dinner. Go down to the cellar Jimmy, and bring me that jar of apples from the shelf. ” She smiles at me with a “mind now” look. There’s no need. Don’t I know it’s the very last jar on the shelf?

I take the steps two at a time, not bothering to hold on to the wooden rails. I stand on tiptoe to take down the preserves. I put both my hands around the jar. I can hear Pa laughing upstairs and Ma joining in. I want to be with them in the kitchen. I hurry up the steps, and my bare foot catches on the middle one. I put out my hand to steady myself, but I fall down, the jar slipping through my fingers. The jar smashes on the hard-as-rock mud floor. Bits of apple fly everywhere.

Ma’s footsteps, Ma’s voice: “Are you hurt?” She checks me for cuts. “Go on upstairs now. Mind you don’t cut your bare feet. ” I want her to yell at me, but that’s all she says.

Upstairs, Pa wipes my eyes with the tail of his shirt. “Never mind, old son, accidents happen. ” I bury my face in Pa’s torn old jacket. I smell the miles he’s walked looking for work to bring us those bags on the table.

“I’m going to bake my mama’s sugar pie.” Ma says, “It’s a special-occasion pie, and it doesn’t need apples. ” “I’ve always wanted to taste sugar pie. ” Pa says.