5 . It was a reading class. While all her classmates were flying through the 2nd and 3rd books in the Harry Potter series, Skye Malik, only on page four of the first book, got impossibly stuck on the word “doughnut”.

Her unexpected difficulty with reading is called dyslexia. Skye got a professional diagnosis at the end of the 2nd grade. Knowing that other kids were going through the same thing made it easier on her somehow. What wasn’t easy, even after all the help she got from special tutors and reading programs, was fluent reading. What many people do without thinking—reading—she had to struggle with word by word, sometimes letter by letter. In class, she would hear the other kids flip through the pages on assignments and go on to the questions while she was still doing battle with the first paragraph.

She was as frustrated as she was discouraged. But she didn’t know of any other way until her 4th grade teacher, Miss Pollock, told her about something called Learning Ally.

Learning Ally is a non-profit organization that offers audio versions of books. A crew of volunteer readers has recorded 75,000 classic novels, children’s books, and school textbooks that help more than 300,000 students and adults with learning differences or who are blind. Now Skye could listen to the books with her ears and follow the words with her eyes on the page. Instead of having her mother read her textbooks to her, she could independently do her work. “With Learning Ally, I feel confident and capable and can easily keep up with my classmates,” Skye explains, “and I want other kids to feel empowered, just the way I did.”

So Skye, now aged 16, created The Paco Project which was named after her grandfather whose nickname was “Paco”. The Paco Project is a fundraiser and educational initiative focusing on giving students with dyslexia access to the same Learning Ally technology that changed her life.

Skye has realized that she is one of the lucky kids who have been diagnosed. She knows that educating teachers about dyslexia and giving students with the learning challenge the tools they need is a great first step in meeting dyslexia head on, and helping them be confident, capable students.

“Right now they feel stuck — ashamed, unsure and insecure about their school work. If I could help stop these students feeling this way, that would mean the world to me.”

6 . Video chat is now the go-to outlet for many social distancers longing for social interaction. But having a successful fete isn't only a question of hopping on camera with friends and kicking off. Social grace is a big part of a successful virtual party — and etiquette doesn't go out the door just because you're in your pajamas in front of a camera.

Introduce everyone to the group

Gone are the days during which you can introduce yourself to new people at your leisure. Instead, the second you click 'Join Meeting', you're pushed in front of potentially dozens of faces staring straight at you.

This is particularly problematic if not everyone on the call knows each other — Zoom itself recommends short ice-breaking sessions for everyone to introduce themselves on meetings.

"I like to use the wait room," says Tamiko Zablith, founder of Minding Manners International. "For security reasons, it means outsiders don't come crashing into your meeting. But also, you can let people come in one at a time, and then you can take that time to introduce them to the group as well."

Learn the art of the pause

Another wildly confusing thing about Zoom parties: everyone has to talk one at a time. There's no chance for small groups to organically form, for joking talk to fill a room, or for guests to talk at the same time. The whole group, no matter how large, can only listen to one person at a time.

That's why putting pauses in your speech is critical, especially since low internet speeds or weird audio may mean it's easy for someone to talk over someone else, drowning out what they have to say to the group.

"If the internet is a bit unreliable, you have those unstable signals. If I keep rambling, and the other person starts, there's that delay," says Zablith. "Work those pauses into your conversation."

Know when to change backgrounds

Using Zoom's backgrounds can actually be a courtesy to eliminate distractions behind you.

Hiding those dirty dishes or pizza boxes, or obscuring other members of the household coming and going, eliminates distractions and makes the other people feel like they're getting your full attention.

"Wouldn't it be better if that distraction just wasn't there?" Zablith says, pointing to the advantage of virtual backgrounds being able to hide anything unsightly behind you. For others, virtual backgrounds also provide a sense of comfort or normalcy to the audience.

7 . What do we mean by responsibility? To put it simply, it is a duty to consider the consequences of our actions. In other words, we have a duty to control our behaviour.

When we are children, we have few responsibilities. Our parents look after us and we generally don’t have to worry about food or shelter. As we grow up, we gradually need to be responsible for more and more things. We learn how to run our own baths, make our own decisions, and realize that we have moral duties. As adults, we are responsible for all aspects of our lives. If there are any problems, we have to handle them ourselves.

We also have responsibilities that go beyond ourselves. Parents have the responsibility to look after their children, ensuring that they have a stable upbringing. Beyond the family, people have a responsibility towards the community as a whole. It is in fact up to us as a society to make this world a safe and pleasant place for everyone.

When we fail in our responsibilities, the consequences are most serious. Teenagers who abandon their studies might ruin their own lives. It is even more horrible to hear about parents who, by not caring for their own children properly, are putting them in danger. Likewise, by not following the traffic rules, careless drivers kill more than a million people around the world every year. Certain professions in our society, such as police officers, exist to protect the public, and the people who do these jobs often risk their own lives in order to do their duty. However, their efforts depend on the support of ordinary people. If we ignore our own responsibilities, society will become dangerous. On a global level, our entire human civilization may be heading towards disaster unless we work together to save our environment.

Furthermore, whether we are shouldering heavy responsibilities, like doctors or lots, or simply taking responsibility for our own learning as students, we will always be judged on how well we perform our duties. For this reason, the hardest part of acting responsibly is admitting that we failed or that we made a mistake. Let’s say you visit your friend’s house and accidentally damage an expensive teapot while your friend is in another room. The honest thing to do is of course to admit your fault and apologize. Because this requires courage, some people take another route: they pretend that nothing happened. Perhaps a broken teapot might not be such a big deal, but in any given situation, we can choose to act responsibly, and it is somewhat through this choice that we decide what our lives are going to be like.

To summarize, responsibilities are an essential part of life since our actions have consequences. Responsibilities aren’t fun, but we can make the burden lighter by sharing them. If everyone considered how their actions would affect themselves and other people, the world would be a better place.

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8 . When I was small, my mother and I would walk to our local library in Franklin Square. As we didn’t always have access to a reliable car, walking hand in hand was the most convenient way to get anywhere. It was at story time for children that both my mother and I made lasting friendships.

Today, I am fortunate to live around the corner from the Cold Coast Public Library in Glen Head and a short walk to the Sea Cliff Children’s Library. My 8-month-old son, Colin, and I find ourselves in Sea Cliff several times a week, meeting and making friends. Well, that is what many people don’t understand—a library is more than books; it’s a community.

Sure, the library in Franklin Square was the place where I was introduced to Judy Blume novels. But it was also the place where I got my first email address in 1997. At the library, friends and I learned how to research colleges and search for scholarships on the Internet. The library was the place where we sometimes giggled (咯咯笑) too loudly, and where the librarians knew us by name. Their knowing our names wasn’t a bad thing. When I came home from my first term at Binghamton University, Mary LaRosa, the librarian at the Franklin Square library, offered me my first teaching job.

I now teach reading at Nassau Community College. My students are often amazed that they can check out books via their smartphones and virtually (虚拟地) visit a variety of Long Island libraries. The app used by Nassau and Suffolk county public libraries, as well as the college library, makes their homework easier by helping them find resources. Even though they can’t always easily visit their local libraries, the library is always with them.

9 . The old romantic saying is a cute one, but according to recent studies, opposites don't necessarily attract.

Research shows that people tend to seek out relationships with—and eventually marry — partners who have similar defining characteristics, such as age, political orientation, religion, education, and income.

“ Generally speaking, when we think about opposites attracting or not, we're thinking in terms of personality rather than these big key factors," says Vinita Mehta, a clinical psychologist and writer based in Washington, D. C.

One big factor as to why this may be is simply your stage of life: where you live, what lifestyle you have, and what kind of people you're exposed to.

“ If you’re on a college campus, by and large，you’re going to find people who are in your age group,'' Mehta says. "You're going to find people who at least eventually become part of the same general income strata. ”

Researchers from the University of Kansas made a courageous claim. A study released earlier this year analyzed real-world relationships and asked couples (romantic partners, friends, and acquaintances) about attitudes, behaviors, values, prejudices, and personality characteristics that were important to them. The pairs that had closer and more intimate relationships were not necessarily more similar than newly formed pairs, and people shared similarities on almost every personal issue that was measured.

The lead psychologists on this study believe this doesn't happen by chance ； it's so common and widespread that seeking out like-minded people may be our psychological default when we make new friends or romantic partners. We certainly get the most out of these relationships. They make us more comfortable and trusting of the other person, and that makes it easier to cooperate and achieve goals.

As far personalities go, connecting on major characteristics, like levels of neuroticism (神经质)and conscientiousness, generally lead to happier couples. But that doesn't mean you and your significant other need to agree on everything. Having different habits——fewer defining parts of your personality, like your favorite sport or foods---can introduce you to new activities and ways of thinking, which can make you a more well-rounded person.

10 . There is certainly evidence that actors experience a blending of their real self with their assumed characters. For instance, Benedict Cumberbatch said, “My mum says I'm much more impatient with her when I'm filming Sherlock.”

Mark Seton, a researcher at the University of Sydney, has even coined the term “post-dramatic stress disorder” to describe the lasting effects experienced by actors who lose themselves in a role. “Actors may often prolong habits of the characters they have embodied,” he writes.

A recent finding doesn't involve acting, and it indicates that merely spending some time thinking about another person seemed to rub off on the volunteers’ sense of self led by Meghan Meyer at Princeton University. Across several studies, these researchers asked volunteers to first rate their own personalities, memories or physical attributes, and then to perform the same task from the perspective of another person. For instance, they might score the emotionality of various personal memories, and then rate how a friend or relative would have experienced those same events.

After taking the perspective of another, the volunteers scored themselves once again: the consistent finding was that their self-knowledge was now changed—their self-scores had shifted to become more similar to those they'd given for someone else. For instance, if they had initially said the trait term “confident” was only moderately related to themselves and then rated the term as being strongly related to a friend's personality, when they came to rescore themselves, they now tended to see themselves as more confident. Remarkably, this morphing of the self with another was still apparent even if a 24-hour gap was left between taking someone else's perspective and re-rating oneself.

“By simply thinking about another person, we may adapt our self to take the shape of that person” said Meyer and her colleagues. That our sense of self should have this quality might be a little discouraging, especially for anyone who has struggled to establish a firm sense of identity. Yet there is an optimistic message here, too. The challenge of improving ourselves—or at least seeing ourselves in a more positive light—might be a little easier than we thought. By roleplaying or acting out the kind of person we would like to become, or merely by thinking about and spending time with people who embody the kind of attributes we would like to see in ourselves, we can find that our sense of self changes in desirable ways.

“As each of us chooses who to befriend, who to model, and who to ignore” write Meyer and her colleagues, “we must make these decisions aware of how they shape not only the fabric of our social networks, but even our sense of who we are.”