1 . When my three-year-old cousin didn’t get his way and hit his mother in anger, there were immediate consequences (后果): his father calmly and firmly made it clear that this behaviour was unacceptable, and he had to apologise. Then, he lost the honor of playing with his Christmas toys for the rest of the day.     1     His parents knew that this consequence would have an impact and was something they could carry out straight away.

The most important goal of discipline (管教) is teaching children and teenagers self-management and responsible decision-making. It is not about control but instead using positive discipline. When children know what will happen, they can make choices. Parents benefit, too, from having a plan of how they will respond to specific behaviour rather than reacting in anger.

    2     Have a conversation to work through what happened in a particular situation, asking the young person how they made the decision and what the impact of their choices was. Teenagers are often unwilling to talk to parents, facing their parent’s disappointment and requests for explanations.     3     The goal of this difficult conversation is to help the teenagers understand the impact of their behaviour.

Taking responsibility and repairing harm by making changes is a powerful consequence that teaches young people about the impacts of their behaviour on others. If an older child has hurt a friend’s feelings, coaching them in talking it through and apologising.     4    

    5     And they can finally make wise choices and solve conflicts without force.

2 . Women and girls already struggle with gender inequality, but when extreme weather damages a community, the UN found that inequalities worsen.

To explore the complex links between gender and climate change, CNN worked with seven women photojournalists to document the challenges women and girls face. This visual project gives a snapshot of the numerous ways climate crisis is changing their lives, but also shows how they are fighting back.

The Center for Girls’ Education runs a series of programs in Nigeria to help girls stay in school. One in every five of the world’s children who are out of school is in Nigeria, according to UNICEF, and it is girls who are impacted the most. More than 10 million children between 5 and 14 years old are absent from classrooms across Nigeria, according to UNICEF. For girls, the statistics are even bleaker: in states in the northeast and northwest of the country, fewer than half attend school.

This education crisis is the result of a tangle of factors, but against the backdrop of these individual factors is the broader context of the climate crisis. Nigeria is growing hotter and dryer, and extreme weather such as flash floods and landslides are becoming fiercer and more frequent. Climate disasters can make schools inaccessible and classrooms unsafe. Communities struggling to cope with extreme weather sometimes turn to their children to help or to earn extra money to support the family. And girls, whose attendance at school is already discouraged in some communities, are often most affected.

There are efforts to support girls’ education and equip them with the resources to cope with a fast-changing climate. The Center for Girls’ Education in the northern Nigerian city of Zaria runs programs to help girls stay in school and offers training on how to cope with the impacts of extreme weather. “I feel when we give the girls education on climate change, how to ease it, it will go a long way in helping the girls in how to support themselves in times of difficulties, and even help them prepare for it,” said Habiba Mohammed, director of the Center for Girls’ Education.

I offer to pay you $200 in one year if you give me $190 today. Good deal or bad deal? It’s the kind of math problem you might encounter in real life, _________, say, whether the cosecant (余割) of a 30-degree angle is 1 or 2. You can imagine students _________ their spirits and paying attention when they realize that they need to know algebra (代数) to avoid being cheated on a loan. Math and personal finance make a _________ fit. Students grasp concepts in math much better when they see how those subjects _________ their daily financial lives.

A survey in 2022 funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that 61 percent of parents of students said math education should be “relevant to the real world” _________ that only 21 percent said it was. The drive for relevance goes beyond K-12 education. Some of America’s top universities are _________ personal finance into their curriculums.

Harvard has a personal finance course in the _________ department that’s taught by John Campbell, a past president of the American Finance Association. “_________, personal finance was regarded as a very sort of hands-on skill that you might teach to people who were going to a technical high school,” he told me. “There is, I would say, a modern movement to _________ of personal finance as a subject with actually a lot more intellectual content.”

In most high schools, personal finance classes are light on math, and math classes are __________ in personal finance. The FiCycle curriculum has plenty of each. “The personal finance component is incredibly __________ for our high school students,” Philip Dituri, the director of education at Financial Life Cycle Education, who has a doctorate in math education, told me. He believed that quite a lot of students would be stimulated by the __________.

There is a __________ standard for personal finance education that was put together by the Council for Economic Education and the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. It emphasizes how to __________ one’s finances. FiCycle focuses more on the underlying concepts. It’s about “how and why individuals and households transfer consumption over time,” Financial Life Cycle Education says.

In conclusion, the integration of math and personal finance in education is not just an academic pursuit, but a __________ necessity for students to guide their real life. It is time for educational institutions to take note and adapt their curricula to better prepare students for the financial challenges of adulthood.

6 . In a crowded migrant (移民) camp in Tijuana, Mexico, a three-year-old girl wandered ________ toward the exit. She was steps from a busy road. Estefanía Rebellón was the only person who ________ her. The writer had just driven from Los Angeles with a group of friends to drop off food and clothing to a(n) ________ organization.

It was December 2018, a time when the US-Mexico border was seeing migrants from Central America ________ violence and poverty. Rebellón rushed over to the child and took her ________. “Where are your parents?” she asked anxiously. Eventually, she and her friends found the girl’s ________ father, who had stepped away to ________ for food.

Back at home, Rebellón gathered a group of volunteer ________ via social media, and using a thousand dollars from her ________, set up a school at the Tijuana border. In five years, the pilot program has grown into the non-profit Yes We Can World Foundation, which has ________ three school buses into classrooms and established two schools.

________ by donations, the foundation’s teachers have provided a bilingual education to more than 3,000 kids. The schools ________ an official curriculum (课程) from Mexico’s education ministry. They also offer ________ courses, which help kids understand more about migration.

Rebellón has received numerous ________ for her work, including Outstanding American by Choice. As more than 6.6 million people still live in refugee camps around the world, she says she’d like to ________ the foundation’s influence and support migrant children globally.

8 . Many American education experts say tutoring (辅导) is the best way to help students make up for learning loss during the pandemic. Although many schools have received a lot of government aid, only a small number of students have been getting tutored.

Chalkbeat and the Associated Press surveyed 12 of the nation’s school systems. The schools reported that fewer than 10 percent of students received any kind of tutoring in the fall of last year. A new tutoring group in Chicago served about three percent of students. But less than one percent of students in three big school systems received tutoring.

The low tutoring numbers suggest several problems. Some parents said they did not know tutoring was available or did not think their child needed it. Some school systems have struggled to hire tutors. Other school systems said their small tutoring programs were part of their efforts to meet students’ needs.

Whatever the reason, the result is clear: at an important time for students’ recovery, millions of children have not received the extra help.

“It works, it’s effective, it gets students to improve in their learning and catch up,” said Amie Rapaport, a researcher studying why so many students are not getting intensive tutoring.

Schools trying to increase tutoring face problems, including hiring and planning. Experts say tutoring is most effective when provided three times a week for at least 30 minutes during school hours. Offering after-school or weekend tutoring is simpler, but attendance is often low.

Low family interest has been another problem. Although test scores sharply dropped during the pandemic, many parents do not believe their children experienced learning loss.

In Wake County, North Carolina, the school district began planning a reading tutoring program in November. District officials last month said volunteers are tutoring fewer than 140 students. That is far fewer than the 1,000 students the program was designed to help. Many worry that not enough students are getting the help they need even as programs continue to grow.

9 . The ranking of universities and colleges at the national global level is a well-known doubtful practice. Imperfect approaches generate inaccurate results of these institutions. Nowadays, prestigious (有威望的) law and medical schools have started to walk away from this “evaluation”.

There are two obvious methodological problems with all of this. One is that the numerical rankings suffer from false precision. Is there really a difference between No.10 and No.11 in the undergraduate (本科生) school rankings? Johns Hopkins University famously had a plan called“10 by 20”with the goal of getting to No.10 by 2020. Hopkins is a great undergraduate institution — whether it’s No.10 or No.11 is meaningless, but it did indeed make it into the top 10 ahead of schedule, which no doubt delighted its trustees and students.

The other methodological problem is that rankings reward those schools that promote measurements by admitting students who have had the advantages of better pre-college education and test preparation coaching, and whose wealth will make them likely future donors. Equally worthy applicants without such resources will fail to enter the schools.

The good news is that in recent months, a reckoning (清算) has begun. Last September, Columbia University chose not to participate in the undergraduate rankings after an enterprising professor discovered that the school was fudging its own numbers. If Columbia’s data were corrected, it would drop from No. 2 to No. 18. Two months later, law schools began pushing back. Yale and Harvard Law Schools announced that they would refuse to provide data to U. S. News, and several outstanding law schools followed suit.

This resistance to rankings has now begun in the world of science. This is a great sign. In announcing its decision, the dean of Washington University’s medical school said, “…it is time to stop participating in a system that does not serve our students or their future patients.”