1 . To tease apart these features of emotion regulation, Varma designed an experimental situation in which they put participants into an “emotion induction (引导)” treatment. Participants read a story that was intended to cause a negative emotion such as a hit-and-run car accident or the death of your dog.

2 . Although these teachers are separated by thousands of miles, their methods of encouraging children to write spring from a common source: the Bread Loaf School. There, near Vermont’s Middlebury College, grade school and high school teachers give up part of their vacations each summer to spend six weeks brainstorming, studying and trading experiences as they try to design new methods of getting their pupils to write. Says Dixie Goswami, a professor who heads Bread Loaf’s program in writing: “We have nothing against ‘skill-and-drill’ writing curricula, except that they don’t work.” Instead, Bread Loaf graduates have created one inventive program to work together to cultivate student writers.

3 . Lucy M. Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a much-respected expert on how to teach reading, has drawn attention with an eight-page essay. Here is part of her argument: “The important thing is to teach kids that they needn’t freeze when they come to a hard word, nor skip past it. The important thing is to teach them that they have resources to draw upon, and to use those resources to develop endurance.”

Both sides agree that children need to acquire the vocabulary and background information that gives meaning to words. But first, they have to pronounce them correctly to connect the words they have learned to speak.

Calkins said in her essay: “Much of what the phonics people are saying is praiseworthy,” but it would be a mistake to teach phonics “at the expense of reading and writing.”

The two sides appear to agree with her on that.