【推荐3】The latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered. This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal(语言的) score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to secure a job. It also predicts future income.

The most credible analyses have shown that the chief causes are vast curricular changes, especially in the critical early grades. In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach. Cognitive psychologists agree that early childhood language learning (ages 2 to 10) is critical to later verbal competence, not just because of the remarkable linguistic plasticity of young minds, but also because of the so-called Matthew Effect.

The name comes from a passage in the Bible: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Those who are language-poor in early childhood get relatively poorer, and fall further behind, while the verbally rich get richer.

The origin of this cruel truth lies in the nature of word learning. The more words you already know, the faster you acquire new words. This sounds like an invitation to vocabulary study for babies, but that’s been tried and it’s not effective. Most of the word meanings we know are acquired indirectly, by intuitively(凭直觉的) guessing new meanings as we understand the main idea of what we are hearing or reading. The Matthew Effect in language can be restated this way: “To those who understand the main idea shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall follow boredom and frustration.”

Clearly the key is to make sure that from kindergarten on, every student, from the start, understands the main idea of what is heard or read. If preschoolers and kindergartners are offered substantial and coherent lessons concerning the human and natural worlds, then the results show up five years or so later in significantly improved verbal scores. By staying on a subject long enough to make all young children familiar with it (say, two weeks or so), the main idea becomes understood by all and word learning speeds up. This is especially important for low-income children, who come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to pass on the knowledge base children from rich families take for granted.

Current reform strategies focus on testing, improving teacher quality, and other changes. Attention to these structural issues has led to improvements in the best public schools. But it is not enough.

【推荐2】“One, two, three, post the product links!” “Please press the button and give us a thumb-up” “exactly!” the “vibe group,” which means a group of people who are pumping some life into live-streaming and coordinating with live streamers to help steer customers to buy products. The group, also referred to as the “E-commerce straight man/crosstalk” by Chinese users, has stirred a craze in recent weeks on Chinese media platforms.

For the “E-commerce crosstalk” or people who help live streamers to sell their merchandise, it is their specialization. However, others believe that this is confusing to consumers.

The “E-commerce crosstalk” is also known as the center control of the live stream. The work of the center control spans across the pre, mid and post-stage of the live stream, and needs to be responsible for equipment debugging (调试), backstage operation, maintenance of the live stream order, data review and other contents.

They usually create a warming vibe to help live streamers sell products such as “I want 100k likes, could you guys help me to get them, please”, “Post product links!”, “Repost!” or “Let’s join the fan club”. These are normal psychological suggestions for customers which don’t break any of the rules of how to conduct business.

While the “E-commerce crosstalk” group doesn’t just control tempo, they also have another important role — they create a sense of exigency for customers, making them buy now, such as “My friends, the last one! Hurry, buy it now!” “How many are left? No, almost out of stock, only 30 left!” “Buy more today! Hurry up my friends! Go to the yellow cart, find the 1st link! Great price, great quality!”

“These practices are creating an illusion (错觉) of inventory constraints to mislead customers,” Fan Xiaolin, a Beijing-based lawyer told us. The unrealistic atmosphere created by the “E-commerce crosstalk” can easily mislead consumers, causing them to make irrational purchases. The 2020 China Live E-commerce Industry Research Report shows that the average return rate of live e-commerce is as high as 30 percent to 50 percent, which is much higher than the traditional e-commerce return rate of 10 percent to 15 percent.