高中英语写作教学反思10篇(精选20篇)

动物是人类的朋友，请大家保护动物吧！保护动物，人人有责！下面就是小编跟大家分享一篇保护动物高中英语作文，欢迎大家阅读！

保护动物高中英语作文一：Protect wild animals

Many animals are in danger of dying out. As is shown in the chart, we can see the number of animal species decreases faster and faster and this trend will continue. From 1980 to 2010, at least 1 million animal species have disappeared. Worse still, more and more wild animals are in great danger. It is not a piece of sensational news; it is a fact, a harsh reality. Unfortunately, we may not see these animals in the near future.

From the second picture, we can find some reasons. Why is the number of animal species declining year by year? Apparently animals have become victims of fashion industry. Animal skin has been used to make fashionable clothes and these clothes sell at a high price. So some greedy people begin to kill animals in a large quantity. This irresponsible behavior not only breaks the balance of nature but also endangers the living environment of human beings.

As far as I am concerned, something must be done to stop this illegal action. We believe "no buying, no killing". First, we must make concerning laws to protect these animals in danger. Second, we must take some measures to protect animals effectively. Animals are our friends and part of our environment. Third, we should raise peoples awareness to protect animals and our environment. In this way, we can build a harmonious society and ensure a sustainable development.

保护动物高中英语作文二：Protect animals

I am a student from Xinhua High School in Chongqing，China. Informed that you have a vacancy for a student to serve as the spokesman for animals, I cannot resist my inner excitement,hoping to seize the opportunity to do something for animals .

In my mind，nothing can delight me so much as caring for animals. Wherever I go and whatever I do, I usually keep in mind that animals are angels from the heaven, which bring us endless comfort and pleasure. I have been a panda lover since my childhood. Panda is so lovely that brings fun to people and they are regarded as the treasure of our country. Unfortunately，such a rare species is now faced with the danger of being extinct。What I am eager to do is to raise people’s awareness of animal protection and appeal to more people to care for our earth companies.

保护动物高中英语作文三：Animals Need Protecting

Animals are natural resources that people have wasted all through our history. Animals have been killed for their fur and feathers, for food, for sport, and simply because they were in the way. Thousands of kinds of animals have disappeared from the earth forever. Hundreds more are on the danger list today. About 170 kinds in the United States alone are considered in danger.

Why should people care? Because we need animals, and because once they are gone, there will never be any more. Animals are more than just beautiful or interesting. They are more than just a source of food. Every animal has its place in the balance of nature. Destroying one kind of animal can create many problems. For example, when farmers killed large numbers of hawks, the farmers stores of corn and grain were destroyed by rats and mice. Why? Because hawks eat rats and mice, with no hawks to keep down their numbers, the rats and mice multiplied quickly.

Luckily, some people are working to help save the animals. Some groups raise money to let people know about the problem. And they try to get the governments to pass laws protecting animals in danger. Quite a few countries have passed laws. These laws forbid the killing of any animal or plant on the danger list. Slowly, the number of some animals in danger is growing.

保护动物高中英语作文四：Protect animals

Children, you grabbed the small tadpoles right, you must know that tadpole grew up to become small frog, the frog can eat insects, so the frog is our humans good friends. We should protect it, not hurt it. But some hotels are also sold the frog meat? Once, dad and his friends took me to dinner. A waiter said: "you see, this is we store the launch of new specials, stir flogs ball". "Chicken is what ah?" I curiously ask, "chicken is the frog." The waiter said, with a smile. I was very angry, because they hurt our good friends-frog! Another thing, he makes a big inspiration. One day, when I finish school, saw a man at the school gate at little chicks must sell, and I will have mercy on them. Because the little chicks must first came to this world, away from the mother, away from the mother love and mother warm embrace, and this is what they faced starved to death, the risk of freezing to death. At that time I thought: we humans are so happy! When you see here, did you see to protect our human friends-animals!

保护动物高中英语作文五：How tu protect animals

It is known to everyone that the unrestrained slaughter of wild animals has diminished the number of some endangered species. More and more species are being driven to extinction every year. It is terrible to think that magnificent animals are being sacrificed to human vanity

There are already laws enacted to prevent the importation of rare animals and the products made from their flesh, skin and bones.

These laws must be strictly enforced. Violators of these laws must be severely punished .Moreover, the public must be informed about the natural treasures we stand to lose .If we don’t take immediate action, we will be depriving future generations of our most precious heritage.

In Taiwan, because most people do not understand the importance of wildlife, the wildlife is in a poor situation. We Chinese are fond of eating anything delicious, so there are many animals killed by hunters. People enjoy eating tigers, bears, birds, and lions, so there are fewer and fewer birds flying in the sky and fewer and fewer bears running here and there in the forest. Instead, we often see them for sale at the market. How poor they are! And how cruel we are!

In my opinion, we should try every possible way to preserve wildlife. First, no one is allowed to hurt any wild animal. Second, the authorities concerned should punish those who kill any wild animal. Third, we should pay more attention to those endangered species to protect them from being eaten. If we can do so, nature must become very beautiful.

保护动物高中英语作文六：How to protect the animals？

Animals are our friends.But how to protect them? government is working to protect all animals in danger,and has made lots of plans to save animals. On the other hand, we shouldn’t eat wild animals.We should keep them away from our dinner. That way,there will not be wild animals on sale. I think the hunters and killers will become fewer and fewer.

Last, we should protect the environment.We should stop people from cutting trees down. Without trees, wild animals will lose their home. And we will lose our animal friends. All of us should try our best to protect animals.

We need to protect animals better.We should give them fresh water to drink.We should make the forests bigger for animals in danger to live in.We should advice people not to kill animals beacause they are our friends!

Dear Maria,

Im very happy that you are interested in Chinese culture,especially the festivals.Now let me tell you something about the Dragon Boat Festival.The Dragon Boat Festival,also called the Duanwu Festival ,is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month according to the Chinese calendar.People always eat rice dumplings and watch dragon boat races to celebrate it.

The festival is best known for its dragon-boat races,especially in the southern places where there are many rivers and lakes. It’s very popular.

The rice dumpling is made of glutinous rice,meat and so on. You can eat different kinds of rice dumplings.They are very delicious.

And Dragon Boat Festival is for Qu Yuan. He is an honest minister who is said to have committed suicide by drowning himself in a river.

Overall, the Dragon Boat Festival is very interesting!

Your friend

Li Hua

高中英语作文范文：完美的心

完美的心

One day a young man was standing in the middle of the town proclaiming1) that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley. A large crowd gathered, and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. There was not a flaw2) in it.

Suddenly, an old man appeared and said, "Why3), your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine!"

The crowd and the young man looked at the old mans heart. It was full of scars. It had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in, but they didnt fit quite right, and there were several jagged4) edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges5) where whole pieces were missing.

The young man laughed. "Comparing your heart with mine, mine is perfect and yours is a mess of scars."

"Yes," said the old man, "Yours looks perfect but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love. I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to them, and often they give me a piece of their heart that fits into the empty place in my heart.

"But because the pieces arent exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared.

"Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away, and the other person hasnt returned a piece of his or her heart to me. These are the empty gouges - giving love is taking a chance.

"Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for those people too, and I hope someday they may return and fill the space Ive been waiting. So now do you see what true beauty is"

The young man walked up to the old man, reached into his perfect heart, and ripped6) a piece out. He offered it to the old man.

The old man placed it in his heart, then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young mans heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges.

The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from the old mans heart flowed into his.They embraced7) and walked away side by side.

How sad it must be to go through life with a whole untouched heart!一天,一个年轻人站在镇子的中央,宣称他拥有整个山谷最美丽的心。一大群人围了过来,都交口称赞年轻人的心,因为这颗心完美无瑕。

一位老者突然出现了,说道:"嗨,你的心可不如我的心美丽啊!"

这群人和年轻人都看了看老者的心,只见上面布满伤痕。心上的一些部分被取走了,另外补上了其他人的,但并不十分吻合,还有几处边缘参差不齐。事实上,他的心上有些地方留下了深深的凹痕,整瓣整瓣的心都不见了。

年轻人笑道:"跟你的心相比,我的心才是完美的,你的心满是疤痕。"

"没错,"老者说:"你的心看上去很完美,但是我永远不会和你交换。你瞧,每处伤痕都代表一个我曾爱过的人。我撕下自己的一片心给他们,他们往往也会给我一片他们的心,填补我心中缺失的那部分。

"但是由于每片心大小并不完全相同,我的心有些粗糙的边缘,不过我很珍惜,因为它们让我想起我们之间分享过的爱。

"有时我把自己的几片心送出去,其他人却没有向我回馈他们的心。这些便成了空着的深痕--付出爱本来就是一种冒险。

"尽管这些凹痕让我感到痛苦,但它们敞开着,让我想起我对他们付出的爱,并希望有朝一日能得到回馈,填满这等待已久的空间。所以,现在你明白什么才是真正的美了吗"

年轻人走到老者面前,把手伸进自己完美的心中,撕下了一片,赠给了老者。老者把这片心放进自己的心里,然后从自己那颗苍老而又伤痕累累的心上撕下一片,放入年轻人心上的伤口。虽然能够放进去,但不十分吻合,因为有的边缘凹凸不平。

年轻人看了看自己的心,它虽然不再完美,却更加美丽,因为老者心中的爱流入了他的心田。

他们互相拥抱,然后并肩前行。

人这一生如果一直保持着一颗完整未动的心是多么可悲啊!

议论文是作者对某个问题或某件事进行分析、评论，表明自己的观点、立场、态度、看法和主张的一种文体。下面是小编为大家整理的高中议论文写作格式，欢迎阅读。

一、什么是议论文

当我们了解生活中的某件事、某个现象或某些问题时，总会形成自己的看法、主张和观点，把这些看法、主张和观点表达出来，并加以阐释，就是议论。

写成文章，就是议论文。议论文是以议论为主要表达方式。

表达方式：议论、说明、记叙、抒情、描写

（一）论点：是作者对要议论的问题所持的见解或主张，是一篇文章的灵魂、统帅。

二、议论文写作格式

1、论点

是一篇文章的灵魂、统帅，任何一篇文章只有一个中心论点，一般可以有分论点。

论点应该鲜明、准确、概括，绝不可模棱两可，让人捉摸不定。

论点的位置一般有四个：

①文题

如《改造我们的学习》《反对党八股》

②开篇

如《改造我们的学习》

③文章中间

如《拿来主义》《论积贮疏》

④结尾

如《过秦论》“仁义不施而攻守之势异也”

2、论据

用来证明论点的材料，有事实论据和理论论据两种。事实论据用事实来说话，而理论论据靠经典性取胜。论据必须围绕中心论点，这是一个最基本的要求。选用的事例与论点若不能保持一致，势必削弱说服力量。像1999年高考作文题《假如记忆可以移植》，若写议论文，就必须要弄清“记忆”与“记忆力”的区别，有的考生所举的事例就明显犯了论据与论点游离的错误，举了郭沫若倒背《红楼梦》的事例，使说服力大打折扣。

选用事实论据还要注意几点：

①论据必须具有典型性。

典型就是指论据要具有代表性。

②论据必须具有新颖性。不少学生的议论文写作离不开一些陈旧的事例，像一写失败与成功的关系，似乎就离不开爱迪生发明灯泡，一写逆境成才就非写张海迪不可，类似的内容不是说不可以用，而是说你用，他用，大家都用，谁的作文与众不同呢?

③论据的表述要精练、简要，与记叙文的表述不同，它只要求表述出与论点相关的内容即可。

3、论证

是议论文写作的重要一环，它包含的内容也较多。

①论证的基本类型：立论、驳论。立论从正面论述，驳论从反面论述。我们写议论文一般以立论为主。

②论证的基本结构层次：三段论式的结构。

提出问题(是什么)→分析问题(为什么)→解决问题(怎么办)

三、议论文写作格式范文

学会舍弃

鸣蝉奋力地甩掉了外壳，获得了高空中歌唱的自由；壁虎因勇敢地挣断了尾巴，得以在危难中保全了它弱小的生命；算盘若填满自己的空位，”座无虚席”，必将丧失自己的运算功能。

对那些不该拥有的东西，我们应该舍弃。

现实生活是复杂的，而我们的承受力有限。如果大脑是一个仓库，不管仓库多大，一种东西充斥其中时，另一种东西定然无法进入。比如读书，当我们痴醉于金庸古龙梁羽生的刀光剑影中，我们又怎能潜心于复杂的几何方阵，怎能专注于浩繁的英语单词呢？想读的和该读的，你必须在两者间作出选择。

人的一生中有很多事情需要作出类似的选择。舍弃应该舍去的，你便是智者；舍弃不该舍去的，你就是愚夫。世界文豪高尔基在他的房间失火时，没有顾及家具、财产、衣物，甚至没有顾及生命，却从熊熊大火中救出了几箱书。舍弃了凡夫俗子眼中的财富，守住了那些启迪心智、净化心灵的真正的财富。而有些人，终生抱着“人为财死，鸟为食亡”的信条，追逐着金光闪闪的财宝，为了庸俗的追求，他们舍弃了人格和道德，舍弃了人性中的真善美。错误的舍弃，使他们的一生龌龊卑鄙。

正确的舍弃，往往需要青松秋菊般的高尚品格。据说安徽桐城有一条“六尺巷”，原本是张、叶两家争执之地。张家主人乃当朝宰相，他舍弃了面子上的威严，以宽仁礼让的胸襟，大度能容的气慨，认为“让他三尺又何妨”，而叶家深感惭愧，也让出三尺，便成了”六尺巷”。那位宰相，化干戈为玉帛，止争斗于未起，如果不是有超出常人的气量和胸怀，怎会作出如此的舍弃？

正确的舍弃，不会像随手扔掉废纸团那样轻而易举，它还需要勇气。因为舍弃就是要承认自己的不足。有句古话说：人争一口气，佛受一柱香。大多人都是好面子的，总想向别人展示自己优秀的一面，因而要我们这些好面子的人来承认自己的不足当然是需要很大的勇气的。当我们发现自己走在错误的道路上的时候，不要犹豫，不要不好意思，要果断的选择舍弃，无谓的坚持只会使事情越变越糟。

你向往山居的清静，就必须舍弃都市的繁华；你仰慕奋斗者的成功，就必须舍弃安逸闲散的生活；你希望走遍千山万水，就必须舍弃乡土乡音的柔美与温馨。我们应该学会舍弃。

Today, we live in the modern world, most things we do can use the machine. The technology brings so many convenience to us, it facilitates our life. As we are facing the new products all the time, the traditional things are fading away. Take the paper-cut for example. When I was very small, paper-cut was so popular in my grandma’s generation, most women could cut all kinds of interesting shapes.

While today when I went back to my hometown, I found that most of them had stopped cutting papers, because they could buy them at the very low price.

What’s more, the young people don’t learn such art, for the parents think it is not necessary for their children to learn the old-fashion thing. The tradition should not be abandoned, it is the reflection of our culture. Even facing the challenge, we need to inherit the tradition.

今天,我们生活在摩登时代,我们可以使用机器做大部分的事情。科技给我们带来了很多方便,它便利了我们的生活。我们每天都面对着新产品,传统的东西正在慢慢消失。以剪纸为例。在我很小的时候,在我祖母的那一代，剪纸很受欢迎,大多数女性可以剪出各种有趣的形状。现在当我回到家乡时,我发现他们中的大多数已经停止剪纸,因为他们可以以很低的价格购买。更重要的是,年轻人不了解这种艺术, 以为父母认为他们的孩子没有必要去学习这种不时髦的东西。传统不应该被放弃,这是我们文化的反映。甚至面临挑战,我们仍然需要继承传统。

[高中英语作文：传统文化的继承

After seeing so many movies about the youth, we are starting to wonder about what do we have in our youth, the fight, the drink or the love?

My answer is no.

What we see from the movie is not true, the plots are exaggerated and misunderstood.

For students, their youth is the process of fighting. They have studied so hard to realize their dreams.

When they are in primary school, they want to do well and make their parents be proud of them.

When they are in middle school and high school, they need to take part in the exams so as to enter the better future schools.

Even they are in college, they still need to study and fight for the ideal job. There is no doubt that most people keep fighting for their future and this is the memory of youth.

看了很多关于青春的电影之后,我们开始思考我们的青春有什么,打架,喝酒或谈恋爱?我的答案是否定的。

我们从电影看到的是不正确的,故事情节被夸大了,也被误解了。对于学生,他们的青春是战斗的过程。他们努力学习来实现梦想。

在上小学的时候,他们想要做的很好,让父母为他们感到骄傲。当他们在初中和高中的时候,需要参加考试,以便将来进入更好的学校。甚至在大学,他们仍然需要学习和争取理想的工作。毫无疑问,大多数人一直在为自己的未来奋斗,这是青春的记忆。

[高中英语作文：青春的记忆

在教学过程中，我力追求简约，追求和谐：

首先，在教材处理上，追求简约，剪裁重缝。课堂上学生们围绕“卡罗纳是一个怎样的孩子?”和“周围的人们又是怎样表达对卡罗纳的爱的?”这两个问题品读感悟。学生通过人物语言、动作、神情的描述，品读、批注、交流，感受师生对卡罗纳的真切关爱之情。学生那同情与怜悯的神情，使我深切地感受到他们正沉浸在爱的教育中。在此基础上，追问：“这些‘爱’卡罗纳感受到了吗?从哪儿看出来?”抓住“他什么也没说，也没有抬起头来，只是把他的手放在我的手上。”

体会卡罗纳将坚强面对现实，成为生活的强者的内心感受。

其次，努力做到工具性与人文性的和谐统一，追求三维目标(知识与能力、过程和方法、情感态度和价值观)的达成。我注重了对学生关爱他人美好情感的熏陶和正确的情感态度和价值观的引领。在朗读中潜移默化，在过渡语、小结语、激情语中不断渗透。引领学生寻找感受周围的人对卡罗纳的爱的词句，从动作、眼神、心理等方面捕捉爱、感受爱。如体悟“我本想跟他说几句话，但不知说什么才好，就把一只手放在他的肩膀上，脸贴在他的耳朵上，对他说：‘卡罗纳，别哭了。’”时，千言万语化为“放、贴”，做这个动作表示什么?请你把动作背后隐藏着的东西朗读出来。千言万语还化为一句话──(齐读)“卡罗纳，别哭了。”

又如：“放学的时候，大家围在他身边，谁都没有说话，只用关切的目光默默地看着他。”我用一句“目光默默地看着他，什么话都没说，那一双双眼睛里写满了什么?如果你就是卡罗纳的同学，你要用这目光告诉他什么?”将学生置身于同学和卡罗纳的直接对话中，激起了学生的情感波澜，对话中加深内化了关爱的情感。

教学，永远是一项遗憾的劳动。借班上课，异地而教，对学情不够了解，未能及时处理好课堂教学资源。如在最后环节，原来预设在学生朗诵过程中渗透手语教学，因为手语而多次重复朗读。后来得知，他们学校在两周前就进行过手语教学。其实，完全可以让学生自己打手语诵读，达到“巧借东风催芳菲”的效果。

因为年轻，所以更需锻炼;因为追求，所以更想提高。路漫漫其修远兮，吾将上下而求索。

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

友谊是一条善良的河流,澄清着沿路的风尘;是上天在人的心灵中植下的一方净土,培育着诚实善良的花朵。下面是小编整理的关于友谊的英语作文，希望对大家有帮助。 关于友谊的英语作文一：

Friendship is a kind of human relations. It is a human instinct to make friends.When in trouble, we

need friends to offer us help, support and encouragement. With success achieved, we also need friends to share our joys.

Friendship is also one of the greatest pleasures that we can enjoy. It implies loyalty, cordiality, sympathy, affection,and readiness to help. No man can make the most of his life without carefully and conscientiously striving to win the right kind of friends as he goes along.

Knowing how valuable friendship is, we should be very careful in making friends. Real friends are those who have good character, superior ability and kindness of heart. Real friends can share all our sorrows and double all our joys.While making friends, we should take care to select those who have such fine qualities. Then we should treat our friends with courtesy, be careful not to interfere unreasonably with them,and not to ridicule their proceedings. We should forgive their failures and do our best to help them. In short, when we have established friendship, we ought to cherish and treasure it by means of words and deeds. Only thus, can we develop real friendship and keep the sacred lamp of friendship burning all our life. 关于友谊的英语作文二：

making friends is a skill like many other skills. it improves with practice. if you want to meet people and make friends, you must be willing to take some actions. you must first go where there are people. you won’t make friends staying home alone. join a club or a group. taking with those who like the same things as you do is much easier. or join someone in some activities. many people are nervous when talking to new people. after all meeting strangers means facing the unknown. and it’s human nature to feel a bit uncomfortable about the unknown. most of our fears about dealing with new people come from doubts about ourselves. we imagine other people are judging us of finding us too tall or to short, too this or too that. but don’t forget that they must be feeling the same way. try to accept yourself as you are and try to put the other person at ease. you’ll both feel more comfortable.

try to be self-comfident even if you don’t feel that way. when you enter a room full of strangers, such as a new classroom, walk tall and straight, look directly at other people and smile.

if you see someone you like to speak to, say something . don’t wait for the other person to start a conversation.

just meeting someone new does not mean that you will make friends with that person-friendship is based on mutual liking and “give and take”. it takes time and effort to develop. 关于友谊的英语作文三：

Friendship Friends play an important part in our lives,and although we may take friendship for granted,we often dont clearly understand how we make friends.While we get on well with a number of people,we are usually friends with only a very few----for example,the average among students is about 6 per person.In all the cases of friendly relationships,two people like one another and enjoy being together.but beyond that,the degree of intimacy between them and the reasons for the shared interests vary enormously.As we get to know people we take into account things like age,race ,economic conditions,social position,and intelligence.Although these factors are not of prime importance,it is more difficult to get on with people when there is a marked difference in age and background.

Some friendly relationships can be kept on argument and discussion,but it is usual for close friends to have similar ideas and beliefs,to have attitudes and interests in commen ---they often talk about being on the same wavelength .it generally takes time to reach this point.And the more intimately involved people become,the more they rely on one another .people want to do friends favours and hate to break a promise.Equally,friends have to learn to put up with annoying habits and try to tolerate differencesof opinion.wWw.xiNgkoo.coMIn contrast with marriage ,there are no friendship ceremonies to strengthen the association between two persons.But the supporting and understanding of each other that results from shared experiences and emotions does seem to a powerful bond ,which can overcome differences in background ,and break down barriers of age, class or race. 关于友谊的英语作文四：

Friendship is priceless, is not buy friendship, and when you give up your friendship who, you need his help, he can not help you, even if you can not buy with thousands of gold back.

I am a heavy feeling of people, sense of obligation, so there are a lot of friends, such as: "Tang Tao, Zhou Jie, Liu Longyu, Liu Fan, off field ... ... my good friend, are infinite in number, no one told me they After a wonderful childhood, with these friends, my childhood full of joy.

They gave me numerous times to help, Don Tao is my first grade friends, our class took part in the running, everyone knows me and the strength of the Tang Tao comparable to the running of the day, I was flabbergasted, my running time, slipped and fell a somersault, then, Tang Tao, Stop right now, pick me, help me to pat the dust off, suddenly, I felt a burst of warm heart, the somersault to get my speed was much slower , Tao Tang met with me crossing the finish line is busy pulling up and give me the second I knew that he was very second.

Zhou Jie is my understanding in the second grade, he often helped me record straight. D O I did not play and when to give me happiness. Liu Longyu fifth grade I knew, he was my classmate, math problems often tell me, tell me a joke, was my best playmate ... ...

Liu Fan, off field in the sixth grade, I know, and we you, for me, be sworn, and I have a difficult time, they are always the first to help me. Friendship is priceless, with friends, you will be better tomorrow.

[关于友谊的高中英语作文

假设你们班级即将召开以“感恩”为主题的班会，要求向大家介绍一下你最想向谁表达感恩之情，他或她为你做了什么，你又将怎样回报他或她的付出。请结合上文内容，以“Thank you, my…”为题写一篇发言稿。

要求：

1.句子通顺，语意连贯。

2.包括所有提示内容。

3.不少于80词。

Thank You, My Mother

Wherever we are today, whatever we are, we owe it to our parents who have given and taught us so much, so we should thank them, especially, thank our mother. I think my mother is one of the best mothers in the world.

She is the busiest one in my family. She does chores for the family and cares about my study. She has taught me a lot. She does lots of things for me. But she never wants anythings in return.

How will I show my thanks to my mother? First, this year, I am going to give her a surprise birthday party and buy her a special present. Second, I’ll do well in school. Third, I’ll help her do housework when I’m free. I want to make her happy. In a word, I love my mother.

[高中英语作文：感恩

拿到英语试题不知道从哪里下手吗?那么下面这套英语写作流程对你会有一定的帮助。

一.审题。

拿到题目后，手中拿铅笔，手脑眼嘴并用，开始审题。看题目的要求是什么，要点是什么，特殊要求是什么。譬如你是叫李华，还是随便一个名字? 要议论文还是记叙文?对分几段写有无要求?等等。诸如此类的硬性要求信息，都最好用铅笔划下来，以免出错，也许你一开始会记得，可随着时间的流逝，你会不会因紧张而遗忘这些信息呢?还是小心为妙。边看最好边张嘴默读，这样就不会遗漏或忽略任何一个字了。

二.草稿。

有的同学怕出错，全文都打草稿再誊写，我姑且认为不太可取，毕竟考场时间宝贵，即使我有四十分钟时间写作文也不敢贸然这么做，更何况考场时我们留给作文的时间往往一再被压缩。有的同学不打草稿，我认为更不太可取。一来容易出错，二来边写边想思维不连贯，即使思维连贯也无法审词酌句，展现自己最好的一面，容易后悔。

草稿怎么打?

1.结构就是你打算分几段写，每段都写什么?哪段转哪段承哪段起合?心里都要是有谱的。

2.关键词：结构拟定后，迅速在草稿纸上写下自己这篇作文可能用到的一些关键词。包括一些漂亮的词和自己可能会忘记的词。主要是动词和名词。

譬如一省作文题： 假设你的名字是李华，亚洲冬季运动会将在你居住的地方举办，现招募志愿者。你希望成为志愿者。申请信的格式已经写好了，你直接写内容就可以。你的个人情况：年龄性别学历，个人条件。英语好，爱好体育，擅长交际，乐于助人。承诺提供最佳服务。

关键词就是学历、爱好、擅长、乐于、承诺，和你对这篇作文初步构思时想到的一些词。先把这些词(指词的英文表达)写在纸上。有一些词的拼写，譬如学历，可能你本身就记得不是特别清楚，这时一定要在开始写作文前先把它写下来，以免一会因干扰而遗忘。

可能看到聪明这个关键词时，你最初写下的往往是clever，再仔细想想，你是不是又想到了smart,deligient好多词，挑个漂亮和合适的用吧。再比如转折，你写了but，这会再想想，是不是又有一堆表示转折的词在你脑里打转呢?挑一个吧。千万别用but.

3.句式：词写下来了，其实你构建这篇作文的建筑材料就到位了，下步就是要把它们盖成漂亮的作文。先用最普通的陈述句把它们在头脑中过一遍，然后看看都能改成什么句式。能不能把一句陈述句改成问句?能不能用上一个双重否定句?能不能用一个主语从句套定语从句的长句?能不能用一个插入语?等等。把你高中三年的英语积累展示出来。在草稿纸上同样标注。

三.正式写。

这样的草稿打完后，就要快快写了。注意，英语作文的卷面简直太重要了，一定要把字写整齐，写大。没有把握的词和句子不用。别忘了遵守你最初用铅笔划下的题目的规定。

四.检查。

注意，最最重要的一步来了。尽管很小心，可是我们写英语作文还是会犯下很多错误。单词拼写的，大小写的，等等。这些错误会极大破坏我们在阅卷老师心目中的形象，一定要坚决誓死消灭。即使时间再紧，请务必留下1——2分钟检查作文的时间，消除隐性错误。

需要说明的是，英语的开头和结尾是最关键的，尤其是开头。基本上，不跑题，遵守题目要求，一个漂亮的开头，一个还过得去的结尾，2-3个高级词汇，1-2个漂亮的句子，加上整齐的字迹，作文的分就不会低了哦。所以，精心为你的作文想个漂亮的开头吧。

During these two years, we have seen many movies about the youth, the

directors try to remind people of their passed early days. Indeed, when people

see the movie, they feel the situation is so familiar that they could not help

thinking about their days in the school. As for me, when I see the movie, I will

think about my high school days, it was so unforgettable for me, my friends and

I studied so hard together, our strong friendship was built at that time, the

stupid things we did always makes me laugh. Everyone will have an unforgettable

memory in their early life, the memory fulfills their life.

Howeverhard the situation is, we shouldnt lose our heart, because we have our dreams.Our dreams are always glorious. We also have enthusiasm that will make ourdreams come true. But we must have the willingness to work hard, since if wework hard, some miracles will happen. Nothing good will happen without our hardwork.

不管情况多么艰难，我们都不应该迷失自己，因为我们还有梦想。我们的梦想总是光荣的。我们也有能使我们梦想成真的热情。但我们必须要有努力工作的意愿，因为如果我们努力工作，会有奇迹发生的。如果不如理工作就不会有好的事情发生。

Whatsmore, when we are unhappy, we can think about our dreams, so that we will bemore enthusiastic. When we are defeated, we should stand up and say," Imnot a failure." Please remember, “ Anything is possible to a man who has astrong determination.”

更重要的是，在我们不快心的时候，我们可以想一想我们的梦想，这样我们就会更加充满热情。在我们失败的时候，我们应该站起来说，“我不是一个失败者”。请记住，“对于一个有决心的人一切皆有可能。”

[高中英语作文：不放弃希望

With the development of science and technology, smart phone becomes more and more popular. Even the students on campus begin to use handphone. Is it a good or bad thing?

随着科学和技术的发展，手机变得越来越流行，就连在校园里的学生也开始使用手机了。这到底是好还是坏？

Smart phone , on one hand, is good for students. For one thing , it enables students to keep in touch with their friends and family more conveniently and quickly. For another, it makes students fashionable and proud.

手机一方面来说对学生是有利的，举例来说，它能使学生与朋友和家人更方面快捷的取得联系。同时，它也使学生感到很时尚和骄傲。

On the other hand, smart phone has a negative effect on the students. First , it will cost them more money than before. Second, it will distract them from their study and life. Third, it will sometimes become a nuisance especially when it rings in classroom or in the library.

但另一方面，智能手机对学生也有负面作用。首先，手机会让学生们比以前花费更多的钱。其次，智能手机也让人更容易从学习和生活中分心。第三，智能手机让人感到麻烦和讨厌，尤其是在图书馆里或者是上课的时候。

so , smart phone is a good thing .However , the students should use it well .

所以，智能手机是个好东西，但是，学生们也要好好使用才行。

[高中英语作文：对手机的看法

究其原因，我结合自己的写作体会总结了三点。其一，对英语作文不熟悉，虽然篇幅要求不大，字数在150字左右，可还是难倒一大片。其二，对某一问题平时缺乏思考和总结，不能提出明确的看法和见解，缺乏层次感。其三，不熟悉英语语法和一些常见的单词，即使知道意思也无法清晰表达出真实意思。

为此，我结合本学期的第一篇作文，给学生做了详细讲解。写一篇作文需要四大步：First, consider it carefully. (第一，认真构思。)Next, draw up an outline.(第二，写出文章结构。)Then, write the composition.(第三，写出作文。)Finally, Check over the composition.(最后，检查文章。)四步骤中，难的是第二，第三步。现结合文章，具体谈一下怎么做。

题目是 Changes in Li Ming’s Hometown (李明家乡的变化)。文章Outline可以从一下几个方面来写：

A. Changes in living conditions.(生活条件的变化)

B. Changes in working tools. (劳动工具的变化)

C. Changes in education. (教育的变化)

Conclusion: Thanks to the government’s efforts, Li Ming’s hometown is becoming more and more better. (结论：多亏政府的努力，李明的家乡变得越来越好了。)

下面我把参考译文写出来，供大家参考。

Changes in Li Ming’s Hometown

Great changes have taken place in Li Ming’s Hometown in the past few years. In the past, people’s living conditions were poor. A big family was crowded in a low house. People usually planted crops with the help of farm animals. And the children studied in old schools. Since the reform and opening-up , his hometown has developed rapidly and people’s living

Conditions have improved a lot. Now, people live in tall bright buildings. They plant crops with the help of farm machines and the work in the fields has become much easier. What’s more, children now study in modern schools. Thanks to the government’s efforts, Li Ming’s hometown is becoming better and better.

郭智勇

the 15-day celebration of chinese new year

the first day of the lunar new year is the welcoming of the gods of the heavens and earth.many people abstain from meat on the first day of the new year because it is believed that this will ensure long and happy lives for them.

on the second day, the chinese pray to their ancestors as well as to all the gods. they are extra kind to dogs and feed them well as it is believed that the second day is the birthday of all dogs.

the third and fourth days are for the sons-in-laws to pay respect to their parents-in-law.

the fifth day is called po woo. on that day people stay home to welcome the god of wealth. no one visits families and friends on the fifth day because it will bring both parties bad luck.

on the sixth to the 10th day, the chinese visit their relatives and friends freely. they also visit the temples to pray for good fortune and health.

the seventh day of the new year is the day for farmers to display their produce. these farmers make a drink from seven types of vegetables to celebrate the occasion. the seventh day is also considered the birthday of human beings. noodles are eaten to promote longevity and raw fish for success.

on the eighth day the fujian people have another family reunion dinner, and at midnight they pray to tian gong, the god of heaven.

the ninth day is to make offerings to the jade emperor.

the 10th through the 12th are days that

[高中关于元宵节的英语作文

《假如我会变》是人教版试验教科书三年级下册第八单习作要求写的是想象作文。该内容是在学习了本组课文神话和民间故事之后编排的，要求学生围绕“假如我会变”展示学生的童心、童趣和梦想。 2011 年版语文课程标准要求“为学生的自主写作提供有利条件和广阔空间，减少对学生写作的束缚，鼓励自由表达和有创意的表达，鼓励写想象中的事物”。根据编者意图、课标要求和三年级学生特点，我设计 “ 假如我会变 ” 的习作内容，并进行了教学实践，反思如下：

一、充分利用童心，激发童趣

孩子天生爱幻想，如果让他们连续一周阅读神话、传说，让那些奇异，怪诞的故事和孩子们亲密接触，他们会像海绵似的将那些故事吸收到自己的大脑中，他们的童心被激活，童趣会自然的萌发出来。习作前的阅读教学，我除了让学生学习教材中的几篇课文，还让学生大量的阅读课外的神话与传说，在口语交际课上，安排了讲故事，评故事，改故事，创编故事等环节，让学生充分的表达和想象。在习作指导的开始，以做脑力保健操的方式让学生任意说喜欢的事物。看似简单的游戏，但学生在短时间内要想说得与众不同，说得新颖独特，就要看思路是否开阔。在教师的引导下，学生的思维触角伸向宏大的宇宙，走进微观世界，从古代走向现在，又冲向未来，现实的，虚拟的 …… 说得千姿百样，丰富多彩，这时候学生的思维被打开，童趣被唤醒。

二 点燃想象之火，激发表达欲

当学生的思维被激活，大脑进入兴奋状态时，教师创设情境，点燃每个学生的想象之火，让大家变成了自己喜欢的事物，然后教师扮演 “ 三年级小学生 ” 这个新角色，来营造一种新角色互相自我介绍的氛围。此时，以自我介绍的方式描述自己的样子，也顺理成章，达到情动辞发的效果。这时，教师什么也不说，给一定的遐想的空间，学生一个个仿佛还陶醉在想象中。然后让学生去说、去讲，他们的表达欲被尽情的释放出来了。

三、对 “ 自由表达 ” 和“写作方法”的反思

新课程标准提倡学生在习作中自由表达，让学生 “ 我手写我口，我口述我心 ” ，让学生从心理上认可习作是很容易的，避免造成畏难心理。但是学生的情况千差万别，有些学生他的 “ 口 ” 或 “ 手 ” 并不能完全表达自己的心。这就要求教师在习作的指导上还不能完全放手让学生自由的表达。如何将作文的写法指导与自由表达统一起来，是习作指导需深入研究的课题。所以我设计一个“素材整理卡”，让学生把刚刚说的内容整理一下，并用一篇例文来说明构段方法，这样放低坡度，降低要求，让学生很容易完成任务，他们也乐于接受。

在实际教学中，因教师语言不够简练，造成重复啰嗦，而且缺乏感染力；评价语言单一，没有起到很好的激励作用；三年级学生的课堂本该活泼生动，但教师激情引导不够，课堂气氛略显单调。总之，课堂是一门缺憾的艺术，习作课堂更是如此，我会在实践中不断反思，在反思中锤炼自己的教学行为和习惯，努力让习作课堂变得多姿多彩。

When the young people start their career, they will do everything to get

the chance to help their career to make breakthrough, such as follow the

business rules. They choose to drink as much as possible, which is over the

limitation of their bodies. The coming wealth is based on the loss of health.

The media reported the news about how the young people died of drinking a lot of

alcohol. Their ambition made them to undertake the limitation. As a result, they

died at the young age. There is no doubt that health overweighs wealth. If a

rich people didnt have a sound body, how he can enjoy life. A man who has been

badly ill will take special attention to the health. No matter how much money he

is paid, he will turn down the invitation that hurts his body.

叶圣陶先生对《一张画像》这篇作文作了仔细的推敲、修改，主要是从以下六个方面修改的。

(1)

把用词不准确的地方改准确。除课文已经举到的把“一张画像”改为“一幅画像”、把“书皮”改成“包书纸”外，还有：作文中写“我递给同桌小强看，还不停地给他讲着”，叶老将“不停”改为“悄悄”，这就更符合当时正在上课的实际情况。作文中写“原来拿画的正是王老师”，叶老将“画”改为“几何课本”，因为王老师拿的是带有图画的课本，并不是一幅画。作文中还写王老师“谈到今天，也谈到了明天，并不断地问我”，叶老将“并不断地”改为“最后他”，因为王老师不可能不断地问同一个问题，叶老这样一改就合乎情理了。

(2)

把不通顺的句子改通顺。作文中写“口里还不住地呐喊：‘冲啊，向几何进军！’”这个句子用词不准确，因为呐喊是大声喊叫、助威的意思，而画面是不可能出声的，叶老改为“从口里还吐出来几个字……”这样就既符合画面的意思，又表达确切。作文中写“我的脸顿时变得通红”，还有最后一句“我的脸顿时臊得通红”，这两句都不真实，因为这时自己是看不到自己脸色的变化的，叶老分别改为“我的脸顿时一阵热”“臊得我脸上顿时火辣辣地一阵热”，这就真实可信了。作文中写“我被他的兴致勾引起来”，这句话没说清楚“我”的什么被王老师勾起来了，所以叶老调整了词序，改为“我的兴致被他勾引起来了”。作文中还写道：“我看见他的粗眉紧皱着，像拧成了一股黑绳。”“拧成了一股黑绳”比喻不当，言过其实，叶老改成“我看见他紧皱着眉头”，不仅文字简洁，也符合当时的实际情况。

(3)

把长句断成短句。如，把“那站在门口手里拿着大三角板和大圆规的王老师，就是我们的新班主任”，改为“我们的新班主任王老师站在教室门口，手里拿着大三角板和大圆规”。把“左边又画了两个少先队员拿着两簇鲜花”改为“靠左边又画了两个少先队员，手里拿着鲜花”，这样把长句断成短句，不但表达得清楚明白，而且读起来也朗朗上口。

(4)

删去重复啰唆的词句。这类修改的地方非常多。如，“他从班上的小事情一直谈到了国家的大事情，谈到了今天，也谈到了明天”，这句话中“了”字用得太多，显得啰唆，叶老都删去了。再如，“看见王老师一个人在桌旁画着什么”，“桌旁”一词没有必要，叶老也删去了。删去重复啰唆的词语，句子就干净简洁多了。

(5)

增添一些词句，使表达的意思更清楚、更完整。如，作文中写“我跟你一样，也喜欢画画，尤其是人像”，叶老把“尤其是人像”改为“尤其喜欢画人像”。因为“尤其是人像”也可以理解成尤其喜欢人像的图画之类，加上了“喜欢画”三个字，意思就清楚明白了。再如，作文中写“小强突然告诉我，王老师叫我到数学教研组去。没料到王老师见到我来了，就笑着问……”这里的前后两句话衔接得不好，“没料到”的意思没有体现出来。叶老添上“我以为准是要挨‘斥儿’了”，这样，句与句之间的衔接就比较紧密，意思表达得也比较准确完整了。

(6)

改正错别字和使用不当的标点符号。作文中有好几处将“像”写成“象”，叶老一一加以改正。标点符号方面的修改也比较多，有的逗号改成句号，有的句号改成逗号，还有感叹号改成句号，这些修改都值得仔细琢磨，都是很有道理的。还有几处比较明显的标点错误，如，“我就轻轻地叫了声：‘王老师’。”这句话中间不能用冒号。“心就像刚上岸的鱼‘扑腾、扑腾’一个劲儿地跳。”中间要用逗号断开，“扑腾扑腾”不必加顿号。“就像是在欢迎着家长似的……”“吹得我心里甜滋滋的……”两句话中所使用的省略号也没有必要。所有这些，叶老都一一加以修改，可见叶老对这篇作文的修改是多么仔细、认真。

示例一：

Dear____,

There will a _____(内容) at/in______(地点) on____(时间). We would be honored to have you there with us.

The occasion will start at _______(具体时间). This will be followed by a ____(进一步的安排). At around______(时间)，__________(另一个安排)

I really hope you can make it. RSVP before ______(通知你的最后期限)

Yours sincerely

Li Ming

比和比例这部分里容，概念多，有比较抽象，很多概念既有联系又有区别，诸如“比”和“比例”，“求比值”和“化简比”等，学生很容易混淆，尤其是在应用正、反比例的概念进行判断，解决实际问题时盲目乱猜的现象极为常见。因此，在总复习时要把这部分内容进行归纳整理，运用知识的内在联系，促进正迁移，防止负迁移，巩固知识，提高能力。

《比和比例》属于概念课，为了让学生对比和比例的知识形成整体的认识，又能把握住知识之间的联系和区别，达成触类旁通，一举多得，我将比和比例的知识对比复习，深化基本概念。当问学生“关于比和比例我们已经知道了些什么？”时，同学们讲了很多，同时也深深感到这些知识点如果这样处理的话会显得零乱、无序、缺乏系统化。

理清知识体系要充分调动学生的主动性和积极性，要让学生自己动手动脑，教师的作用主要是引导、帮助、点拨和补充。