【推荐1】Why was school created?    1    Especially on test days, many students wonder exactly why they’re being subjected to such terrible and unusual punishment!

If you’re honest with yourself, though, you know what a great place school is.    2    . Sure, tests can be stressful, but think of how boring life would be if you didn’t get to learn new things and see other people so often!

Schools are not a new invention. You may have seen some old one-room schoolhouses that have been around for several hundred years or more.    3    .

In fact, education dates back to the very first humans ever to live on Earth. Why? To survive, every generation has found it necessary to pass on its knowledge, skills, values, and traditions to the next generation. How can they do this? Education! Each subsequent generation (后代) must be taught these things.

    4    They educated young people within the family unit. Over time, however, populations grew and societies formed.

Rather than every family being responsible for education, people soon found out that it would be easier and more efficient to have a small group of adults teach a larger group of children.    5    .

【推荐1】In the middle of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Amanda Barrows carefully placed a wooden nightstand(床头柜) on the ground. She attached a sign reading, “Take a poem, leave a poem.”

“It’s completely unexpected,” said Barrows, a park ranger (管理员) by day and a poet by night. “I’m really taken aback by the outpouring of support.”

Barrows has always considered herself a writer, so she enrolled in a class called Poetry for the People. The final project of the class is to find a way to “bring poetry into the community”.

At first, Barrows struggled to land on an idea. Eventually, she realized that she could fuse her love for parks and her love for poetry. A coworker gave Barrows a weathered nightstand. She thought it would be the perfect tool for her project.

She filled the drawer at the top with fresh paper and pens and added a box at the bottom for poems. To get the ball rolling, she asked her close friends to add their favorite poems to the drawer for people to take away.

The poetry nightstand reminded her of Little Free Libraries. That project features bookstands stationed across the city. People can leave and take books from little libraries. She only had a single nightstand to work with, so Barrows decided that she would leave it in a park for four days before moving it to a new location. San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department manages about 220 parks, and Barrow’s goal is to bring the poetry nightstand to all of them.

Since the project started, people have added a wide range of writing. Barrows shares most of the submissions on social media. Some are clearly composed by kids, while others are more refined. People have also written poems in various languages. “I love to see different people’s handwriting and share their personal words,” Barrows said.

The instructors of Poetry for the People said the nightstand fulfilled the main purpose of the project. Other students in the class wrote poetry on sidewalks with chalk. Another gave out poems disguised as parking tickets. Tanea Lunsford Lynx, a guest instructor for the class, says the project is “an invitation to slow down”. She believes that the old-fashioned nightstand stands out in a city that is filled with new technology.

Barrows says she intends to “keep this going indefinitely,” and she hopes others will build off the project and contribute their own creativity. “It really is a community project,” Barrows said. “It belongs to all of us.”

【推荐2】Poetry can be a source of distraction, of beauty, of truth. It can guide us when it gets difficult to manage the intensity of what we’re feeling. So it’s no surprise that people sought out poetry for comfort this past year.

Overall visits from readers to a poetry website went up thirty percent during the pandemic. “So many people have reached out wanting to discuss how much more poetry has meant to them this year, or how suddenly poetry has meant something to them,” says award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye, a teacher. All year, she says people have been asking her for advice on what poems to read or what poetry platforms to choose.

It wasn’t just the pandemic. This year saw an extraordinary economic trauma that we had all been experiencing. And poetry is an art form that has always been a resource in times of crisis. “A lot of people, especially in healthcare, haven’t known where to put their sorrow because there’s been too much and there’s been no time to navigate it,” she says.

Suzanne Olhmann, a nurse, who says she talks about poetry with her patients almost every day, shares the poem Kindness by Naomi with them, as well as with other healthcare workers. “Naomi’s poem really helps us understand that you can think of sorrow as a two-sided coin and on the other side of it is kindness,” she says.

Poet James Crews says that one reason why poetry has provided comfort this year is that it’s a powerful medium for working through change. “A lot of poems are read during funerals, weddings, graduations, and huge transitions in our lives,” he says. “And I feel that we’re all turning to poetry as a way of capturing and naming this huge transition that we’re all going through together right now. We need poems to remind us why the world is worth saving and also how we can take better care of ourselves.”

That is how poetry gives us hope each and every day. And even once the pandemic is over, poems will be here for us, holding space for relief and escape.