中考英语作文背诵范文(精彩20篇)

一、学科

1. My favorite subject is English。

2. More than three quarters of the information on the Internet is in English。

3. It is used by travelers and business people all over the world。

4. China has joined the WTO and the Olympic Games will be held in China. English becomes more and more useful。

5. So English is very important and I like English very much。

6. We have a lot of fun in the English class。

7. Our English teacher often makes us happy in the English class。

8. I hope I can go abroad one day, and then I can speak to foreigners in English。

9. I like English and try my best to learn it。

二、环保

1. Its our duty to protect our environment。

2. It is very important to take care of our environment

3. We should not throw litter onto the ground

4. We should not spit in a public place/ cut down the trees

5. We should plant more flowers and trees。

6. We must pick up some rubbish and throw it into a dustbin

7. If everyone makes contribution to protecting the environment, the world will become much more beautiful。

三、旅游

1. Last Sunday(Saturday,…) ,it was sunny(rainy, windy, foggy,)

2. I got up very early (late). After breakfast I went to …with my friends by bike, bus，…

3. We enjoyed ourselves。

4. We forgot the time. We didnt come back until 5 oclock。

5. We all felt very tired, but we were happy。

6. I thought I would never forget this trip。

7. Last summer, my parents and I went to Beijing for our holidays。

8. We visited a lot of places of interest。

9. We had a good time there。

10. We bought a lot of things. The clothes here are good and cheap。

四、比赛

1. Last Sunday, Class One had a football match with Class Two。

2. All of us went to watch it。

3. The match was very exciting。

4. In fact, I have never seen such an exciting match before。

5. The score was 5-3. Our team scored three goals in the last fifteen minutes。

6. Class One won this match. Class Two lost。

7. Class One played well. They deserved to win。

8. Their PE teacher was very pleased with their performance。

五、健康

1. It is very important to keep healthy。

2. How can we keep healthy?

3. We cant go to sleep too late. We cant get up too late。

4. We should eat the food healthily。

5. We should do more exercise。

6. Last Tuesday I got a cold and had a pain in my head。

7. I didnt feel like eating anything。

8. I decided to see the doctor。

9. In the doctors office, the doctor looks over me carefully。

10. He said :"Nothing serious." And he told me to take a rest and drink more water。

11. A nurse gave me an injection. It was a little painful。

12. The doctor asked me to take the medicine three time

13. A few days later, I felt better. From then on I believe that keeping healthy is the most important thing in the world。

六、节日

1. In China the most important holiday is the Spring Festival。

2. It comes in January or February。

3. On the Spring Festival Eve people have a big dinner. They have a lot of nice food to eat。

4. During the Spring Festival people have a lot of interesting things to do。

5. People visit their relatives and friends。

6. They greet each other with a hug and say, "Happy New Year"。

7. As China is a big country, people in different places celebrate this holiday in different ways。

七、写人

1. His name is Jack。

2. He was born in London in 1982。

3. He is 1.68 meters tall and weighs 52 kilos。

4. He is 20 years old。

5. He comes from England。

6. He is a good ping-pong player。

7. He is medium build。

8. He has short hair。

9. He is outgoing. Every one likes to talk with him. He gets on well with us。

10. He teaches English very well。

11. He works very hard. He works in No.5 Middle School。

12. He loves watching football games after work。

13. He often helps me with my English。

14. At the age of six, he began to play table tennis。

八、生活

1. Jim got up very early。

2. Jim cleaned the room and do the housework。

3. Jim went to shop and did some shopping。

4. Jim did some cooking。

5. Jim fed the cat。

6. Jim sweeps the floor。

7. He washes the dishes。

8. It is a busy day. He is very tired. But he feels happy。

体育运动是在人类发展过程中逐步开展起来的有意识地对自己身体素质的培养的各种活动。下面是关于体育运动的英语作文范文，希望对你写作有帮助。

英语作文一

Recently, more and more people stay at home watching TV and surfing the Internet, which leads to obesity and even get serious illness.

最近，越来越多的人呆在家里看电视、上网，所以导致肥胖甚至更严重的疾病。

This is no doubt that sport is good for our health. A person who takes exercises regularly will keep fit. What’s more, exercise can make you well-behaved and confident. If you usually take exercise with your friends, you will be close to them. After all, sports can make your life more colorful.

毫无疑问，运动对我们的健康有好处。人经常运动可以保持身体健康。更重要的是，运动可以使你表现得自信。如果你经常和你的朋友锻炼，你们之间的关系会更加紧密。毕竟，运动可以使你的生活更加丰富多彩。

Nothing is more important than doing sports. Its time to take actions to stay away from the TV and computer and to take part in sport activities.

没有什么比运动更重要。是时候采取行动远离电视，电脑和参加体育活动了。

英语作文二

All over the world millions of people take part in different kinds of sports. Sports are perhaps the most popular form of relaxation that almost all can enjoy.

Some people seem to think that sports and games are unimportant things that people do at times when they are not working. But in fact sports and games can be of great value, especially to people who work with their brains most of the day. They should not be treated only as ammusements.

Sports and games build our bodies, prevent us from getting too fat, and keep us healthy. They also give us valuable practice in helping the eyes, brain and muscles to work together. In table tennis, the eyes see the ball coming, judge its speed and direction, and pass the information on to the brain. The brain has to decide what to do and sends its orders to the muscles of the arms legs and so on, so that the bah is met and hit back where the player wants it to do. All this must happen with very great speed, and only those who have had a lot of practice can do this successfully.

Sports and games are also very useful for character-training. In their lessons, boys and girls may learn about such virrues as unselfishness courage disciple and love of ones country, but what is learned in books can not have the same deep effect on a childs character as what is learned through practice. Most of students time is spent in classes, studying lessons. So what the students do in their spare time is of great importance. If each of them learns to go all out for his team and not for himself on the sports field, he will later find it natural to work for the good of society, for the good of his country.

参考翻译

世界上有许多的人参加不同种类的体育运动。体育运动可能是几乎所有的人都可享受的最大众化的娱乐形式。

有些人似乎认为体育运动不是什么重要的事情，只是人们在不干活的时候才去做的。但实际上，体育运动对人们益处很大。特别是对那些一整天从事脑力劳动的人来说，更是这样。不能把它们单纯看成是娱乐。

体育运动能增强我们的体质，防止发胖，保持身体健康。他们还在使眼睛、头脑和肌肉协同动作方面提供宝贵的锻炼机会。打乒乓球时，眼睛看到球打过来，要判断速度和方向，再把这个信息传到大脑，这时大脑得决定怎么办，并给胳臂、腿等部位的肌肉发出命令，以便接到球，并把球打回到打球人要它到的地方。所有这一切的反应都要非常迅速。只有那些打乒乓球训练有素的人，才能成功地做到。

体育运动还有利于品格的培养。孩子们在课堂上可能学到关于无私、勇敢、守纪律和爱国等品德。但是日本上学的东西对孩子品格的影响不可能和亲身体验中学来的东西影响一样深刻。学生大部分在校时间都用在上课。因此，学生的课余时间的活动至关重要。如果每个人在运动场上认识到是为自己的球队而不是为个人而拼搏，日后他就会感到，为社会利益，为国家利益而工作是理所当然的。

Everyone has a dream, everyone dreams of each has its own characteristics.

My dream is to become a singer. Astronauts ya-ping wangs dream is when astronauts, soaring in the sky, after a test, 1 on 1 June 2013 live at 38 points, 5 ya-ping wang realized their dream. Dream is all the motivation, if did not have the power, then you will always be stepped in situ, power will let you constantly burning inner small universe, you want a perennial desire for a better life. Dream, can let you are not afraid of wind and rain, l fearless risk, keep moving forward.

Dancers Liao Zhi lost her legs in an earthquake, also lost daughter, hospitalized for 4 months, finally can was released from the hospital, but she must take prosthesis, thought it wont pain again, but she never thought with prosthesis is how much pain. Back to the home, want to go to the Wc, and calling to dad, mom, called for a long long time no one her. She remembered that mom and dad might not be home, so, she endured the pain with the prosthesis to the toilet. Just walked into a toilet and a load into the toilet, the hair is wet, look in the mirror before their mess, she decided to practice, have not yet learned to walk just learn to dance, in order to dream hard practice for six, seven years.

This reminds me of the dishes during the summer vacation, didnt stick to quit a few days. Will insist on a dream, the realization of the dream is not, make track for to dream on the road requires effort and sweat, and tears. In to abandon, do not give up. Vocabulary, dream, how beautiful dream, only constant efforts, constantly insist, to be courageous ya-ping wang, Liao Zhi insisted.

每个人都有一个梦想，每个人的梦想都各有特色。

我的梦想是当一名歌唱家。宇航员王亚平的梦想是当上宇航员，在天空中翱翔，经过一番的考验，就在2013年6月1住1日5时38分，王亚平实现了自己的梦想。梦想就是一切前进的动力，如果没有了动力，那你将永远的踏步走在原地，动力会让你不断的燃烧内心的小宇宙，激发你对美好生活向往生生不息的渴望。梦想，会让你不惧风雨l，无畏风险，不断前进。

舞蹈家廖智在一次地震中失去双腿，也失去了女儿，住了4个月的医院，总算可以出院了，但她必须带假肢，本以为不会再痛苦了，但她万万没有想到带假肢是有多么痛苦。回到了家，想上Wc，便叫爸爸，妈妈，叫了很长很长时间都没有人理她。她才想起爸爸妈妈可能不在家，于是，她忍着痛苦带着假肢走向了厕所。刚走进厕所便一头载进了马桶，头发也湿了，看着镜子前狼狈的自己，她便下定决心苦练，还没有学会走路就学会跳舞，为了梦想苦苦练习了六，七年。

这让我想起了在暑假里洗碗，没坚持几天就放弃了。有梦就要坚持，梦想的实现并非一朝一夕，追来梦想的道路上需要付出努力和汗水，甚至泪水。在抛弃，不放弃。梦想，是多么美好的词汇，梦想，只有不断的努力，不断地坚持，才能拥有王亚平的勇敢，廖智的坚持。

When someone asks me: What is your Chinese dream? I will answer it without any hesitation: to be a good doctor. The reason why I want to be a doctor is that I want to save people’s lives as possible as I can. When I was young, I had a terrible car accident. Thanks to the doctors, they brought me back to life. From then on, to be a good doctor has always been an inspiration to me. I will study hard to make sure that my dream will come true in the future.

Chinese dream is made up of every ordinary people’s dreams. We should do our best to make our dream come true.

当有人问我:你的中国梦是什么?我将毫不犹豫地回答:是一个好医生。我想成为一名医生的原因是,我想要尽可能的挽救人们的生命。当我年轻的时候,我有一个可怕的车祸。多亏了医生,他们把我带回生活。从那时起,成为一个好医生一直是我的灵感。我将努力学习,以确保在未来我的梦想成真。

中国梦是由每一个普通人的梦想。我们应该尽力使我们的梦想成真。

中招考试即将到来，许多学生感到压力很大，为此很烦恼。你校的校刊特意进行了课后放松方式的调查。请你以”Learn to relax yourself “为题写一篇80词左右的短文。要点提示：

1)学生压力大及其表现

2)学会放松很重要

3)常见的放松方式

4)最适合的自我放松方式

5)我的建议

Learn to relax yourself

Now many students of Grade 9 are under too much pressure. They always feel too tired to listen to the teachers carefully in class.

It’s important for students to relax. Only in this way can they study well and be healthy. Here are some different ways to relax themselves. For example, they can try to have enough sleep,or they can listen to their favourite music after class. They can also read some books or do some sports. For me, I often hang out with my friends.

While you are studying, don’t forget to relax. You will study better after a good rest.

参考译文

学会放松自己

现在许多9年级的学生压力太大。上课时他们总是觉得太累了以至于不能认真听老师讲课。

对学生来说放松是很重要的。只有这样他们才能学习健康。这里有一些不同的方法来放松自己。例如，他们可以尝试有足够的睡眠，或者他们可以听他们喜欢的音乐课后。他们也可以读一些书或做一些运动。对我来说，我经常和朋友们出去玩。

当你在学习的时候，不要忘记放松。好好休息后你会学得更好。

Today, I want to introduce to you my hometown--particularly coastal. Of course, my hometown because east is sea, is a yellow sea, so just named coastal.

My hometown is in jiangsu province on the north side of yancheng city, although home is poor and backward, and television often see cities are not comparable, also do not have high mountain, not famous scenic spot, but my home have I close-knit family.

My hometown is the vast expanse of the plain, not famous mountains, no treasures and the people are very honest, kind-hearted, and we heard that this area is the sea of alluvial out a relationship, because the land is out of the sand deposition, no earthquakes, floods, not happened are expressed notebook farmers, hard-working simplicity of virtue continue from generation to generation. However, our hometown some local products still amazing, if you heard of zhang guo3 lao3 after eating, the magic of the immortal multiflower knotweed, and legend of the ancient emperor seal was the mosquito qingshui river,

My hometown, people good, well, the future is better, I must be in the introduction of the Internet to see home, home next to the north of China Eurasian continental bridge to head east-edge cloud port, the south is natural wetland scenic spot--MI deer and red-crowned cranes hometown, the distance from the international metropolis Shanghai also but three hours of journey home town, developing the natural harbor-binhai port, a coastal highway after, are building new airport, the train way will give my hometown come again limitless vitality, I have determined to be good friends with good study, with my wisdom and hands build our beautiful home, my hometown coastal must be more beautiful tomorrow.

今天，我要向大家特别介绍我的家乡——滨海。当然，我的家乡因为东边是海，是出了名的黄海，所以才取名滨海。

我的家乡在江苏省靠北边的盐城市，虽然家乡还是比较贫穷落后，和电视里经常见到的大城市不能相提并论，也没有高山，没有出名的风景区，但我的家乡有我最亲近的亲人。

我的家乡是一望无际的平原，没有名山大川，没有奇珍异宝，人们都很诚实善良，听说和我们这一带是海冲积出来的有关系，因为土地是沙子淤积出来的，没有发生过地震，没有发生过洪水，人也都是本本分分的农民，勤劳简朴的美德世代相传。不过，我们家乡有的土特产还是很神奇的，如果你听说过张果老吃后就成仙的神奇的何首乌，还有传说古代皇帝封的不生蚊子的清水河。

我的家乡，人好，地好，将来一定更好，我在网上看到家乡的介绍，家乡北边紧挨着中国的欧亚大陆桥东头——边云港，南边是天然湿地风景区——MI鹿和丹顶鹤的家乡，距离国际大都市上海也不过3个小时的路程，家乡有正在开发的天然良港——滨海港，有沿海高速公路经过，正在兴建的飞机场、火车道都会给我的家乡再来无限的生机，我立志要好好学习，用我的智慧和双手建设我们美好的家园，我的家乡滨海明天一定更美好。

中考英语作文1：my friend

Han Mei is my best friend. We know each other since we were born. Because we are twins. She is my elder sisiter. Like most twin sisters, we look almost the same. The most easy way to to distinguish us is that she has a scar on her arm. It is my fault. When we are six years old, we played beside the stair, and then I pushed her down the stair accidently. She got hurt but not blame me at all. That is the history of her scar. Since then our parents always recognize us with that mark. Han Mei is better than me in study. So, sometimes I was criticized by our mother for failing the exam, she will pretend me to receive the criticism, without making my mother see the mark. I’ m so thankful for this. So sometimes I will pretend her to take part in the piano class, as she is not interested in it. It is so interesting to play such game.

中考英语作文2：my friend

My good friend is Mei. She’s a girl. She is my classmate.

Mei is tall and thin. She has two big eyes and long hair. She likes listening to music and reading books. Sometimes we listen to music together. She likes summer. Because she can swim in the summer holiday. She likes pink and white. She is in Class Four, Grade Six with me. She usually goes to school by motor cycle. Sometimes she goes to school on foot. We often go shopping together on the weekend.

We will be good friends forever.

中考英语作文3：my friend

My best friend is --- He is 15 years old. We are both in the same class. He works very hard. He is never late for school and he does well in all his lessons. He is always ready to help others. My math is very poor, so he often helps me with my math after class. His parents are both teachers. They are very busy, so he often helps do the housework at home. He is a little shorter than me but he is very strong. He likes playing football very much at school. We often play football together and he plays it pretty well . He gets on well with us . Everyone in our class likes him .

题目：请以“saving water”为题，并根据以下提示写一篇不少于60单词的作文。

saving water

1 what do we use water for?

2 why water is very important in our daily life?

3 how do we save water?

参考范文

as we all know, water is essential in our daily life. we drink water every day, we use water to wash things and cook food, we also use water to make machines. people cant live without water.

我们都知道水对于日常生活的重要性。我们每天喝水，用水洗东西和烹制食物，我们还用水来制造机器。离开水，人类就无法存活。

though about 75% of the earth is covered with water, only 3% of it is fresh water. so we must save water by having a shower instead of a bath. we can save water by fixing dripping taps immediately and we can also save water by not washing under a running tap.

虽然地球75%都被水覆盖，但其中只有3%是淡水。所以我们应该用淋浴代替泡澡来节约水，同时及时修好滴水的水龙头，并且不要开着水龙头洗东西。

[适用话题]“财富”“我有一个梦”“慈善”“奉献”等。

Money Everything?(金钱就是一切吗?)

At present some people think that money is everything. They say that you can do everything if you have money. You can live in a beautiful house, keep a luxurious ear and have all sorts of delicious food.

I dont think so. Indeed, money can buy a lot of things we need. But there are many, many wonderful things in the world that cannot be bough/; with money.

For example, knowledge cannot be bought with money. One cannot be rich in knowledge unless he studies hard. Time cannot be bought with money, either. Who can buy even a second with money?

There are still many other things that cannot be bought with money: health,life, happiness,friendship, love and so on. Just think, if a person hasnt these things at all, is the money still useful?

Now, do you think money is everything?

金钱就是一切吗?

近来，有些人认为钱就是一切，他们说，要是有了钱，你就可以做任何事情，你可以住舒适的房子，坐豪华的轿车，吃可口的饭菜，

我不这么认为。的确，钱可以买到我们需要的许多东西，但是，世界上还有许多美丽的东西用钱是买不到的。

例如，知识是买不来的，一个人要想获得丰富的知识，只有通过艰苦的学习。时间用钱也是

08年浙江义乌中考英语作文范文：义乌作为一个国际商贸名城，吸引了越来越多的国内外游客来旅游购物。因此，建设一个绿色，文明的义乌显得尤为重要。请你以为题，写一篇短文。

参考词汇：environment duty,rubbish,plstic,pollution,plant

要求：（1）语句通顺，语意连贯，书写认真 （1）词数809左右。文章开头已给出，不计入词数

（3）可适当发挥（文中不能出现真实的人名和姓名）

As we know,Yiwu is an international city.________________________________________________________

参考中考英语作文范文：

How to build a greener city

As we know,Yiwu is an international city. It attracts more and more people to come and do business.So its our duty to build a beautiful green city. As students,we shouldnt throw rubbish anywhere on the ground or use too many plastic bags. Ask the factories not to put waste water into the river and wed better not go to school by car so that we can reduce the air pollution. Whats more, we should plant more trees and flowers to make our city greener. Lets work hard for our city tohave a good environment.

如何建立一个更绿色的城市我们知道，义乌是一个国际城市。它吸引更多的人来这里做生意。所以建立一个美丽的绿色城市，我们的责任。作为学生，我们不应该把垃圾扔在地上的任何地方或使用太多的塑料袋。要求工厂不要把废水排入河中，我们最好不要坐汽车去学校，我们可以减少空气污染。更重要的是，我们应该种更多的树和花来绿化我们的城市。让我们努力工作，为我们的城市有一个良好的环境。

下面的材料旨在丰富学生在是非问题写作方面的思想和语言，考生在复习时可以先分类阅读这些篇章，然后尝试写相关方面的作文题。

对于素材中用黑体字的部分，特别建议你熟读，背诵，因为它们在语言和观点上都值得吸收。学习语言的人应该明白，表达能力和思想深度都靠日积月累，潜移默化。从某种意义上说，提高英语写作能力无捷径可走，你必须大段背诵英语文章才能逐渐形成语感和用英语进行表达的能力。这一关，没有任何人能代替你过。

因此，建议你下点苦功夫，把背单词的精神拿出来背诵文章。何况，并不是要求你背了之后永远牢记在心：你可以这个星期背，下个星期忘。这没有关系，相信你的大脑具有神奇的能力。背了工具箱里的文章后，你会惊讶的发现：I can think in English now！

1.?????? Proverbs

1. A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success.

2. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time.

3. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

4. The classroom--not the trench--is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore.

5. Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

6. It is the purpose of education to help us become autonomous, creative, inquiring people who have the will and intelligence to create our own destiny.

7. You see, real ongoing, lifelong education doesn’t answer questions; it provokes them.

8. People will pay more to be entertained than educated.

9.the most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure.

10. The essence of our efforts to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each as equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different-to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind, and spirit he or she possesses.

11. A great teacher never strives to explain his vision-he simply invites you to stand beside him and see for yourself.

12. If you can read and don’, you are an illiterate by choice.

2. Damaging Research

A study by National Parent-Teacher Organization revealed that in the average American school, eighteen negatives are identified for every positive that is pointed out. The Wisconsin study revealed that when children enter the first grade, 80 percent of them feel pretty good themselves, but by the time they get to the sixth grade, only 10 percent of them have good self-images.

3. Education and Citizenship

An important aspect of education in the United States is the relationship between education and citizenship. Throughout its history this nation has emphasized public education as a means of transmitting democratic values, creating equality of opportunity, and preparing new generations of citizens to function in society. In addition, the schools have been expected to help shape society itself. During the 1950s, for example, efforts to combat racial segregation focused on the schools. Later, when the Soviet Union launched the first orbiting satellite, American schools and colleges came under intense pressure and were offered many incentives to improve their science and mathematics programs so that the nations would not fall behind the Soviet Union in scientific and technological capabilities.

Education is often viewed as a tool for solving social problems, especially social inequality. The schools, t is thought, can transform young people from vastly different backgrounds into competent, upwardly mobile adults. Yet these goals seem almost impossible to attain. In recent years, in fact, public education has been at the center of numerous controversies arising from the gap between the ideal and the reality. Part of the problem is that different groups in society have different have different expectations. Some feel that children should be taught basic job-related skills; still others believe education should not only prepare children to compete in society but also help them maintain their cultural identity (and, in the case of Hispanic children, their language). On the other hand, policymakers concerned with education emphasize the need to increase the level of student achievement and to improve parents in their children’s education.

Some reformers and critics have called attention to the need to link formal schooling with programs designed to address social problems. Sociologist Charles Moscos, for example, is a leader in the movement to expand programs like the Peace Corps, Vista, and Outward Bound into a system of voluntary national service. National service, as Moscos defines it, would entail “the full-time undertaking of public duties by young people whether as citizen soldiers or civilian servers-who are paid subsistence wages” and serve for at least one year. In return for this period of service, the volunteers would receive assistance in paying for college or other educational expenses.

Advocates of national service and school-to-work programs believe that education does not have to be confined to formal schooling. In devising strategies to provide opportunities for young people to serve their society, they emphasize the educational value of citizenship experiences gained outside the classroom. At this writing there is little indication that national service will become a new educational institution in the United States, although the concept is steadily gaining support among educators and social critics.

4. The Teacher’s Role

Given the undeniable importance of classroom experience, sociologists have done a considerable amount of research on what goes on in the classroom. Often they start from the premise that, along with the influence of peers, students’ experiences in the classroom are of central importance to their later development. One study examined the impact of a single first-grade teacher on her students’ subsequent adult status. The surprising results of this study have important implications. It is evident that good teachers can make a big difference in children’s lives, a fact that gives increased urgency to the need to improve the quality of primary-school teaching. The reforms carried out by educational leaders like James Comer suggest that when good teaching is combined with high levels of parental involvement the results can be even more dramatic.

Because the role of the teacher is to change the learner in some way, the teacher-student relationship is an important part of education. Sociologists have pointed out that this relationship is asymmetrical or unbalanced, with the teacher being in a position of authority and the student having little choice but to passively absorb the information provided by the teacher. In other words, in conventional classrooms there is little opportunity for the students to become actively involved in the learning process. On the other hand, students often develop strategies for undercutting the teacher’s authority: mentally withdrawing, interrupting, and the like. Hence, much current research assumes that students and teachers influence each other instead of assuming that the influence is always in a single direction.

5. Education Philosophy

For the past fifty years our schools have operated on the theories of John Dewey (1859-1953), an American educator and writer. Dewey believed hat the school’s job was to enhance the natural development of the growing child, rather than to pour information, for which the child had no context, into him or her. In the Dewey system, the child becomes the active agent in his own education, rather than a passive receptacle for facts.

Consequently, American schools are very enthusiastic about teaching “life skills” –logical thinking, analysis, creative problem--solving. The actual content of the lessons is secondary to the process, which is supposed to train the child to be able to handle whatever life may present, including all the unknowns of the future. Students and teachers both regard pure memorization as an uncreative and somewhat vulgar.

In addition to “life skills”, schools are assigned to solve the ever growing stoke of social problems. Racism, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug use, reckless driving, and are just a few of the modern problems that have appeared on the school curriculum.

This all contributes to a high degree of social awareness in American youngsters.

6. Student Life

To the students, the most notable difference between elementary school and the higher levels is that in junior high they start “changing classes”. This means that rather than spending the day in one classroom, they switch classrooms to meet their different teachers. This gives them three or four minutes between classes in the hallways, where a great deal of the important social action of high school traditionally takes place. Students have lockers in these hallways, around which thy congregate.

Society in general does not take the business of studying very seriously. Schoolchildren have a great deal of free time, which they are encouraged to fill with extracurricular activities—sports, clubs, cheerleading, scouts—supposed to inculcate such qualities as leadership, sportsmanship, ability to organize, etc. those who don’t become engaged in such activities or have afterschool jobs have plenty of opportunity to “hang out”, listen to teenager music, and watch television.

Compared to other nations, American students do not have much homework. Studies also show that American parents have lower expectations for their children’s success in school than other nationalities do. (Historically, there has not been much correlation between American school success and success in later life.) “He’s just not a scholar”, the American parents might say, content that their son is on the swim team and doesn’t take drugs. (Some of the young do choose to study hard, for reason of their own, such as determining that the road to riches lies through Harvard Business School.)

What American schools do effectively teach is the competitive method. In innumerable ways children are pitted against each other—whether in classroom discussion, spelling bees, reading groups, or tests. Every classroom is expected to produce a scattering of A’s and F’s (teachers often grade A=excellent; B=good; C=average; D=poor; and F=failed). A teacher who gives all A’s looks too soft—so students are aware that they are competing for the limited number of top marks.

Foreign students sometimes don’t understand that copying from other people’s papers or from books is considered wrong and taken seriously. Here, it is important to show that you have done your own work and are displaying your own knowledge. It is more important than helping your friends to pass, whom we think do not deserve to pass unless they can provide their own answers. Group effort goes against the competitive grain, and American students do not study together as many Asians do. Many Asians in this country consider their group study habits a large contributor to their school success.

7. Adult Education

After complaining about many aspects of American life, a 40-year-old woman from Hong Kong concluded, “But where else could someone my age go back to school and get a degree in social work? Here you can change your whole life, start a new business, do what you really want to do.”

So at least to this person, school requirements weren’t inhibiting. And to millions of others, adult education is the path to a new career, or if not to a new career, to a new outlook. Schools generally encourage the older person who wants to start anew, and besides regular classes, schedule evening classes in special programs. Today there are so many people of retirement age in college that it is no longer remarkable.

8. Moral Relativism in American

Improving American education requires not doing new things but doing (and remembering) some good old things. At the time of our nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson listed the requirements for a sound education in the Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia. In this landmark statement on American education, Jefferson wrote of the importance of education and writing, and of reading history, and geography. But he also emphasized the need “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests, and duties, as men and citizens.” Jefferson believed education should aim at the improvement of both one’s “morals” and “faculties”. That has been the dominant view of the aims of American education for over two centuries. But a number of changes, most of them unsound, have diverted schools from these great pursuits. And the story of the loss of the school’s original moral mission explains a great deal.

Starting in the early seventies, “values clarification” programs started turning up in schools all over America. According to this philosophy, the schools were not to take part in their time-honored task of transmitting sound moral values; rather, they were to allow the child to “clarify” his own values (which adults, including parents, had no “rights” to criticize). The “values clarification” movement didn’t clarify values; it clarified wants and desires. This form of moral relativism said, in effect, that no set of values was right or wrong; everybody had an equal right to his own values; and all values were subjective, relative, and personal. This destructive view took hold with a vengeance.

In 1985 The York Times published an article quoting New York area educators, in slavish devotion to this new view, proclaiming, “They deliberately avoid trying to tell students what is ethically right and wrong.” The article told of one counseling session involving fifteen high school juniors and seniors. In the course of that session a student concluded that a fellow student had been foolish to return one thousand dollars she found in a purse at school. According to the article, when the youngsters asked the counselor’s opinion, “He told them he believed the girl had done the right thing, but that, of course, he would not try to force his values on them. ‘If I come from the position of what is wrong,’ he explained, ‘then I’m not their counselor.’”

Once upon a time, a counselor offered counselor, and he knew that an adult does not form character in the young by taking a stance of neutrality toward questions of right and wrong or by merely offering “choices” or “options”.

In response to the belief that adults and educators should teach children sound morals, one can expect from some quarters indignant objections (I’ve heard one version of it expressed countless times over the years): “Who are you to say what’s important?” or “Whose standards and judgments do we use?”

The correct response, it seems to me, is, is we ready to do away with standards and judgments? Is anyone going to argue seriously that a life of cheating and swindling is as worthy as a life of honest, hard work? Is anyone (with the exception of some literature professors at our elite universities) going to argue seriously the intellectual corollary, that a Marvel comic book is as good as Macbeth? Unless we are willing to embrace some pretty silly position, we’ve got to admit the need for moral and intellectual standards. The problem is that some people tend to regard anyone who would pronounce a definitive judgment as an unsophisticated Philistine or a closed-minded “elitist” trying to impose his view on everybody else.

The truth of the real world is that without standards and judgments, there can be no progress. Unless we are prepared to say irrational things—that nothing can be proven more valuable than anything else or that everything is equally worthless—we must ask the normative question. It may come, as a surprise to those who fell that to be “progressive” is to be value-neutral. But as Matthew Amold said, “the world is forwarded by having its attention fixed on the best things” and if the world can’t decide what the best things are, at least to some degree, then it follows that progress, and character, is in trouble. We shouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things, some lives, books, ideas, and values are better than others. It is the responsibility of the schools to teach these better things.

At one time, we weren’t so reluctant to teach them. In the mid-nineteenth century, a diverse, widespread group of crusaders began to work for the public support of what was then called the “common school”, the forerunner of the public school. They were to be charged with the mission of school felt that the nation could fulfill its destiny only if every new generation was taught these values together in a common institution.

The leaders of the common school movement were mainly citizens who were prominent in their communities—businessmen, ministers, local civic and government officials. These people saw the schools as upholders of standards of individual morality and small incubators of civic and personal virtue; the founders of the public schools had faith that public education could teach good moral and civic character from a common ground of American values.

But in the past quarter century or so, some of the so-called experts became experts of value neutrality, and moral education was increasingly left in their hands. The commonsense view of parents and the publicthat schools should reinforce rather than undermine the values of home, family, and country, was increasingly rejected.

There are those today still that claim we are now too diverse a nation, that we consist of too many competing convictions and interests to instill common values. They are wrong. Of course we are a diverse people. We have always been a diverse people. And as Madison wrote in FederalistNo.10, the competing, balancing interests of a diverse people can help ensure the survival of liberty. But there are values that all American citizens share and that we should want all American students to know and to make their own: honesty, fairness, self-discipline, fidelity to task, friends, and family, personal responsibility, love of country, and belief in the principles of liberty, equality, and the freedom to practice one’s faith. The explicit teaching of these values is the legacy of the common schools, and it is a legacy to which we must return.

9. Schools Should Teach Values

People often said, “Yes, we should teach these values, but how do we teach them?” this question deserves a candid response, one that isn’t given often enough. It is by exposing our children to good character and inviting its imitation that we will transmit to them a moral foundation. This happens when teachers and principals, by their words and actions, embody sound convictions. As Oxford’s Mary Warnock has written, “You cannot teach morality without being committed to morality yourself; and you cannot be committed to morality yourself without holding that some things are right and others wrong.” The theologian Martin Buber wrote that the educator is distinguished from all other influences “by his will to take part in the stamping of character and by his consciousness that he represents in the eyes of the growing person a certain selection of what is, the selection of what is ‘right’, of what should be.” It is in this will, Buber says, in this clear standing for something, that the “vocation as an educator finds its fundamental expression.”

There is no escaping the fact that young people need as example principals and teachers who know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, and who themselves exemplify high moral purpose.

As Education Secretary, I visited a class at Waterbury Elementary School in Waterbury, Vermont, and asked the students, “Is this a good school?” They answered, “Yes, this is a good school.” I asked them, “Why?” Among other things, one eight-year-old said, “The principal Mr. Riegel, makes good rules and everybody obeys them.” So I said, “Give me an example.” And another answered, “You can’t climb on the pipes in the bathroom. We don’t climb on the pipes and the principal doesn’t either.”

This example is probably too simple to please a lot of people who want to make the topic of moral education difficult, but there is something profound in the answer of those children, something education should pay more attention to. You can’t expect children to take messages about rules or morality seriously unless they see adults taking those rules seriously in their day-to-day affairs. Certain must be said, certain limits lay down, and certain examples set. There is no other way.

We should also do a better job at curriculum selection. The research shows that most “values education” exercises and separate courses in “moral reasoning” tend not to affect children’s behavior; if anything, they may leave children morally adrift. Where to turn? I believe our literature and our history are a rich quarry of moral literacy. We should mine that quarry. Children should have at their disposal a stock of examples illustrating what we believe to be right and wrong, good and bad—examples illustrating what are morally right and wrong can indeed be known and that there is a difference.

What kind of stories, historical events, and famous lives am I talking about? If we want our children to know about honesty, we should teach them about Abe Lincoln walking three miles to return six cents and conversely, about Aesop’s shepherd boy who cried wolf if we want them to know about courage, we should teach them about Joan of Arc, Horatius at the bridge, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. If we want them to know about persistence in the face of adversity, they should know about the voyages of Columbus and the character of Washington during the Civil War. And our youngest should be told about the Little Engine That Could. If we want them to know about respect for the law, they should understand why Socrates told Crito: “No, I must submit to the decree of Athens.” If we want our children to respect the rights of others, they should read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’ “Letter from Birmingham jail.” From the Bible they should know about Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi, Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers, Jonathan’s friendship with David, the Good Samaritan’s kindness toward a stranger, and David’s cleverness and courage in facing Goliath.

These are only a few of the hundreds of examples we can call on. And we need not get into issues like nuclear war, abortion, creationism, or euthanasia. This may come as a disappointment to some people, but the fact is that the formation of character in young people is educationally a task different from, and prior to, the discussion of the great, difficult controversies of the day. First things come first. We should teach values the same way we teach other things: one step at a time. We should not use the fact that there are many difficult and controversial moral questions as an argument against basic instruction in the subject.

After all, we do not argue against teaching physics because laser physics is difficult, against teaching American history because there are heated disputes about the Founders’ intent. Every field has its complexities and its controversies. And every field has its basics, its fundamentals. So they are too with forming character and achieving moral literacy. As any parent knows, teaching character is a difficult task. But it is a crucial task, because we want our children to be healthy, happy, and successful but decent, strong, and good. None of this happens automatically; there is no genetic transmission of virtue. It takes the conscious, committed efforts of adults. It takes careful attention.

10. College Pressures

Mainly I try to remind that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. They don not want to hear such liberating news. They want a map—right now – that they can follow unswervingly to career security, financial security, Social Security and, presumably, a prepaid grave.

What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

My wish, of course, is na?ve. One of the national gods venerated in our media—the million-dollar athlete, the wealthy executive—and glorified in our praise of possessions. In the presence of such a potent state religion, the young are growing up old.

I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, and the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains: only victims.

“In the late 1960s.” one dean told me. “The typical question that I got from students was ‘Why is there so much suffering in the world’ or ‘how I can make a contribution?’ Today it’s ‘Do you think it would look better for getting into law school if I did a double major in history and political science, or just majored in one of them?’” many other deans confirmed this pattern. One said: “They are trying to find an edge—the intangible something that will look better on paper if two students are about equal.”

Note the emphasis on looking better. The transcript has become a sacred document, the passport to security. How one appears on paper is more important than how one appears in person. A is for Admirable and B is for Borderline, even though, in Yale’s official system of grading, A means “excellent” and B means “very good.” Today, looking very good is no longer good enough, especially for students who hope to go on to law school or medical school. They know that entrance into the better schools will be an entrance into the better law firms and better medical practices where they will make a lot of money. They also know that the odds are harsh. Yale Law School, for instance, matriculates 170students from an applicant pool of 3,700; Harvard enrolls 550 from a pool of 7,000.

It’s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it’s nice to think that admission officers are ready reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As that they regard a B as positively shameful.

The pressure is almost as heavy on students who just want to graduate and get a job. Long gone are the days of the “gentleman’s C.” when students journeyed through college with a certain relaxation, sampling a wide variety of courses-music, art, philosophy, classics, anthropology, poetry, religion—that would send them out as liberally educated men and women. If I were an employer I would rather employ graduates who have this range and curiosity than those who narrowly pursued safe subjects and high grades. I know countless students whose inquiring minds exhilarate me. I like to hear the play of their ideas. I do not know if they are getting As or Cs, and I do not care. I also like them as people. The country needs them, and they will find satisfying jobs. I tell them to relax. They cannot.

Nor can I blame them. They live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and board at most private colleges now come to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it costs to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what college receives in endowments, grants, and gifts. Now, the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Heating oil is up. Insurance is up. Postage is up. Health-premium costs are up. Everything is up. Deficits are up. We are witnessing in American the creation of a brotherhood of paupers—colleges, parents, and students, joined by the common bond of debt.

Today it is not unusual for a student, even if he works part time at college and full time during the summer, to accrue $5,000 in loans after four years—loans that he must start to repay within one year after graduation. Exhorted at commencement to go forth into the world, he is already behind as he goes forth. How could he not feel under pressure throughout college to prepare for this day of reckoning? I have used “he,” incidentally, only for brevity. Women at Yale are under no less pressure to justify their expensive education to themselves, their parents, and society. In fact, they are probably under more pressure. For although they leave college superbly equipped to bring fresh leadership to traditionally male jobs, society has not yet caught up with this fact.

Along with economic pressure goes parental pressure. Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined.

I see many students taking pre-medical courses with joyless tenacity. They go off to their labs as if they were going to the dentist. It saddens me because I know tem in other corners of their life as cheerful people.

“Do you want to medical school?” I asked them.

“I guess so,” they say, without conviction, or “Not really.”

“Then why are you going?”

“Well, my parents want me to be a doctor. They are paying all this money and …”

Poor students, poor parents, they are caught in one of the oldest webs of love and duty and guilt. The parents mean will; they are trying to steer their sons and draughts toward a secure future. But the sons and daughter want to major in history or classics or philosophy—subjects with no “practical” value. Where’s the payoff on the humanities? It’s not easy to persuade such loving parents that the humanities do indeed pay off. The intellectual faculties developed by studying subjects like history and classics—an ability to synthesize and relate, to weigh cause and effect, to see events in perspective—are just the faculties that make creative leaders in business or almost any general field. Still, many fathers would rather put their money on courses that point toward specific profession—courses that are pre-law, pre-medical, pre-business, or, as I sometimes heard it put, “pre-rich.”

But the pressure on students is severe. They are truly torn. One part of them feels obliged to fulfill their parents’ expectations; after all, their parents are older and presumably wiser. Another part tells them that the expectations that are right for their parents are not right for them.

I know a student who wants to be an artist. She is very obviously an artist and will be a good one—she has already had several modest local exhibits. Meanwhile she is growing as a well-round person and taking humanistic subjects that will enrich the inner resources out of which her art will grow. But her father is strongly opposed. He thinks that an artist is a “dumb” thing to be. The student vacillates and tries to please everybody. She keeps up with her art somewhat furtively and takes some of the “dumb” courses her father wants her to take—at least they are dumb courses for her. She is a free spirit on a campus of tense students—no small achievement in it—and she deserves to follow her muse.

Peer pressure and self-induced pressure are also intertwined, and they begin almost at the beginning of freshman year.

“I had a freshman student I’ll call Linda,” one dean told me, “who came in and said she was under terrible pressure because her roommate, Barbara, was much brighter and studied all the time. I could not tell her that Barbara had come in two hours earlier to say the same thing about Linda.”

The story is almost funny—except that it is not. It is symptomatic of all the pressure put together. When every student thinks every other student is working harder and doing better, the only solution is to study harder still. I see students going off to the library every night after dinner and coming back when it closes at midnight. I wish they would sometimes forget about their peers and go to a movie. I hear the clacking of typewriters in the hours before dawn. I see the tension in their eyes when exams are approaching and papers are due: “Will I get everything done?”

Probably they won’t. They will get blocked. They will sleep. They will oversleep. They will bug out.

Part of the problem is that they are expected to do. A professor will assign five page papers. Several students will start writing ten page papers to impress him. Then more students will write ten page papers, and a few will raise the ante to fifteen. Pity the poor student who is still just doing the assignment.

“Once you have twenty or thirty percent of the student population deliberately overexerting,” one dean points out, “It’s bad for everybody. When a teacher gets more and more effort from his class, the student who is doing normal work can be perceived as not doing well. The tactic work, psychologically.”

Why cannot the professor just cut back and not accept longer papers? He can, and he probably will. But by then the term will be half over and the damage done. Grade fever is highly contagious and not easily reversed. Besides, the professor’s main concern is with his course. He knows his students only in relation to the course and does not know that they are also overexerting in their other courses. Nor is it really his business. He did not sign up for dealing with the student as a whole person and with all the emotional baggage the student brought along from home. That’s what deans, masters, chaplains, and psychiatrists are for.

To some extent this is nothing new: a certain number of professors have always been self-contained islands of scholarship and shyness, more comfortable with books than with people. But the new pauperism has widened the gap still further, for professors who actually like to spend time with students do not have as much time to spend. They are also overexerting. If they are young, they are busy trying to publish in order not to perish, hanging by their figure nails onto a shrinking profession.

If they are old and tenured, they are buried under the duties of administering departments—as departmental chairmen or members of committees—that have been thinned out by the budgetary axe.

Ultimately it will be the students’ own business to break the circles in which they are trapped. They are too young to be prisoners of their parents’ dreams and their classmates’ fears. They must be jolted into believing into themselves as unique men and women who have the power to shape their own future.

“Violence is being done to the undergraduate experience,” says Carlos Hortas. “College should be open-ended: at the end it should open many, many roads. Instead, students are choosing their goal in advance, and their choices narrow as they go along. It’s almost as if they think that the country has been codified in the type of jobs that exist-that they’ve got to fit into certain slots. Therefore, fit into the best paying slot.”

“They ought to take chances. Not taking chances will lead to life of colorless mediocrity. They’ll be comfortable. But something in the spirit will be missing.”

I have painted too drab a portrait of today’s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story; if they were so dreary I wouldn’t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known.

Nor are they so obsessed with their studies that they avoid sports and extracurricular activities. On the contrary, they juggle their crowded hours to play on a variety of teams, perform with musical and dramatic groups, and write for campus publications. But this in turn is one more cause of anxiety. There are too many choices. Academically, they have 1,300 courses to select from; outside class they have to decide how much spare time they can spare and how to spend it.

This means that they engage in fewer extracurricular pursuits than their predecessors did. If they want to row on the crew and play in the symphony they will eliminate one; in the ‘60s they would have done both. They also tend to choose activities that are self-limiting. Drama, for instance, is flourishing in all twelve of Yale’s residential colleges, as it never has before. Students hurl themselves into these productions—as actors, directors, carpenters, and technicians—with a dedication to create the best possible play, knowing that the day will come when the run will end and they can get back to their studies.

They also cannot afford to be the willing slave of organizations like the Yale Daily News. Last spring at the one-hundredth anniversary banquet of that paper—who’s past chairmen include such once and future kings as Potter Stewart, Kingman Brewster, and William F. Buckley, Jr.—much was made of the fact that the editorial staff used to be small and totally committed and that “newsies” routinely worked fifty hours a week. In effect they belonged to a club; Newsies is how they defined themselves at Yale. Today’s students will one or two articles a week, when he can, and he defines himself as a student. I’ve never heard the word Newsie except at the banquet.

If I have described the modern undergraduate primarily as a driven creature who is largely ignoring the blithe spirit inside who keeps trying to come out and play, it’s because that’s where the crunch is, not only at Yale but throughout American education. It’s why I think we should all be worried about the values that are nurturing a generation so fearful of risk and so goal-obsessed at such an early age.

I tell students that there is no one “right” way to get ahead—that each of them is a different person, starting from a different point and bound for a different destination. I tell neither them that change is a tonic and that all the slots are not codified nor the frontiers closed. One of my ways of telling them is to invite men and women who have achieved success outside the academic world to come and talk informally with my students during the year. They are heads of companies or ad agencies, editors of magazines, politicians, public officials, television magnates, labor leaders, business executives, Broadway products, artists, writers, economists, photographers, scientists, historians—a mixed bag of achievers.

I asked them to say a few words about how they got started. The students assume that they started in their present profession and knew all along that it was what they wanted to do. Luckily for me, most of them got into their field by a circuitous route, to their surprise, after many detours. The students are startled. They can hardly conceive of a career that was not pre-planned. They can hardly imagine allowing the hand of God or chance to nudge them down some unforeseen trail.

11. To Err Is Wrong

In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateaus. This event drew a lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of reports covered Yaz’s every more. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all of this attention will go to your head?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at this way: in my career I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”?

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process. As Yaz suggest, an activity that produces a hit may also produce a miss. It is the same with creative thinking; the same energy that generates good creative ideas also produces errors.

Many people, however, are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on “the right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B~”

Right over 70% of the time = “C~” Right over 60% of the time = “D~” Less than 60% correct, you fail.

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.

Playing It Safe

With this kind of attitude, you aren’t going to be taking too many chances. If you learn that failing even a litter penalizes you (e.g., being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance), you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself to situation where you might fall. This leads to conservative thought pattern designed to avoid the stigma our society puts on “failure”.

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in Journalism. For the last six month, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked with her about situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail. She went through eighteen years of schooling to try any approaches where she might fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a potential stepping-stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and other people do you see who are to try anything new because of this failure? Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from many learning experience except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

Different Logic

From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the everyday world requires us to perform thousand of small tasks without failure. Think about it: you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand a pot of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you are more concerned with producing right answers than generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules, formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend litter time testing assumptions, challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phase errors are viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “if you want the hits, be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screw up, what went wrong this time?” the creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” and then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filed with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions that were right for the wrong reasons. And, Thomas Edison knew 1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline engine efficiency. The problem he faced was“knockthe phenomenon in which gasoline takes too long to burn in the cylinder-thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to him, “How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” the key concept here is “early”. Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally, he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its’ red leaves, which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the red color, which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I make the gasoline red?” perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and, lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock”.

[英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

在小红的铅笔盒里，有四位好兄弟。其中，铅笔是老大，橡皮是老二，削笔刀是老三，笔盒是老四。

一开始，他们都很团结。可有一天，铅笔开始傲慢起来，铅笔召集橡皮、削笔刀和笔盒开会，铅笔说 ：“从今天开始，你们都要为我服务。”橡皮、削笔刀和笔盒答应了。从那时起，铅笔故意刁难他们：铅笔故意在纸上乱画，让橡皮为他美容，为此橡皮瘦了一大圈；铅笔常找削笔刀为他剃头，这让削笔刀的牙齿都磨平了；铅笔躺在软绵绵的笔盒里，稍感觉有一点儿不舒服，就对笔盒破口大骂。可是他们从不说苦，因为他们认为铅笔永远是他们的好兄弟。

不久后，小红的铅笔盒里又添了几支新铅笔，他们对铅笔老大说：“瞧瞧你的熊样，小主人早该把你扔了。”铅笔听了，赶紧跑到镜子前，想看看自己的模样，只见镜子里的自己又矮有瘦，样子真像一根火柴。铅笔见了，伤心地哭了起来。此时，橡皮、削笔刀和笔盒来到铅笔面前，说：“在你刁难我们的时候，其实也毁了你的面容，只要你和我们团结一致，咱们还是好兄弟。”听了他们的话，铅笔惭愧地低下了头。

……

第一招：审题细心。审题好比驾驶员打方向，方向对了，哪怕开得慢点，也会顺利到目的地。如果审题不清，书面表达的成绩不知道会有多惨。学生真正开始写作 前，必须花相当一部分时间做写前阅读、思考等准备，包含以下四方面：1)审体裁。根据情景提示首先要弄清写何种体裁文章。2)审结构。明确开始部分、正文 部分和结尾部分，定好段落。3)审格式。如日记、便条、书信、通知的格式等。4)审内容。弄清什么必需写，哪些略写，尤其是图画式书面表达，要学会连贯 性，读懂图的意思。5)审人称和时态。弄清书面表达要求用何种人称，根据材料确定短文的基本时态。

第二招：衔接流畅。恰当使用逻辑词语，使各要点间连贯，行文通顺。比如表并列或递进： and, both…and, neither…nor, not only…but also;表选择：or, either…or; 表转折或让步：but, although, though, however, even though, in spite of, on the contrary; 表对比：like, unlike, while; 表举例：for example, such as, that’s to say; 表强调：in fact, of course, besides; 表时间顺序：when, after, before, as soon as, soon after; 表因果关系：because, since, as, for, for this reason，as a result; 表结论：in a word, to sum up. In summary, in conclusion, on the whole;

第三招：短语地道。如果能多用短语，则可回避书面表达中的中式英语，同时也能减少错误几率。尤其在考试时，如果使用短语，会使文章增加亮点。

第四招：句式丰富。一篇可读性强的文章，通常能较好体现学生对英语语言结构、词块、句式的运用。因此各类句式的多元呈现往往可以提升书面表达的成绩。初中 阶段英语写作常用的句式如下：There be…；the more…the more…；It’s adj for sb to do something；I think/believe/suppose…(宾从)； It can’t be put into real experiment。(被动)等。尤其是复合句的适恰运用对提升文章的层次很有帮助。对大多数同学来说，仿写很重要，在教材和很多的阅读书籍中都蕴含着 丰富的好词佳句。

第五招：情感真实。同样的话题，有些文章没什么情感，冷冰冰；有些 文章很有温度，有真情实感。情感真实主要可通过如下方法实现：1)内容的呈现。比如：2012年的中考英语书面表达My dream，大部分的作文都还是停留在表面上。但这个例子：I want to be a good father because my daddy was always so busy when I was a little boy.He had no time with me and my mum…虽然文章的文采并不是很好，但很有真情实感，令读者有心动的感觉，也是好文章。2)副词的运用。在句子的某些位置，添加副词，可以使句子和文段更 有人性味，更有情感性。如：I really enjoy the beauty of the sea in the sun。加了一个really，就有味道了。

第六招：思维多元。从杭州近五年中考书 面表达命题情况看，书面表达话题虽多元，但在设题上基本为半开放形式，因此半控制部分学生需要涵盖题目所给信息并进行适当发挥，而半开放部分，则要求学生 根据话题内容、自己的生活阅历、个人思维层次结合自己的英语表述自己的个人看法。有些学生的英语水平比较好，但因为在思维上比较局限想不出比较有深度、宽 度和广度的观点，这也会在一定程度上约束书面表达的质量。

第七招：整理独到。进入八 年级以来，在平时写作、单元练习、期中期末考试中，考生已积累了一定量与教材同话题的自己写的英语小短文，建议在临考前的最后阶段把自己八年级以来写的不 同话题的文章进行修改，润色、整理、汇编成册，制作一本个性化私人定制的“书面表达秘籍”，以备中考前高效复习用，以不变应万变。

第八招：卷面美观。1)不做涂改。需要在平时的书面表达中养成简列提纲、打草稿，再誊抄到答题卡的习惯。2)及时补救。如果对答题卡上的书面表达有修改， 建议用斜线划掉相应部分。3)勤练规范。临考前一个月，以中考答题卡的行距和长度为参照，设计自己字的大小，字的间距，每行的字数，以看起来舒服为准。

教给大家十个字，搞定初中英语写作，帮你拿到一等文。

问：“哪十字？”

“结构+要点+逻辑+语法+亮点！”

结构：中考最流行的结构就是三段式，深受各地区中考英语写作阅卷老师的喜爱。为什么尼？因为这种结构十分清晰。“观点——要点——总结”让人一目了然。三段式的第一段：简单明了，开门见山，不超过2句话，如，我们想表达小强很强壮，第一段直接说 XQ is extremely strong. 观点明确，这一句足矣。第二段：分2-3点说为什么他强壮。1. 每天吃10顿饭，He has ten meals everyday! 详举吃的是什么。2. 每天运动2小时，He does exercise 2 hours a day! 详举做了什么运动。第三段：经过第二段的论证，可以得出结论。但请注意，不能完全照抄第一段，要有升华。也可以提出希望和建议等。如，How strong and robust XQ is! I hope to be? him one day!

要点：实际上中考英语写作就等于两个字，翻译！因为中考英语写作一般会给出几个要点，要求必须在文章中有所体现。文章写的再好，只要缺少要点就会扣分。所以要点，也就是文章的第二段内容，要做到全，围绕中心。

逻辑：这里的逻辑实际指的就是逻辑词。最常用的就是表示递进的，转折的，总结的逻辑词等。递进：除了first, second, third, finally 等还可以使用高级点的，如first of all(首先)，in addition, whats more, moreover(都是另外的意思)，in a word, all in all（表示总结的）。转折：but, yet, however等。真正有经验的阅卷老师会很注意这些逻辑连接词，因为这些词体现了这个文章的思路。

语法：其他几点都不是硬性的要求，不那样做不能说是错，只能说是不好，但是语法却是硬性的。如，单词的使用，时态等。

亮点：当我们将前八个字都做得很完美的时候也只能得到一个二等文的上。要想得到一等文，最后两个字，亮点至关重要。大家设想如果我们是阅卷老师。有两篇写人美丽的作文摆在我们面前，都是结构清晰的三段式，要点都很全，都用了一些逻辑词，都没有语法错误，但是A篇只用了beautiful,good- looking,B篇却用到了attractive，charming，catching等，我坚信正常人都会给B篇高分的。这些高级一点的词汇，词组，句型便是我们得到一等文的最有力的绝招。所以，以后写英语作文要养成一般词汇限量用的好习惯。

只要把这十个字都搞定了，那么初中英语写作就一定能搞定！

Dogs

Nowadays many people like to have dogs as their pets. Dogs are friends of man not only because they are lovely but also because they are faithful to their masters.

Dogs can do a lot of work for man. They play with us. They hunt with us. They keep door for us. But long ago, dogs all over the world were wild.

Dogs can date back to the Stone Age. All dogs have the same ancestor. It is believed that their ancestor was much like a wolf. Other animals, such as the fox, came from this ancestor, too. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, man began to tame wild dogs. After the dogs were tamed, they were trained. The strong dogs became working animals. They were trained to pull heavy loads. They learned to keep an eye on the sheep and other animals. Working dogs had other jobs, too.

Some dogs were not strong. But they could help man hunt for game. Other dogs were best as pets.

Today, there are more than 100 kinds of dogs in the world.

狗

现在许多人都把狗当作他们的宠物。狗是人类的朋友，不仅因为它们可爱，而且因为它们对主人忠诚。

狗能为人类做很多工作。它们可以和我们玩，它们可以跟我们一起打猎，它们可以给我们看家。但是以前世界上的狗都是野生的。

狗可以追溯到石器时代。所有的狗都是同一个祖先，人们相信狗的祖先很像狼。其他动物，如狐狸，也是来自这个祖先。几千年前人类就开始驯服野狗，狗被驯服后，人们就训练它们。强壮的狗成为人类工作的帮手，人们训练它们拉重的货物。它们学会了帮人们照看绵羊和其它的动物。

有些狗不够强壮，但它们能帮人们寻找猎物。还有些狗成了人们的宠物。

目前世界上狗的种类已经达到100多种。

[关于狗的英语中考作文

提示：

1 教会如何生活 过分溺爱

2 指出缺点，指明方向 强加兴趣、价值观

3 教会富有爱心 希望值过高

要求：

1、根据内容要点适当增加细节，以使行文通顺连贯;

2、词数110左右;

3、开头已给出，不计入单词总数。

Recently, we have had a discussion in our class about whether parents are our best teachers. Some students……

参考范文：

Recently, we have had a discussion in our class about whether parents are our best teachers. Some students agree to the point because they think parents help to point out their mistakes in their lives. They teach them a lot about how to live a meaningful life. What’s more, parents’ love helps to teach them how to love others. So parents are their most important teachers.

However, not all of us hold the same views. Some think that their parents give them too much love, and they are too eager to pass on their values and interests to them. Moreover, their parents sometimes expect too much of them, which makes them feel their goals too difficult to reach.

In my opinion, parents are our important teachers. But parents should also try to understand their children more and limit the generation gap.

1.Above all ( things ), S + V...最重要地，…

2.According to the aforementioned, S + V...综观上述所云，…

3.As a result ( consequence ), S + V...结果，…

4.As long as S1+ V1, S2 + V2...只要…，…

5.As we know from the above, S + V...由上述我们可知，…

6.At any rate ( cost ), we should V...无论如何，我们应该…

7.Because of this, we can find that S + V...因为如此，我们可以知道…

8.For this reason, S + V...基于此因 ，…

9.From the ... point of view, ...从…的观点来看，…

10.If we can do as mentioned above, there can be no doubt that S + V...假如我们能做到以上所提者，无疑地…

11.In a word, S + V...一言以蔽之，…

12.In any case, we should V 无论如何，我们应该…

13.In short ( brief ), S + V...简而言之 ，…

14.In conclusion, we should V 总而言之，我们应该…

15.Judging from the above, S + V...从以上来判断 ，…

16.Last but not least, S + V...最后还有一件重要的事就是…

17.Only by this can we V...只有以此我们才能…

18.On the whole, S + V...整体而论 ，…

19.On this ground, S + V...基于此种原因

20.Owing to this fact we can find that S + V...因此我们可以知道…

21.The long and the short of it, S + V...总之 ，…

22.To be short ( brief ), S + V...简而言之 ，…

23.To sum up ( conclude ), S + V...总之 ，…

24.Thus, this is the reason why S + V...因此，这就是为什么…的原因

25.Under no circumstances should we V...无论如何我们绝不…

26.What we must do is to V...我们只要…就可以了

i am always busy with my lessons. what i have to do everyday is nothing but study.

luckily, last summer my family went to my uncles farm.we enjoyed a really interesting holiday. during the holiday, i didnt have to get up early, nor did i need to finish many exercises.

i rode the horse in the fields. i milked the cows on the farm. to my great joy, my uncle invited me to go fishing. life on the farm is quite different from that at school. i want to go back to spend my summer holiday again.

发言稿要注意以下三点：

1、发言的地点

2、发言的对象

3、发言的内容。

请看例文：

在一次英语班会上，老师请同学们以“Proud of My School”为主题发言。请根据下面所给的提示写一篇发言稿。字数要求在80～100词之间。文中不得出现真实的人名、地名。

提示：

①What does your school look like?

②What fun do you have at school?

③Why do you like your school?

Proud of My School

My school is very big with several tall buildings. There are 2，000 students in my school. We have a big playground with lots of trees around it. There are a lot of flowers everywhere.

We have lots of fun at school. After class we play games and do lots of sports, like a big family. The teachers in my school are as kind to us as our parents. I feel proud of my school because it is one of the best schools in my heart.

环境保护问题是中考热门话题，出现频率高，难度较大，必须掌握。

1 、6月5日(June 5)是世界环境保护日，我们周围的环境变得越来越糟糕，污染越来越严重……。假如你是学生Jone.，你校要进行“如何保护我们的环境?”专题演讲比赛，要求：(1)、举例说明环境存在的问题1-3方面;(2)、如何保护好我们的环境，采取怎样的措施，举例1-3方面进行说明，字数80左右。

As we all know，the environmemt around us is getting worse and worse .In some places，we cant see fish swimming in the river or trees on the hills. Some people even have no clean water to drink. So I think we must do something to protect the environment. But what can we do?How to protect our environmemt ?For example，we can go to school on foot or by bike . we can use shopping baskets not plastic bags when we go shopping，and we can use both sides of the paper when we write .In a word，if everyone pays more attention to our environment ，there will be less pollution and our life will be better.“There is only one earth”，I hope everyone will protect our environment well.

2、保护环境

( 四川乐山) 从2008年6月1日起，国家将禁止商家免费提供塑料袋，掀起全国“拒塑”的环保运动。假如你是李华，准备以“What Can We Do for the Environment” 为题，写一篇保护环境的英语演讲稿。 内容包含：

(1)。在购物时用布袋子替代塑料袋;(2)。尽可能地再利用使用过的课本;(3)。离开教室应关灯;(4)。最好走路或骑自行车上学;(5)。简述理由：保护环境，减少污染，节约能源等。

参考词汇：布袋子cloth bag 塑料袋plastic bag 保护protect 能源energy

污染pollution 课本textbook

What Can We Do for the Environment

our environment is becoming worse and worse，what can we do for the environment?I think each of us can do a little bit to help with this problem.

The first thing we can do is to use cloth bags instead of plastic bags when we go shopping. It helps to protect the environment. The second thing we can do is to reuse the old textbooks as possible as we can. We should also never forget to turn off the lights when we leave the classrooms in order to save energy. Whats more，it would be better if we walk or ride a bike to school. We should try our best to reduce pollution and waste.

In fact，even the simplest everyday activities can make a real difference to the environment. I believe we can make the world a better place to live in.

3.为了保护地球有限的资源，我们应该采取什么措施呢?请根据下面的提示写一篇约80词的短文，短文开头已经给出。提示词;1.save water，the source of life，protect drinking water，stop polluting，make full use of it;2.save electricity，crucial，turn off，other electric machines;3. save forests，useful，stop cutting down;4.recycle useful rubbish，save resources

参考作文：

Although the world develops much faster and better，the resources on the earth get fewer and fewer.In order to protect them，something must be done.

Save water. Water is the source of life. No water，no life. So its very important for us to do so.Not only should we protect drinking water and stop polluting it，but also make full use of it.

Save electricity. It is crucial. We cant imagine what the life will be like without it.Everyone should do his best to save electricity. Dont forget to turn off lights or other electric machines when we finish working.

Save forests. They are useful .Please stop cutting them down and use recycled paper instead. Make our world a green one to live in.

Recycle useful rubbish. Plenty of rubbish can be recycled like cans，paper，bottles，and so on.

We can save resources in this way. I believe we can make the world a better place to live in.