6 . Like many schools worldwide, the pandemic forced Safe Passage to address an issue it’s been debating for years: how to best integrate (使……完整，使……整体) online or remote learning into its education plans.     1     But the area’s lack of internet access, as well as security concerns like theft, make distributing technology for students to learn at home a daunting (令人怯步的) task.

Holland says students will be at a disadvantage in today’s workplace if they don’t have access to digital tools.     2    

“Blended learning is a combination between technology and face-to-face classroom learning,” says Holland. “It’s not a bolt-on solution. If you see technology as this cool thing you just bolt on to an existing curriculum, you are in big trouble.”

Jean-Francois agrees.

“A lot of grants will include purchasing laptops or tablets. But education is a lot more complex,” she says. “    3     We can’t just assume that if we give them a tablet and instructions, they are going to know how to use it, and we shouldn’t expect they are going to know how to effectively teach children with it.”

    4     But Johnson, the Rotarian who helps clubs design education grants, cautions against moving too quickly to “reinvent education.”

“We need to figure it out, but figure it out one step at a time,” says Johnson. “You have to know what people are able to accept and use — cognitively, socially, and emotionally. Determine that, then move forward.”

7 . “Is data the new oil?” asked advocates of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. By 2016, with the rise of big data’s fast-growing cousin deep learning, we had become more certain: “Data is the new oil,” stated Fortune magazine.

Amazon’s Neil Lawrence has a slightly different comparison: Data is coal. Not coal today, though, but coal in the early days of the 18th century, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. Newcomen built his device to pump water out of the southwest’s rich tin (锡) mines.

The problem, as Lawrence said, was that the pump was rather more useful to those who had a lot of coal than those who didn’t: it was good, but not good enough to be able to buy enough coal in to run it. That was so true that the first of Newcomen’s steam engines wasn’t built in a tin mine, but in coal works near Dudley.

So why is data coal? The problem is similar: there are a lot of Newcomen in the world of deep learning. New companies are coming up with revolutionary new ways to train machines to do impressive tasks, from reconstructing facial data from images to learning the writing style of an individual user to better predict which word they are going to type in a sentence. And yet, like Newcomen, their innovations are so much more useful to the people who actually have large amounts of raw material to work from.

But there is an ending to the story: 69 years later, James Watt made a nice change to the Newcomen steam engine, adding a condenser (冷凝器) to the design. That change, Lawrence said, “made the steam engine much more efficient, and that’s what triggered the industrial revolution.”

Whether data is oil or coal, then, there’s another way the comparison holds up: a lot of work is going into trying to make sure we can do more, with less.

“If you look at all the areas where deep learning is successful, they’re all areas where there’s lots of data,” points out Lawrence. That’s great if you want to classify images of cats, but less helpful if you want to use deep learning to diagnose rare illnesses. “It’s generally considered unacceptable to force people to become sick in order to acquire data.”

It’s not as impressive as teaching a computer to play a game better than any human alive, but “data efficiency” is a vital step if deep learning is to move away from simply taking in large amounts of data and giving out the best correlations (关联) possible.

8 . Anne of Green Gables (1985)

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Anne of Green Gables, previously filmed in 1934, was afforded a TV-movie treatment in 1985. Anne Shirley is an orphan girl sent to live with a foster family on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Though she has great difficulty controlling her temper and vivid imagination, Anne eventually wins over her new guardians, bossy Marilla Cuthbert and Mailla’s shy brother Mathew. Anne’s journey is a happy one, but starts out difficult like those of many children adopted at an older age.

Martian Child (2007)

Martian Child tells the story of a widower, David, and his continuation of the adoption process he had started before his wife’s death. His new son, Dennis, believes that he is a Martian. David must contend with this belief and gain access into Dennis’s world. Both characters are born outsiders and they recognize their common sense of loss. Martian Child is a wonderful story for any adopted child, especially those who have created their own origin story to cope with the absence of their birth family.

Despicable Me (2010)

Despicable Me is championed for showing kids how much their presence impacts the lives of their adoptive parents. Gru is a super-bad guy until he meets orphans Margo, Edith and Agnes. They overturned his life and his evil plans as they work to warm his heart and home. Despicable Me is a funny kid movie on the surface, but truly has a lot to say about the love of a child and the effect of that love on their new parents and home.

Annie (2014)

In this remake of one of the most-beloved adoption stories, Annie’s positive attitude shines in the midst of incompetent social workers and greedy foster parents. The songs are cheerful and catchy and the film is happy. While this film could be very challenging for children who have experienced destructive placements, it is generally family-friendly. It also gets points for allowing Annie to exemplify several of the strengths of foster kids: hopeful, brave, tough and smart.

10 . Self-control may be the secret to success, according to a persuasive new study that followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Children who showed early signs of self-control were not only less likely to have developed addictions or to have committed a crime by adulthood, but were also healthier and _________ than their more impulsive peers.

For the new study, called the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, researchers led by Duke University psychologist Terrie Moffitt followed 1,000 children in New Zealand for more than three decades.

In previous research, researchers found that _________ and out-of-control behavior were more common in children who had experienced loss or violence. If children have bad experiences, the _________ may affect the proper development of the frontal cortex (前额叶) in children’s brains, which is responsible for self-control. If children have lower self-control, they will have a(n) _________ time in school. They won’t learn as efficiently and they are more likely to act out because of their frustrations, which means the potential for more _________ problems and, in later life, the potential for legal problems.

Although Moffitt’s study found some “concentration of low self-control children in homes with low income,” the author says, “The link was _________. There were plenty of well-to-do children with very low self-control.” _________, poor children who scored best on measures of self-control were more likely than others to become wealthy in later life. “One _________ of the findings is that children with high self-control who began life in low-income homes ended up as adults with higher incomes,” says Moffitt.

_________, the period of time in which many of the mistakes in self-discipline would potentially lead to the worst life outcomes occurred during the teenage years. Teens who had scored lowest in measures of __________ in early childhood were the most likely to make mistakes in the first place. And even those low self-control teens who managed to __________ smoking, alcohol or other drug-related problems, and who stayed in school, still did worse later in life than their more disciplined peers. This suggests that there might be a better __________ on investment from early childhood interventions.

“Trial and error is a __________ part of teenage life”，says Moffitt, “But teens with good self-control __________ trial and error more strategically, and they understand the difference between a useful learning experiment and real danger. I am convinced that teenagers can be taught to recognize this __________.”