Drawing High Schoolers to Science
A group of educators and plant scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) are connecting to reshape science classes. And this particular partnership isn’t just helping students get a better understanding of biology; it’s turning them into young scientists, even if only during class.
It doesn’t take long to see that the curriculum born from this collaboration makes for a much different experience than the traditional high school biology classes. For starters, it has a comic book for a workbook. Secondly, students are getting their hands dirty growing plants. MSU researchers are also studying the plant. The high schoolers are asking some of the same questions professional plant scientists are trying to answer.
“We’re getting them engaged with science in science practices, not just having them learn about science,” says Hildah Makori, a researcher at MSU. “They learn to look at things differently. That’s a life-time impact.”
The main characters of the comic book are a pair of young field scientists. They invite the high school students to help with plant research inspired by a real project at MSU. By growing their own plants, the students learn about genetics, evolution and how these interact with the environment.
The team has seen how this practice could keep students in the driver’s seat of their learning. To help the characters out, students set up different experiments to test their ideas.
The program is working. “This comic personally gave me a click that sparked my curiosity,” reads one student’s survey response. “The comic book put a lot of creative atmosphere into the story instead of just looking at words, instead of just listening to the teacher talk,” says another.
Teachers also had positive reviews. In a survey, one remarked how helpful it was to have the comic to refer to. The students could see the comic’s characters doing something in the lab and realize, “I’m able to do this right here at my table and I can do the same thing,” the teacher says.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Do you have a favorite podcast? That can be a difficult question to answer for some as there are so many options. That is because the world is full of interesting topics and thoughts about them. If you feel you have something engaging and valuable to share, start a podcast.
A podcast is a series of audio episodes that cover a particular subject. The first step to creating a podcast is to find your topic. It’s believed that the best topics are ones that you know a lot about and love.
Another important step is to make sure you have the right equipment. While podcast equipment can be complex and expensive, it doesn’t have to be. For your first podcast, you can simply rely on your phone and computer. You can record all of your audio on your phone. Then with your computer — and the right software — you can mix the audio. This is the process of putting your audio together into one perfect-sounding file.
After you have your topic and equipment, you’ll want to choose your format. Your podcast could be one person speaking, two people talking, or many people offering their opinions. Your podcast could also include more than one of these options.
Once you’ve decided, you can start drafting your episodes. However, whatever format or formats you choose, maintain the same structure for each episode. The next step is to find a quiet place and do your recording.
When you’ve completed your recording and audio mixing, you’ll need to find a platform for your podcast. Luckily there are plenty of free and paid platform options on which to upload your podcast. Before uploading, make sure you have an interesting title and good tags for your show. Be sure to post about your show on social media. Get your podcast listed in a podcast directory, too. You want to get the word out about your podcast to grow your audience. Your podcast just might become someone’s new favorite.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Competitive Cheerleading
Over the years, cheerleading has taken two primary forms: game-time cheerleading and competitive cheerleading. Game-time cheerleaders’ main goal is to entertain the crowd and lead them with team cheers, which should not be considered a sport. However, competitive cheerleading is more than a form of entertainment. It is really a competitive sport.
Competitive cheerleading includes lots of physical activity. The majority of the teams require a certain level of tumbling (翻腾运动) ability. It’s a very common thing for gymnasts, so it’s easy for them to go into competitive cheerleading. Usually these cheerleaders integrate lots of their gymnastics experience including their jumps, tumbling, and overall energy. They also perform lifts and throws.
Competitive cheerleading is also an activity that is governed by rules under which a winner can be declared. It is awarded points for technique, creativity and sharpness. Usually the more difficult the action is, the better the score is. That’s why cheerleaders are trying to experience great difficulty in their performance. Besides, there is also a strict rule of time. The whole performance has to be completed in less than three minutes and fifteen seconds, during which the cheerleaders are required to stay within a certain area. Any performance beyond the limit of time is invalid.
Another reason for the fact that competitive cheerleading is one of the hardest sports is that it has more reported injuries. According to some research, competitive cheerleading is the number one cause of serious sports injuries to women. Generally, these injuries affect all areas of the body, including wrists, shoulders, ankles, head, and neck.
There can be no doubt that competitive cheerleading is a sport with professional skills. It should be noted that it is a team sport and even the smallest mistake made by one teammate can bring the score of the entire team down. So without working together to achieve the goal, first place is out of reach.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ChatGPT Helps People a Lot
In real life, robot customer service in various applications are broadly similar to ChatGPT’s Al products. It is ChatGPT’s ability to learn the most with the highest level of intelligence that has made it a global hit. At the end of November 2022, AI research lab OpenAI launched AI chat software ChatGPT. So what exactly can ChatGPT do, and how can it help us ordinary people?
First, chat with ChatGPT as if it were your friend when you’re bored, and it will constantly revise its parameters (参数) and behavior with your advice and guidance. So the more you talk to it, the more it knows what you want, and the more it responds to you. Take travel as an example. While there are a lot of travel recommendation sites out there right now, they can’t be customized to the individual, but you can ask ChatGPT for very specific information to get suggestions.
Second, ChatGPT can be used when you want to create content but lack ideas. It can open your mind to ideas as well as create ideas for you. Children in the growth always like to listen to parents tell new stories, and story-telling gives a lot of parents a headache. What should we do when we run out of storybooks? ChatGPT is a great story generator, which generates a whole new story, as many as you want, based on the themes and characters you provide. It’s perfect.
Third, let ChatGPT help you out when you’re not sure how to get started with a paper, or an article. Of course, it doesn’t always provide the right content, so we can learn from its framework, and it’s much easier to fill in the content from there. Enter information about the type, title, column name, data, and so on, and ChatGPT will generate the table with one click. You can add columns and rows and do in-table calculations.
According to ChatGPT’s own answer, it’s just an unconscious computer program. It can carry on self-active learning and realize task transfer under the regular instruction. Docs the answer ChatGPT gives you have to be the right answer? For conscious humans, it might be better to pick from all the possible answers.
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Benefits of Green Spaces
We all know the value of taking a walk in the fresh spring weather. It allows your mind to relax and forget about the problems in everyday life. Studies have commonly shown the benefits of being around green spaces, including gardens, urban parks and forests.
But did you know that being in contact with these natural surroundings during childhood could positively impact your mental health as an adult? A study by the Institute for Global Health surveyed 3,600 people from all over Europe.
The all-adult study gave participants a questionnaire (问卷) on how frequently they used natural spaces during childhood — for example, playing in a garden or riding a bike at the park. They were also asked about the importance they put on using such places. Volunteers were then given a psychological test, which included a variety of questionnaires and problem-solving activities, to analyze their nervousness and feelings of depression within a four-week period. The results consistently showed that the people who were more exposed to natural spaces had higher mental health scores compared to those with lower childhood exposure — as did those who attached higher importance to using green spaces. The study’s assistant, Wilma Smith, wrote that the results “show the importance of childhood exposure to natural spaces for the development of a nature-appreciating attitude and a healthy psychological state in adulthood”. She also stressed the importance of “recognizing the implications of growing up in environments with limited opportunities for exposure to nature”.
According to the study, 73 percent of Europe’s population only has limited access to natural spaces. So we call on policymakers to improve the availability of natural spaces for children.
While this study was based in Europe, a lack of green space can affect anyone, anywhere. So remember to make time to expose yourself to nature, as your mental health is just as important as the physical one.
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How to Be a Better Boss
Workplaces have changed dramatically over the past few years. Teams have become more isolated owing to remote work. Technology has brought great benefits but also constant interruptions, from endless Zoom calls to message flows on Slack. With each shift, the job of the manager has become harder. Many report feeling burnt-out, overloaded and confused.
Yet in real life everyone suffers when management is bad and benefits when it is good Research based on a long-running survey of management techniques has found that well-managed firms tend to be more productive, export more and spend more on research and development.
So the prize for better management is big. But how to obtain it? Read enough management books and you might conclude that managers need to change their personality thoroughly, becoming either Machiavelli’s prince or a Marvel superhero. However, study successful managers, and more practical lessons can be drawn.
One is to be clear about a firm’s processes. Managers should make clear the purpose of a team, what a meeting should achieve and who will take a decision. Meeting agendas at GSK, a British drugs firm, clearly say whether an item is for awareness, to gather participants’ input or intended to make a decision. Such clarity means that everyone knows what they are doing, and why.
Management isn’t all about piling up tasks, meetings or processes. A second lesson is that managers can add value by deleting. Sparing workers from pointless meetings, emails and projects frees them to concentrate on the work that fattens the bottom line. At the start of the year, Shopify, an e-commerce firm, deleted 12,000 repeated meetings from its employees’ calendars. The useful ones were eventually added back. But the firm says that meetings are down by 14% since the mass deletion while productivity has gone up by a similar amount.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Ignoring Your Biggest Regrets
Regrets, people often feel, are to be avoided. Mistakes may be unavoidable, but they should be kept to a minimum. And when they do occur, the best course of action is to ignore them as inevitable steps on our journey. That seems logical, at least until you consider that one of the criteria for mental illness is an inability to feel regret. As author Kathryn Schulz argues, “If you want to be fully functional, and fully human, and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live not without regret, but with it.” Counterintuitively, she and other experts argue feeling regret is essential for living your best life. No one is saying, of course, that getting trapped in your past mistakes is a good idea. But neither is a “no regrets and never look back” mentality.
Regret forces us to engage in a reflective analysis to understand why we thought or acted the way we did and makes us try things differently in the future. If you keep telling yourself “no regrets,” then learning isn’t going to happen. Besides, hiding from regret doesn’t make it hurt less. Action does. Action, recent research shows, is the best way to make regret hurt less. So if you’re troubled by your failure to travel when you were young, science suggests you consciously plan an adventurous trip now that you’re older and wiser. Upset about a broken friendship? Act to try to repair it.
Acknowledging our mistakes, rather than ignoring them, reminds us that we are valuable and worthy despite our faults. That sort of acceptance is the basis both of real self-confidence and of true kindness. As Schulz sums up in her talk: “Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly. It reminds us we know we can do better.”
Why Should We Read Literary Classics?
Many have grown up on a healthy diet of literary classics. Some literary classics have been inspiring readers in many ways. In this age of fast-turners, how does investing our time in a timeless literary classic change us for the better?
Many literary classics from yesteryear, which got little or no success when published, are considered invaluable. These books offer a window through which we can experience histories rooted in different cultures. One can always ask, “But we can do so by reading our history books too. Why do we need to read classics?” The simple answer is that these literary classics are not just a retelling of history. They allow us to have a more individualized experience, where they show us other ways to look at history.
It is common knowledge that reading as a habit helps us improve our command of the language. But literary classics have an edge: the enriching writing style is something that sets them apart. Fascinated with the amazing wording and phrasing, we’ll surely pause and wonder about what we read. For instance, when we read Shakespeare, we naturally begin to consider how to better express our ideas just like his far-reaching “Have more than you show; speak less than you know.”
One more benefit is that after reading classics, we won’t see non-classics as just other stories: we’ll become interested in them. Maybe we’ll realize that some details we ignored last time are actually worth appreciating, or we’ll discover literary devices that bring a whole new meaning to the story. Literary classics offer us more perspectives to dig deep and enhance our ability to think and reason, which will inevitably spill over into our reading of other works. We finally fall in love with non-classics as well.
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Call a Physical Therapist
You get up from the sofa and - ow! Back pain takes your breath away. Do you reach for the pain pills? No! Call a physical therapist instead!
More and more, physical therapy, or PT, is a common go-to for treating aches and pains. A physical therapist can treat almost any injury to give a patient a better quality of life. When it comes to treatment, one size does not fit all. A physical therapist personalizes a treatment plan based on their observations and the patient’s concerns. The goal is to help injured or ill people improve movement and manage pain, so they can live life to the fullest. These therapists work with patients who suffer from back or neck injuries. They help people recover from broken bones and surgeries as well as work- or sports-related injuries. Physical therapists also teach people how to stay in shape and prevent further injuries. Their hands-on (动手的) therapy includes strengthening or stretching exercises, ice or heat and more.
No one can become a physical therapist without getting a doctor of physical therapy degree. After completing it, a person must pass a professional license exam before beginning to practice. Further, being a physical therapist can be mentally and physically draining because of the hands-on, personalized patient care required. A successful physical therapist needs to have great communication skills and an eye for detail. They should also be creative problem solvers as well as resourceful.
For those looking for a satisfying career, PT is one to consider. The demand for the profession is growing faster than that of many other careers. Private clinics and hospitals hire physical therapists. Sports facilities and professional sports teams also employ them. Therapists may work in skilled nursing facilities or visit patients in their own homes. If someone wants to see the world, they may want to become a travel physical therapist.
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DJ: Hello. A lot of you have probably just got your A-levels and you’re looking forward to going to university. But more and more young people are deciding to take a gap year before they start their degrees. Today I’m talking to a group of young people who’ve all decided to take a year out before they go to university. What are they going to do? Rosie? What are your plans?
Rosie: I’m going to work in a department store.
DJ: Why do you want to do that?
Rosie: Two reasons really. I’m going to study Management at university and this will give me the chance to find out what it’s like to work in a big organization. And I’ll also be able to earn some money.
DJ: What about you, Christopher?
Christopher: I’m going to do community work with a conservation group. I think it’ll be good to do something really useful. And I’ll meet a lot of interesting people, I’m sure.
DJ: Will you get paid for it?
Christopher: Well, we won’t get rich doing it, but we’ll be all right. We’ll get about £20 a week plus food and accommodation.
DJ: Helen, what are you going to do?
Helen: I’m going to travel around Europe.
DJ: Are you going to work there?
Helen: I hope so, or I’ll have to come home again. I might try and get a job—you know—in a hotel or something like that.
DJ: Why do you want to do it?
Helen: Well, mainly because it’ll be a change. After all, I’ve been at school for 13 years. I just want to do something different. It’ll give me new experiences and I’ll need to be more independent.
Note: A-levels英国普通中等教育证书考试高级水平课程, 也是英国学生的大学入学考试。
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