The Student Essay Competition of Yorkshire

We are thrilled to announce the beginning of our annual student essay competition. This competition provides a fantastic opportunity for all of you to showcase your writing skills, express your creativity and win exciting prizes.

The theme for this year’s competition is “The Power of Education“. We want to hear your thoughts on how education has the power to make a difference to the world, transform lives, and create a better future for all. All high school students from Yorkshire can participate in the competition.

Essay Guidelines:

*The essay should be written in English.

*The word count should be between 500 and 1, 000.

*The essay should be different from anything that has existed before and not be previously published.

*Proper citation and referencing are required for any external sources used.

*Plagiarism (抄袭) will result in disqualification.

Submission Details:

Please submit your essays via email to YKSEC@yahoo.com by 8th next month. The subject line of the email should read:“Student Essay Competition+your name”

Prizes:

We have exciting prizes lined up for the winners of this competition. The top ten winners will receive a trip to London. Additionally, the winning essays will be featured on our website and social media platforms, giving you a chance to showcase your work to a wider audience.

Amy Jandrisevits knows the value of a good doll. “Dolls have a power we don’t completely understand,” she says. It’s a conclusion she came to while working as a pediatric oncology (儿科肿瘤) social worker using dolls to help her young patients adapt to their changing medical situations. Many of the kids saw themselves in those good dolls, but for the kids who had lost their legs or hair, there were none they could relate to.

So, eight years ago, when a friend said that her child was disabled, Jandrisevits knew what might help the youth through the challenging period. “It’s hard to tell a kid, ‘You are perfect the way you are’, and it is important to build the kids’ self-confidence,” she says.

Jandrisevits went about changing that. She made a doll by hand, which looked like her friend’s child and sent it off. After the friend posted a photo of the happy child and doll on-line, another woman asked Jandrisevits to make a doll that looked like her baby, who had lost a leg.

Word spread, and soon Jandrisevits made dolls for children with different physical defects (缺陷) — in short, dolls that looked like them. She quit her job and started a nonprofit, A Doll Like Me. Working out of her home in Milwaukee, based on photos sent by kids’ parents or caregivers, Jandrisevits takes about seven hours to make each doll. A GoFundMe page helps her make up for costs and allows her to donate her services. She hasn’t charged for a doll since she began her nonprofit.

In all, she has made more than 400 dolls. The waiting list is long, but Jandrisevits is undefeated. As she explains on her GoFundMe page, “Every kid, regardless of age or body type, should look into the sweet face of a doll and see their own.”

“Long time no see.” is a very interesting sentence. When I first read this sentence from an American friend’s e-mail, I laughed. I thought it was a perfect example of Chinglish.

Obviously, it is a word-by-word literal translation (直译) of the Chinese greeting with wrong English grammar! Later on, my friend told me that it is a standard American greeting. I was too surprised to believe her. Her words were unbelievable at all. So I did research on Google.com. To my surprise, there are over 60 thousand web pages containing “Long time no see.” Though it is sort of informal, it is part of the language that Americans use daily. Interestingly, if you type this phrase in Microsoft Word, the software will tell you that the grammar needs to be corrected.

Nobody knows the origin of this Chinglish sentence. Some people believe that it came from Charlie Chan’s movies. In the 1930s, Hollywood moviemakers successfully created a worldwide famous Chinese detective named “Charlie Chan” on wide screens. Detective Chan liked to teach Americans some Chinese wisdom by quoting Confucius. “Long time no see.” was his symbol. Soon after Charlie Chan, “Long time no see.” became a popular expression in America thanks to the popularity of these movies.

Some scholars compare America to a huge melting pot. All kinds of cultures are mixed in the pot together and they change the color and taste of each other. Language is usually the first thing to be influenced in the mixed pot.

You can have some examples from other countries, such as pizza from Italian, sushi from Japanese, and déjà vu from French etc. There is a long list! Since Americans admire Chinese culture more and more nowadays, I believe more Chinese words will become American English in the future. In this way, the American’s melting pot keeps adding richness.

Children should do housework. That’s a controversial (有争议的) idea, though not everyone will admit it. A few parents will say that their children are too busy for housework. Many more of us assign (分派) housework, or say we believe in them, but the housework just doesn’t get done.

That’s a problem. For starters, housework is good for kids. Being a part of the routine work of running a household helps children develop an awareness of the needs of others, while at the same time contributing to their emotional well-being.

One small study, done over a period of 25 years, found that the best predictor (预测) for young adults’ success in their mid-20s was whether they participated in household tasks at age 3 or 4. Those early shared responsibilities extended to a sense of responsibility in other areas of their lives.

But for all that their help matters, few kids are doing much around the house at all. In a survey of 1,000 American adults, 75 percent said they believed regular housework made kids “more responsible”. Yet while 82 percent reported having had regular housework growing up, only 56 percent of those with children said they required them to do housework.

Sports and homework are not get-out-of-housework-free cards. The goal, after all, is to raise adults who can balance a caring role in their families and communities with whatever lifetime achievement goals they choose. Housework teaches that balance.

What should you do when getting children to do housework? Accept no excuses. Don’t worry if you must repeat yourself again and again. If you’re spending more time getting the child to do this job than it would take to do it yourself, then you’re doing it right. Can a payment help? Maybe. But if you’re trying to teach kids to share the responsibility of a home, paying them for routine housework is not the right message.

How to Turn Your Goals into Habits

First we make our habits, then our habits make us. It’s such a simple concept, yet it’s something we don’t always do.

I believe that having ONE goal to focus on is much more powerful than having many goals. By putting the belief into practice, I have achieved a lot of personal goals over time.     16     My answer takes a little explaining. I try to turn my goals into habits, and in doing so, I put my goals on autopilot. Turning a goal into a habit means really focusing on it for at least a month. The more you can focus, the more it’ll be on autopilot.     17     You’ll still do it, but you only have to use minimal force to maintain it, and you can focus on your next goal or habit.

Take my marathon goal as an example. I was just starting running and had the brilliant idea to run a marathon within a year. So that was my goal.     18     First, I had to make running a daily habit. Second, I had to report to people in order to have accountability (负责) so that I could not quit easily. I focused on the daily running habit for about a month, and didn’t have any other goals or habits. When the running habit stuck, I started reporting to people I knew and blogging about my running every day.

    19     I could focus on new goals without having to worry about the marathon. I still had to do the running, of course, but it didn’t require constant focus.     20     I was able to achieve this because, all year long, I had daily running and accountability habits. I put my marathon goal into autopilot, so instead of struggling with it daily for an entire year, I focused on it for one month and was able to accomplish it while focusing on new habits and goals.

Yours,

Li Hua