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2015年英语六年级写作基础知识精选8篇 作文(最新20篇)

导语:作文失分的因素有很多,其中卷面是否干净也是一种因素。下面是小编整理的九大得分技巧,仅供大家参考!

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BusyWeekend小学六年级英语作文

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Hi ,this is Wang Fang Ping, I’m going to have a busy weekend! On Saturday, I’m going to go shopping with my friend by bus. I’m going to buy a pair of new shoes, some books and magazine. Then I’m going to visit my grandparents by bike.

On Sunday, I’m going to my friend home. We will do homework.. Then, in the evening, I’m going to supermarket with my brother. He likes toy very much.. In the market, I’m going to buy five notebooks, one pen, three pencils, one pencil-case, a color pen and many snacks. At home, we are going to watch TV together. That will be fun. What about you? What are you going to do on the weekend?

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篇1:高考英语作文写作的技巧盘点

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从每年的考试情况来看,很多同学能完整地按照要求把文章写出来,但得分却较低。实际上,高考英语书面表达是一个分值颇高且易得分的题型,只是很多同学没有掌握得分技巧。下面我们一起看看怎样才能让高考作文拽起来。

一、几点重要原则

1.智者利用押题,傻子依赖押题!

2.书面表达整篇背诵绝无必要,可以以看读为主,关键是从中汲取一些常用的词汇和表达,并能得体熟练地运用。考场上应变能力很重要!

3.英文写作模仿很重要。有时也很有效。但不能过于牵强,尤其是对一些长难句的刻意模仿使用。

4.文似看山不喜平,起承转合一定要有!

5.见微知著,一叶知秋,几个亮点足矣:有道是:浓妆淡抹总相宜,作文写得简洁到位要比长篇大论更显功力。

6.心不为形役。不要身陷逐字逐句英汉对号式的字面翻译,要把表达的主动权始终握在自己手里。

二、善用万能句以不变应万变

历届高考,书面表达考得最多是提示作文,即提供一定的情景内容,要求考生完成100词左右的短文。

从命题方式看,有短文提示、要点提示、图画提示、情景提示以及图表提示等;体裁以应用文为主,记叙文为辅:题材为广大中学生所熟悉的日常生活。从提供要点的情景方面看,历届高考书面表达题均属供料小作文,采用文字供料或文字说明加图画(图表)的方式供料。

备考时,同学们要利用有限的时间把以前背的范文整理一下,从中选出不同体裁、不同题材的范文各一篇(范文以高考真题的高分作文为佳),把它们重新记忆,一定记牢。这样,高考时不管什么样的文章都可套用背诵好的格式。避免考场上因紧张而无章可循。

最后阶段,还要总结一下写作时常用且能出彩的固定句型、句式,比如强调句型、定语从句、名诃性从句等,牢记英语的五个基本句式,背诵平时老师总结的万能句。以不变应万变。

考场答题前,应仔细审题,研究所提供的文字和图画(图表)材料和作文要求。分析、提炼要点,理顺要点,确立基本的写作思路,不要忽略任何一个词。关键的词更不能遗漏,构思好写几个方面,缺一不可。

写作时,尽量用学过的英语句型和词组。少写长句和复杂句以免弄巧成拙、漏洞百出。但目前高考有关书面表达的评分标准要求作文中应有较多的语法结构和词汇,因此同学们在书面表达中不能都写小句、短句和单句,还要正确运用高级词汇和复杂结构。恰当运用过渡词,使写出来的文章含金量更高,更具可读性。

三、高分作文六大特性

1.条理性。指的是合理安排文章结构。首先,在文章思路、组织材料、叙述顺序等方面要有一定的条理性。其次。根据需要,安排好段落,各段之间要层次分明,也要重视每一段的开头和结尾,开头语往往是总起句,结尾语往往是总结句。

2.准确性。指要求写出语法正确的句子,包括时态、语态、用词和句法等,要准确、地道地表达。必须要牢牢掌握一些常用句型或习惯表达,避免中式英语,在实践中不断总结中英用法的差异,养成用英语思维写作的习惯。

3.流畅性。指根据整篇文章思想的需要,有效采用不同的连接手段,使文章层次清楚、行文连贯。

4.简洁多样性。简洁性就是语言简洁,不重复。多样性就是能随情景内容的变化写出句式多样的语句。这也是新课程标准对写作的评价标准。

5.思想性。新标准对写作的要求,增加了情感因素,在准确流畅表达写作要点的同时,适当增加句子的感情色彩,增加一些人情味,使文章读起来更亲切,完全达到与读者进行交流的目的。

6.美观性。指的是卷面书写规范、清楚、干净、整洁。

四、怎样才能有拽的感觉

1.高考写作的实质变相考查句型与词汇的灵活应用

英语写作不同于语文作文的写作,如果说语文作文是一个自由发挥的舞蹈,那么高考英语写作就是带着枷锁在跳舞。我之所以这样来形容,是因为高考英语写作的内容都已经通过文字、表格、图片这三种形式给定,内容方面,不需要学生进行发挥,大家所需要发挥的就是不要老去给这个不变的内容穿毫无变化的校服(简单句),而要去穿一些不一样的衣服,让它显得不那么单调,让阅卷老师能看到不同,而那些所谓的衣服也就是多变句型与词汇。

2.写作的评分标准怎么去迎合评卷老师的胃口

我了解到目前很大一部分学生的作文都处在15分左右,写作满分25分,15分也就是个及格分,那么15分和20多分的作文到底差在哪里?这个问题很容易回答。15分的作文中规中矩,该对的都对,包括内容要点的完整,语法与词形的正确,但是全都是简单句子的堆砌,没有任何亮点。而20多分的作文在句型词汇方面就做了很好的包装,它的句子穿的衣服已经不是校服,而是李宁、耐克,或者是阿迪,所以让人觉得很拽,而高考英语写作要的就是这种很拽的感觉。

3.写作提分的三要素句型。连词。高级词汇

句子是我们写作文最大的单位。有了漂亮的句子。用好的连词将其连句成段,再加上一些如星星般亮点词汇的点缀,一篇好的高考英语作文就诞生了。而这三个因素中最容易把握的是句子,最难的是高级词汇,限于大家的词汇还比较有限。一篇文章中出现那么一两个就够了。我们应该把重心放在句型上,因为这个最容易把握。

但是大家又有这样的困惑,学校里老师也给了我们很多的句型啊,动辄成五十上百句的,大家背得挺多,但是面对考试的时候,发现背的那些怎么也用不上。其实不是那些东西没有用,而是它们太干了,就好比一根干骨头,大家嚼起来很没有味。也不知道该把它们往哪里放。

在这里我给大家提供一种比较切实可行、迅速提高的练习方法,在接下来的时间里只要大家按照这个方法来,就一定会有收获。

找出历年真题,一周只需要写两篇。但是要这么来写。

1.把你要写的内容要点用九到十句的汉语表达出来。

2.逐一地进行翻译,不是用简单句。而是要刻意地去想:

(1)可以用什么样的复杂句;

(2)怎样去避开不会的表达,转义。

例如:

这本书是如此的有趣,以至于我读了一遍又一遍。

1.This book was so interest,ing that l read it again and again,

2.This was such an interest,ing book that l read it again andagain,

3.This was s0 jnteresting abook that l read it again and again

4.So interesting was thisbook that l read it again and again

这四句译文当中无疑评卷老师最欣赏的是第四句,因为它用了倒装。

4.如何备考

其实这种思维大家都有。但是没有成为一种思路,让它能在考试中起到作用,那是因为大家练得少。英语写作处在一种很尴尬的境地,一方面大家要分数。但另外一方面大家一个学期里写的作文也就是期中期末的两篇。毫不夸张地说,有的学生上了三年的高中可能只写了六篇作文,所以练习是很重要的,要是现在不练而把高考当练习。那么作文只拿14、15分也合情合理了,到那时你不要骂评卷老师不公平,而应该问问自己备考的时候为什么不多练几篇。时间都是挤出来的,希望大家可以挤出时间来练写作。

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篇2:小学生有情感的书信写作基础

全文共 387 字

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导语:书信,是工作、生活中最常见、常用的一种应用文。是个人与个人、个人与家庭、个人与社会(某单位)之间交流、沟通的交际工具,也是相互联系的一种方法和手段。尽管现在科学技术不断发展、不断现代法,已经用电话、移动电话、计算机网上交流等快捷的方式替代了写信,但作小学生还是应该掌握写信的一些方法和技巧。应为只有会写信,才能学会在纸上、在计算机上、在电话里发表自己的看法,表达自己的意愿。写信,就是学会表达,学会写文章。

信的形式以记叙文为主。表达的特点可以是一个中心内容,也可以是几个主题。想要向对方讲几件事都可以,它是一种最自由,嘴便于表达思想、抒发情感的方式。

写信要把握四个大方面。

第一,学会写信封;

第二,掌握写信的格式和方法;

第三,向对方说清楚自己要表达的意思;

第四,根据与收信人的关系,语言要运用得体。

小学生必须学会写信,这样可以给今后的学习、生活、工作带来很多方便和益处。

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篇3:小学六年级英语作文:爸爸的承诺

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Next week, my birthday will come and I am so happy about it. My father tells me that he has prepared the gift for me and he wants to give me the surprise. But my father later tells me that he has to go out for business. I am so disappointed, he has promised me before. But my father keep his promise and sends me the gift.

下周,我的生日即将到来,我很高兴。我父亲告诉我,他已经为我准备了礼物,他想给我一个惊喜。但后来我父亲告诉我,他必须出差。我很失望,他之前承诺过我。但是我的父亲信守诺言,把礼物寄给了我。

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篇4:六年级毕业班英语

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My school is big and beautiful. It is in my hometown. There are many flowers, trees and grass there. There is a track on the playground, too.

Im in Class 3, Grade 6. In my school, every grade has three classes. There are seven lessons every day. We must get up at 5:30, because our school bus comes at 6:30. We get to school probably at 6:55. Our class begins at 7:50. We eat lunch at school at 12:00. We finish school at 3:30. So we go home very early. After school, I do my homework at home. Sometimes, I play football with my friends. We are all very happy. This is my school!

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篇5:英语写作经典句式积累

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下面是语文迷网小编为大家整理的英语写作的经典句式,希望对你有帮助。

1. According to a recent survey, four million people die each year from diseases linked to smoking.

依照最近的一项调查,每年有4,000,000人死于与吸烟有关的疾病。

2. The latest surveys show that quite a few children have unpleasant associations with homework.

最近的调查显示相当多的孩子对家庭作业没什么好感。

3. No invention has received more praise and abuse than Internet.

没有一项发明像互联网一样同时受到如此多的赞扬和批评。

4. People seem to fail to take into account the fact that education does not end with graduation.

人们似乎忽视了教育不应该随着毕业而结束这一事实。

5. An increasing number of people are beginning to realize that education is not complete with graduation.

越来越多的人开始意识到教育不能随着毕业而结束。

6. When it comes to education, the majority of people believe that education is a lifetime study.

说到教育,大部分人认为其是一个终生的学习。

7. Many experts point out that physical exercise contributes directly to a persons physical fitness.

许多专家指出体育锻炼直接有助于身体健康。

8. Proper measures must be taken to limit the number of foreign tourists and the great efforts should be made to protect local environment and history from the harmful effects of international tourism.

应该采取适当的措施限制外国旅游者的数量,努力保护当地环境和历史不受国际旅游业的不利影响。

9. An increasing number of experts believe that migrants will exert positive effects on construction of city. However, this opinion is now being questioned by more and more city residents, who complain that the migrants have brought many serious problems like crime and prostitution.

越来越多的专家相信移民对城市的建设起到积极作用。然而,越来越多的城市居民却怀疑这种说法,他们抱怨民工给城市带来了许多严重的问题,像犯罪和卖淫。

10. Many city residents complain that it is so few buses in their city that they have to spend much more time waiting for a bus, which is usually crowded with a large number of passengers.

许多市民抱怨城市的公交车太少,以至于他们要花很长时间等一辆公交车,而车上可能已满载乘客。

11. There is no denying the fact that air pollution is an extremely serious problem: the city authorities should take strong measures to deal with it.

无可否认,空气污染是一个极其严重的问题:城市当局应该采取有力措施来解决它。

12. An investigation shows that female workers tend to have a favorable attitude toward retirement.

一项调查显示妇女欢迎退休。

12a. A proper part-time job does not occupy students too much time. In fact, it is unhealthy for them to spend all of time on their study. As an old saying goes: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

一份适当的业余工作并不会占用学生太多的时间,事实上,把全部的时间都用到学习上并不健康,正如那句老话:只工作,不玩耍,聪明的孩子会变傻。

14. Any government, which is blind to this point, may pay a heavy price.

任何政府忽视这一点都将付出巨大的代价。

15.Nowadays, many students always go into raptures at the mere mention of the coming life of high school or college they will begin. Unfortunately, for most young people, it is not pleasant experience on their first day on campus.

当前,一提到即将开始的学校生活,许多学生都会兴高采烈。然而,对多数年轻人来说,校园刚开始的日子并不是什么愉快的经历。

16. In view of the seriousness of this problem, effective measures should be taken before things get worse.

考虑到问题的严重性,在事态进一步恶化之前,必须采取有效的措施。

17. The majority of students believe that part-time job will provide them with more opportunities to develop their interpersonal skills, which may put them in a favorable position in the future job markets.

大部分学生相信业余工作会使他们有更多机会发展人际交往能力,而这对他们未来找工作是非常有好处的。

18. It is indisputable that there are millions of people who still have a miserable life and have to face the dangers of starvation and exposure.

无可争辩,现在有成千上万的人仍过着挨饿受冻的痛苦生活。

19. Although this view is wildly held, this is little evidence that education can be obtained at any age and at any place.

尽管这一观点被广泛接受,很少有证据表明教育能够在任何地点、任何年龄进行。

20. No one can deny the fact that a persons education is the most important aspect of his life.

没有人能否认:教育是人生最重要的一方面。

21. People equate success in life with the ability of operating computer.

人们把会使用计算机与人生成功相提并论。

22. In the last decades, advances in medical technology have made it possible for people to live longer than in the past.

在过去的几十年,先进的医疗技术已经使得人们比过去活的时间更长成为可能。

23. In fact, we have to admit the fact that the quality of life is as important as life itself.

事实上,我们必须承认生命的质量和生命本身一样重要。

24. We should spare no effort to beautify our environment.

我们应该不遗余力地美化我们的环境。

25. People believe that computer skills will enhance their job opportunities or promotion opportunities.

人们相信拥有计算机技术可以获得更多工作或提升的机会。

26. The information Ive collected over last few years leads me to believe that this knowledge may be less useful than most people think.

从这几年我搜集的信息来看,这些知识并没有人们想象的那么有用。

27. Now, it is generally accepted that no college or university can educate its students by the time they graduation.

现在,人们普遍认为没有一所大学能够在毕业时候教给学生所有的知识。

28. This is a matter of life and death--a matter no country can afford to ignore.

这是一个关系到生死的问题,任何国家都不能忽视。

29. For my part, I agree with the latter opinion for the following reasons:

我同意后者,有如下理由:

30. Before giving my opinion, I think it is important to look at the arguments on both sides.

在给出我的观点之前,我想看看双方的观点是重要的。

31. This view&nbsnbsp;is now being questioned by more and more people.

这一观点正受到越来越多人的质疑。

32. Although many people claim that, along with the rapidly economic development, the number of people who use bicycle are decreasing and bicycle is bound to die out. The information Ive collected over the recent years leads me to believe that bicycle will continue to play extremely important roles in modern society.

尽管许多人认为随着经济的高速发展,用自行车的人数会减少,自行车可能会消亡, 然而,这几年我收集的一些信息让我相信自行车仍然会继续在现代社会发挥极其重要的作用。

33. Environmental experts point out that increasing pollution not only causes serious problems such as global warming but also could threaten to end human life on our planet.

环境学家指出:持续增加的污染不仅会导致像全球变暖这样严重的问题,而且还将威胁到人类在这个星球的生存。

34. In view of such serious situation, environmental tools of transportation like bicycle are more important than any time before.

考虑到这些严重的状况,我们比以往任何时候更需要像自行车这样的环保型交通工具。

35. Using bicycle contributes greatly to peoples physical fitness as well as easing traffic jams.

使用自行车有助于人们的身体健康,并极大地缓解了交通阻塞。

36. Despite many obvious advantages of bicycle, it is not without its problem.

尽管自行车有许多明显的优点,但是它也存在它的问题。

37. Bicycle cant be compared with other means of transportation like car and train for speed and comfort.

在速度和舒适度方面,自行车是无法和汽车、火车这样的交通工具相比的。

38. From what has been discussed above, we may safely draw the conclusion that advantages of bicycle far outweigh its disadvantages and it will still play essential roles in modern society.

通过以上讨论,我们可以得出结论:自行车的优点远大于缺点,并且在现代社会它仍将发挥重要作用。

39. There is a general discussion these days over education in many colleges and institutes. One of the questions under debate is whether education is a lifetime study.

当前在高校和研究机构对教育存在着大量争论,其中一个问题就是教育是否是个终身学习的过程。

40. This issue has caused wide public concern.

这个问题已经引起了广泛关注。

41. It must be noted that learning must be done by a person himself.

必须指出学习只能靠自己。

42. A large number of people tend to live under the illusion that they had completed their education when they finished their schooling. Obviously, they seem to fail to take into account the basic fact that a persons education is a most important aspect of his life.

许多人存在这样的误解,认为离开学校就意味着结束了他们的教育。显然,他们忽视了教育是人生重要部分这一基本事实。

43. As for me, Im in favor of the opinion that education is not complete with graduation, for the following reasons:

就我而言,我同意教育不应该随着毕业而结束的观点,有以下原因:

44. It is commonly accepted that no college or university can educate its students by the time they graduate.

人们普遍认为高校是不可能在毕业的时候教会他们的学生所有知识的。

45. Even the best possible graduate needs to continue learning before she or he becomes an educated person.

即使最优秀的毕业生,要想成为一个博学的人也要不断地学习。

46. It is commonly thought that our society had dramatically changed by modern science and technology, and human had made extraordinary progress in knowledge and technology over the recent decades.

人们普遍认为我们的现代科技使我们的社会发生了巨大的变化,近几十年人类在科技方面取得了惊人的进步。

47. Now people in growing numbers are beginning to believe that learning new skills and knowledge contributes directly to enhancing their job opportunities or promotion opportunities.

现在越来越多的人开始相信学习新的技术和知识能直接帮助他们获得工作就会或提升的机会。

48. An investigation shows that many older people express a strong desire to continue studying in university or college.

一项调查显示许多老人都有到大学继续学习的愿望。

49. For the majority of people, reading or learning a new skill has become the focus of their lives and the source of their happiness and contentment after their retirement.

对大多数人来讲,退休以后,阅读或学习一项新技术已成为他们生活的中心和快乐的来源。

50. For people who want to adopt a healthy and meaningful life style, it is important to find time to learn certain new knowledge. Just as an old saying goes: it is never too late to learn.

对于那些想过上健康而有意义的生活的人们来说,找时间学习一些新知识是很重要的,正如那句老话:活到老,学到老

51. There is a general debate on the campus today over the phenomenon of college or high school students doing a part-time job.

对于大学或高中生打工这一现象,校园里进行着广泛的争论。

52. By taking a major-related part-job, students can not only improve their academic studies, but gain much experience, experience they will never be able to get from the textbooks.

通过做一份和专业相关的工作,学生不仅能够提高他们的专业能力,而且能获得从课本上得不到的经验。

53. Although people’s lives have been dramatically changed over the last decades, it must be admitted that, shortage of funds is still the one of the biggest questions that students nowadays have to face because that tuition fees and prices of books are soaring by the day.

近几十年,尽管人们的生活有了惊人的改变,但必须承认,由于学费和书费日益飞涨,资金短缺仍然是学生们面临的最大问题之一。

54. Consequently, the extra money obtained from part-time job will strongly support students to continue to their study life.

因此,业余工作挣来的钱将强有力地支持学生们继续他们的求学生活。

55. From what has been discussed above, we may safely draw a conclusion that part-time job can produce a far-reaching impact on students and they should be encouraged to take part-time job, which will benefit students and their family, even the society as a whole.

通过上面的讨论,我们不难得出结论:业余工作对学生们会产生深远的影响,我们应鼓励学生从事业余工作,这将有利于学生和他们的家庭,甚至整个社会。

56. These days, people in growing numbers are beginning to complain that work is more stressful and less leisurely than in past. Many experts point out that, along with the development of modern society, it is an inevitable result and there is no way to avoid it.

现在,越来越多的人们开始抱怨工作比以前更有压力。许多专家指出这是现代社会发展必然的结果,无法避免。

57. It is widely acknowledged that computer and other machines have become an indispensable part of our society, which make our life and work more comfortable and less laborious.

人们普遍认为计算机和其他机器已经成为我们社会必不可少的一部分。 它们使我们的生活更舒适,减少了大量劳动。

58. At the same time, along with the benefits of such machines, employees must study knowledge involved in such machines so that they are able to control them.

同时,随着这些机器带给我们的好处,员工们也必须要学习与之相关的知识以便使用它们。

59. No one can deny the basic fact that it is impossible for average workers to master those high-technology skills easily.

没有人能否认这一基本事实:对于一般工人来讲,轻松掌握这些技术是不可能的。

60. In the second place, there seem to be too many people without job and not enough job position.

第二方面,失业的人似乎太多而又没有足够的工作岗位。

61. Millions of people have to spend more time and energy on studying new skills and technology so that they can keep a favorable position in job market.

成千上万的人们不得不花费更多的精力和时间学习新的技术和知识,使得他们在就业市场能保持优势。

62. According to a recent survey, a growing number of people express a strong desire to take another job or spend more time on their job in order to get more money to support their family.

根据最近的一项调查,越来越多的人表达了想从事另外的工作或加班以赚取更多的钱来补贴家用的强烈愿望。

63. From what has been discussed above, I am fully convinced that the leisure life-style is undergoing a decline with the progress of modern society, it is not necessary a bad thing.

通过以上讨论,我完全相信,随着现代社会的进步,幽闲的生活方式正在消失并不是件坏事。

64. The problem of international tourism has caused wide public concern over the recent years.

近些年,国际旅游的问题引起了广泛关注。

65. Many people believe that international tourism produce positive effects on economic growth and local government should be encouraged to promote international tourism.

许多人认为国际旅游对经济发展有积极作用,应鼓励地方政府发展国际旅游。

66. But what these people fail to see is that international tourism may bring about a disastrous impact on our environment and local history.

但是这些人忽视了国际旅游可能会给当地环境和历史造成的灾难性的影响。

67. As for me, Im firmly convinced that the number of foreign tourists should be limited, for the following reasons:

就我而言,我坚定地认为国外旅游者的数量应得到限制,理由如下:

68. In addition, in order to attract tourists, a lot of artificial facilities have been built, which have certain unfavorable effects on the environment.

另外,为了吸引旅游者,大量人工设施被修建,这对环境是不利的。

69. For lack of distinct culture, some places will not attract tourists any more. Consequently, the fast rise in number of foreign tourists may eventually lead to the decline of local tourism.

由于缺乏独特的文化,一些地方不再吸引旅游者。因此,国外旅游者数量的快速增加可能最终会导致当地旅游业的衰败。

70. There is a growing tendency for parents to ask their children to accept extra educational programs over the recent years.

近些年,父母要求他们的孩子接受额外的教育呈增长的势头。

71. This phenomenon has caused wide public concern in many places of world.

这一现象在全世界许多地方已引起了广泛关注。

72. Many parents believe that additional educational activities enjoy obvious advantage. By extra studies, they maintain, their children are able to obtain many kinds of practical skills and useful knowledge, which will put them in a beneficial position in the future job&nbsnbsp;markets when they grow up.

许多家长相信额外的教育活动有许多优点,通过学习,他们的孩子可以获得很多实践技能和有用的知识,当他们长大后,这些对他们就业是大有好处的。

73. In the first place, extra studies bring about unhealthy impacts on physical growth of children. Educational experts point out that, it is equally important to take some sport activities instead of extra studies when children have spent the whole day in a boring classroom.

首先,额外的学习对孩子们的身体发育是不利的。教育专家指出,孩子们在枯燥的教室里呆了一整天后,从事一些体育活动,而不是额外的学习,是非常重要的。

74. Children are undergoing fast physical development; lack of physical exercise may produce disastrous influence on their later life.

孩子们正处于身体快速发育时期,缺乏体育锻炼可能会对他们未来的生活造成严重的影响。

75. In the second place, from psychological aspect, the majority of children seem to tend to have an unfavorable attitude toward additional educational activities.

第二,从心理上讲,大部分孩子似乎对额外的学习没有什么好感。

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篇6:有关英语作文time六年级

全文共 303 字

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When I go to school, teachers always tell me that we should make used of

Timeand study hard. I dont put it in my heart. But when I realize my

classmates are making big progress, I know I have wasted a lot of time to

improve myself. So from now on, I must study hard and learn as much knowledge as

possible.

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篇7:小学六年级英语写一封信

全文共 621 字

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Dear Wei Fang,

I hear that you have won first prize in the English Speech Contest of Middle School Students, so I’m writing to give my sincere congratulations.

You don’t know how excited I was when I heard the good news. As your best friend, I am proud of you! Your pronunciation and fluent English left me with deep impression. It came as no surprise to me that you won the contest. Could you share with me how you improve your spoken English? Your experience will be of great help to me in learning.

I will be grateful if you can write me back and give me your advice. I am looking forward to your early reply.

Yours,

Li Hua

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篇8:初中英语作文的写作方法

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不少同学在问了,英语作文怎么写?如何写好英语作文,下面是小编为大家收集的初中英语作文的写作方法,欢迎阅读。

初一英语写作题,题材一般是写人、写事、写物、写景、日记、书信、通知、便条等文体。一般来说,不同的写作题材,它的人物,时间,写作的重点也是不尽相同的。下面结合一些常见的题型介绍一下写作的注意事项以及写作技巧。

各地的评分标准略有差异,但是都包括以下几个方面:整体印象、语言表达、词数规定等几方面内容。我们在写作中要尽量避免扣分,争取有加分点。当然用英文写作不同于用母语那样得心应手,常常会受到生词、语法、惯用法的限制,只要同学们平时注意两种语言的异同性,抓住写作要点,也可妙笔生花。

1、为了保证文章层次分明、条理清楚,要把时间固定下来,如:记叙一件事要用过去时;写经常发生的事或对人物的描写,要用一般现在时。整个文章中的人称要一致,首尾呼应,不要随意改动,以免造成误解。

2、不要为了追求“一鸣惊人”而去找一些生冷的词汇,对这些一知半解的词你不会用,不知道如何搭配,结果可能适得其反,使文章显的生硬、不协调,甚至错误百出,所以要使用有把握的词,避免不必要的失分。比如说发生了一起意外事件,我们通常用“have an accident ”来表示,不要错误的使用“have an incident”。

3、注意不同语言的表达习惯,也是写好英语作文的重要环节,如“我的理想是做一名歌手”,很多同学写成“My ambition is to do/make a singer,” “to do”表示“做”或者“干”,“to make”表示“制作”,而“做一名歌手”则表示“成为一名歌手”应该用“be/become a singer”;又如“看书、看报”应用“read a book/newspaper”,而不是“see a book/newspaper”。因此,平时应该注意不同语言的表达习惯,切忌望文生义或一味生搬硬套。

4、有些同学因怕出错而只写短句或简单句,写出的文章过于幼稚、空洞乏味。要使文章有血有肉就要把平时学的知识用进去,如:定语从句、宾语从句、非谓语动词和比较等句型,关键时用上一、二个,就能使文章不同凡响,更有文采,特别是对关联词的使用,如“so that”、“not…but ”“not only...but also”等,会使你的文章逻辑结构紧密、层次鲜明、条理清楚,更能显示出你的英文功底,但要做到这些并非一日之功,要靠平时的不断训练和积累。

5、最简单的增分点就是认真的书写。工整漂亮的书写会给评卷老师留下美好的第一印象,在扣分时自然会“手下留情”,而且很多地区都在写作上有1分的书写分。只要平时多下点功夫,得到这一分并不难。

注意事项

最后将英语写作的基本步骤和技巧归纳为以下几个环节:

1、细心审题细读题目中每一项提示或观察所给的每一幅画,明确文章的中心思想,弄清题意,确定写作体裁,掌握所要表达的要点做到心中有数,避免随心所欲,文不对题。

2、理顺要点在所给提示或图上标出要点,然后按事件先后的顺序或各要点之间的内在联系排序,分出层次。如果是看图作文,则要按图构思,这样做既可避免要点遗漏,又可使表达内容条理清楚。

3、构成框架将理顺的要点或每幅图画的含义加以连贯,构成写作的整体框架,进一步定人称、定时态语态、定顺序、定段落、定开头结尾。基本框架构成后,写作就有了把握。

4、组织句子用自己最熟悉的短语或句型将理顺的要点逐句表达出来,多用简单句,用有把握的复合句。要扬长避短,避难就易。若遇到表达障碍,可换一种说法,将一句变成两、三句,只求达意。

5、串句成篇将写好的句子连贯地组织起来,注意上下句的逻辑关系,适当采用递进、让步、转折、因果等关联词语,使短文浑然一体,层次分明,过渡自然。6、检查修改文章草成后,默读1~2遍,检查修改,尤其要注意人称、大小写、拼写、习惯用语、格式有无错误,要点有无遗漏,文句有无语病,词数是否恰当,行文是否连贯。

英语写作水平的提高是一个渐进的过程,只要同学们在平时多加训练,多读文章,做一个有心人,就能在英语作文中取得理想的成绩

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篇9:英语四级写作素材精彩句型积累

全文共 3057 字

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英语写作积累很重要。下面是语文迷网为大家整理的英语四级作文精彩句式,希望对你有帮助。

一.开头句型

1.Recently the phenomenon has become a heated topic.

2.Recently the problem has been brought into focus.

3. Nowadays there is a growing concern over ... .

4. What calls for special attention is that...

5. There’s no denying the fact that...

6. what’s far more important is that...

7.It is common knowledge that honesty is the best policy.

8.It is well-known that…

9.Many nations have been faced with the problem of ...

10.According to a recent survey, ...

11. With the rapid development of ..., ...

二.结尾句型

1.From what has been discussed above, we can draw the conclusion that ...

2.In conclusion, it is imperative that ...

3.In summary, if we continue to ignore the above-mentioned issue, more problems will crop up. 4.With the efforts of all parts concerned, the problem will be solved thoroughly.

5.Taking all these into account, we ...

6. Whether it is good or not /positive or negative, one thing is certain/clear...

7.All things considered, ...

8.It may be safely said that...

9.Therefore, in my opinion, it’s more advisable...

10. It can be concluded from the discussion that...

11. From my point of view, it would be better if...

三.表原因句型

1.A number of factors are accountable for this situation.

A number of factors might contribute to (lead to )(account for ) the phenomenon(problem).

2. The answer to this problem involves many factors.

3. The phenomenon mainly stems from the fact that...

4. The factors that contribute to this situation include...

5. The change in ...largely results from the fact that...

6. Part of the explanations for it is that ...

7. One of the most common factors (causes ) is that ...

8. Another contributing factor (cause ) is ...

9. Perhaps the primary factor is that ...

10. But the fundamental cause is that ...

四.表比较句型

1.The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

2.The advantages of A are much greater than those of B.

3.A may be preferable to B, but A suffers from the disadvantages that...

5.For all the disadvantages, it has its compensating advantages.

6.Like anything else, it has its faults.

7.A and B has several points in common.

8.However, the same is not applicable to B.

9. A and B differ in several ways.

10. Evidently, it has both negative and positive effects.

五.表证明句型

1. No one can deny the fact that ...

2. The idea is hardly supported by facts.

3. Unfortunately, none of the available data shows ...

4. Recent studies indicate that ...

5. There is sufficient evidence to show that ...

6. According to statistics proved by ..., it can be seen that ...

六.表结果句型

1. It may give rise to a host of problems.

2. The immediate result it produces is ...

3. It will exercise a profound influence upon...

4. Its consequence can be so great that...

七.表反驳句型

1. It is true that ..., but one vital point is being left out.

2. There is a grain of truth in these statements, but they ignore a more important fact.

3. Many of us have been under the illusion that...

4. It makes no sense to argue for ...

5. Such a statement mainly rests on the assumption that ...

6. Contrary to what is widely accepted, I maintain that ...

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篇10:打下GMAT写作坚实基础的三个方法

全文共 559 字

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强化阅读。读书破万卷,下笔如有神,大量的阅读能丰富词汇量,提高语感,增长见识。阅读材料可以选择两个来源,一是原版国外名著,因为它们是英语规范语言的结晶;二是杂志、报刊和互联网等,这些资源是接触新词汇、新概念、新观点的好工具。

学以致用。GMAT写作的基本要求就是能在一般商业环境中有效和准确表达自己的观点。在国内如果不是在外企,恐怕很难有和他人用英语口头或者书面交流的机会。这时候可以考虑去一些英语聊天室或者聊天工具上和说英语的国内或国外朋友交流。国内比较热门的英语聊天室有263的英语角,有不少国内英语高手,也有一些国外朋友。ICQ,Yahoo Messager等也是结识国外朋友,练习书面英语的好地方。

专项提高。创造一个动笔的机会,要在GMAT写作中取得高分,还需要针对性练习。GMAT写作是分析性写作,或者要求和某一事物针锋相对提出和证明自己的观点,或者要求支持对方观点,属于议论文范畴。议论文的关键是自圆其说和有理有据,其篇章布局都有一定规律可循,可以当做新八股文来作:复述事实提出自己观点分点说明并举例证明总结。

GMAT写作高分之路没有捷径,需要考生不断拓展自己的阅读为GMAT写作打下坚实基础,也需要考生平时留言中英文的思维差别,多了解英文的思维和逻辑和论证方法,做好充足的准备,GMAT作文高分不会遥远。

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篇11:六年级关于低碳生活的英语作文

全文共 1666 字

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最近一个时期,我听到了“低碳生活”一词。通过看书了解,低碳生活是一种低消耗,低能量,低开支,从而减少二氧化碳的排放的生活方式。在查阅资料的过程中,我知道了保定是全国中小城市的试点城市,作为一名小学生,我能为低碳生活做点什么呢?

Recently, I heard a "low carbon life" is a word. By reading books about low carbon life is a kind of low consumption, low energy, low cost, thereby reducing carbon dioxide emissions by way of life. In the data access process, I know Baoding is a pilot city of national small and medium-sized city, as a student, what can I do for the low-carbon life?

以前,我就每天把水拧到最大,洗手、洗脸每月都要耗水十几吨,现在,老师告诉我们要准备两个水桶,用来储存废水。废水可以用来冲厕所,拖地、浇花。用电也要节约,看完电脑或电视后,要把插座上的小红灯关掉,以便节约电源,尽量放假时白天写作业,晚上早关灯一小时,用那一小时的时间和家人散步。既节约了电源,又起到了减肥的作用,还增进了感情,真是一举多得呀!少用一次性物品(筷子、饭盒等)少用塑料袋,多用环保袋。出行最好步行,少开私家车,少做出租,多做公交车。这样就做到了“低消耗、低能量、低开支”的作用。

Previously, so every day I screwed water to wash hands, every month, water consumption of ten tons, now, the teacher told us to prepare two bucket, used to store the waste water. The waste water can be used to flush the toilet, mopping the floor, water the flowers. Use of electricity is to save, read a computer or TV, to the socket on the small red light off, in order to save power, as far as possible when the homework, early in the evening lights for one hour, walking in the one hour time with family. Save power, but also played a role in weight loss, but also to enhance the feelings, really serve multiple purposes! Use less disposable items (such as chopsticks, lunch boxes) to use less plastic bags, use environmental protection bags. The best travel on foot, opened a small car rental, do less, do more buses. So do the "low consumption, low energy, low cost" role.

低碳生活,人人有责,让我先行,保护环境。

Low carbon life, everybody, let me first, Protect environment.

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篇12:六年级英语作文:MyHero

全文共 2636 字

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英雄就是凡人,在某时不顾个人安危,不计得失,敢于迎难而上的人,就堪称英雄。下面是语文迷为大家整理提供的英语作文:My Hero,希望对你有帮助。

My Hero篇一

As for the meaning of hero, Different people have different explanations. My hero is common people, but they do extraordinary things in their lives.

During the war years, fighting heroes of the liberation of the motherland sacrificed their lives to blow up people`s enemy in the air in order to open up the road of victory. From Dong Cunrui to Huang Jihuang ...... countless heroes with their lives, write On-e after another heroic patriotic movement which had inspired the patriotic spirit of generations of youth.

At the beginning of PRC, no one could not forget a person who helped a large numbers of people selflessly.His name was Lei Feng. To be specific, Comrade Lei Feng dedicated all his life to the people, which had a profound effect on the healthy growth of teenager-s .

Nowadays we youngsters pride ourselves on treating the Peoples Liberation Army as our hero. After Wenchuan earthquake happened, Chinese Peoples Liberation Army responded quickly in several hours . In the face of this severe trial, they developed the spirit of never afraid of sacrifice,no fear of fatigue and continuous fighting, and overcame all obstacles.Ultimately, Chinese people gained the great victory of earthquake relief .

All in all, our hero are often ordinary to the public. However, in order to safe-guard the people`s interest and defend state sovereignty, they can give up their family, their wealth and even their lives. Consequently, our hero will live in my heart till the end.

My Hero篇二

There are lots of heros in the world,but for me,Severus Snape is the biggest hero in my heart.

Severus Snape is a character in Harry Potter and he was born on January 9,1960.He was a professor in Hogwarts who taught students Potions and Defence Against The Dark Arts. Everybody thought Severus is an Eeath eater and belongs to Vlodemort because he killed Dumbledore.But in Harry Potter And The Deathy Hollows, when Severus died,he gave Harry his memory and said deeply:“Look at me.” Harry looked inside his memory and found out Severus loved Harry’s mother Lily very much and just because Vodemort killed her so he would rather let everyone hate him and spyed on Vodemort.

Severus Snape’s love is very moving. He lived for Lily and died for Lily. He loved her so much that he has to protect her son Harry even thought he is not his son. When Dumbledore asked him:“ You still love her, after all these time?” Severus answered firmly:“Always.” These words moved every reader’s heart.

Severus is not a real person,but I still think he is a great hero.He is,very brave and strong.

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篇13:六年级作文我的英语老师

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今天我去英瑞特上英语,刚想给魏老师打个招呼,没想到她对我摆摆手说:“我已经不给你们讲课了,新来的蔡老师要接替我的工作。”我一下子惆怅若失,心里空荡荡的,打心眼里憎恨那位把魏老师换走的新老师。

上课铃响了,我们五十四只眼睛齐唰唰地盯着门口,想见识见识新来的老师。不一会儿,门吱嘎一声开了,应声而来的是一位女老师。她的体形有些发福,两只眼睛被挤成了两道月牙。她走上讲台自我介绍:“我叫蔡媛媛。”只听见大家直呼一声“菜园子”大笑起来,蔡老师也笑着说:“我好有魅力呀,刚出场就迷倒了一半观众”。这下可好,房顶都要被我们的笑声掀垮了。老师见镇不住我们,突然眉头一皱,计上心头,说:“前几天我得了感冒现在还没好……”老师的话音未落,我们便一下子闭上了嘴巴,俗话说病从口入,谁也不愿意当病毒牺牲品。

课上了一半,枯躁无味的新概念把我们带到了一个乏味的世界,当教到case(盒子)这个单词时,我们再也没有兴趣继续学习了。老师看了看我们痛苦的表情,灵机一动,说:“我给你们讲个故事吧。在我读大学时,给我们教英语的是个男老师,在学case这个单词时,他问:“Who can give me a case?(谁能给我一个盒子)”,但我们都把case听成了同音词kiss(吻),老师看没人举手,便走到一个女生面前,问:“Can you give me a case?(你能给我一个盒子吗)”,只见她慢慢站起来,脸比苹果还红,然后不好意思地亲了一下老师,捂着脸坐下了。搞得那位教授丈二和尚摸不着头脑,莫名其妙地把嘴张成了O型。”蔡老师的话音还没落,全班同学早已笑成了一锅粥。

人不可貌相,海水不可斗量。蔡老师的课比我想象中的要精彩百倍,我希望所有的老师上课都这么幽默,让我们在轻松愉快的气氛中掌握知识。

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篇14:六年级英语日记

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This morning I went to the English corner which is in the park near my home. It is three years since it was founded. Many middle school students as well as college students and foreigners take part in the activity. People there practice speaking English by talking about something interesting. People also exchange the experience in English Learning. I think it is a good chance for me to use what I have learnt in my English class. I felt very cool after I got back home. I’ll try my best to learn English better, for it is so widely used in the world.

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篇15:我的英语老师六年级

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从小到大,经历了无数个老师的教诲,常常会回想起他们,想起他们的音容笑貌,想起他们的独特,想起他们作为一个老师所独具的影响力,最难忘我初中的英语老师,到今天为止,她也是我见过的最漂亮 最优雅的女人。

在农场黯淡的天色下,婉老师是一道亮丽的风景,她出生于一个大地主家庭,曾经是川大的校花,没有人知道她为什么会流落到农场来教书,她教我们的时候,已是四十岁的中年人了,苍白如纸的 脸上却看不到一丝皱纹,五官极精致,总给人不真实的感觉,有一种拒人于千里之外的高贵,她上课的时候,教室里出奇的安静,最调皮的男生就算逃课也不会在她课堂上喧哗的,除了讲课她不会有一 句多余的话,总是上课来,下了课就走,也不跟任何人寒喧,独自来独自去,眼神却是空茫的,农场庸常和琐碎的生活里,婉老师象不真实的影子留在我的记忆里。

我离开农场以后,婉老师也随着高升的丈夫到了省城,超常和孤傲的美丽注定了她会有一段轰轰烈烈不同凡响的经历,她竟然放着好好的官太太不做,跟一个小她十多岁的男人私奔了,最让人不能 接受的是,那男人除了一张漂亮的脸蛋和满嘴的油腔滑调以外一无是处,而且整整比她矮了一个头,所有人都说婉老师鬼迷心窍了,我想她是太想证明自己太想给自己找到一个舞台,女儿以死相逼也没 能让她回心转意,结果应了那句老话:”自古红颜多薄命“,没过多久,小男人因诈骗被判入狱,婉老师却没了退路,儿女拒绝认她,老公对她恨之入骨,那一刻,她要面对的不只是伤痛和悔恨,而是 整个世界的垮塌和陷落,于是,她消失了,从那以后,农场的人再也没有看见过她。

常常会想起美丽如画中人的婉老师,好想跟她说一声:安好!

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篇16:小学生写景作文的写作基础

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大自然物换星移、雨雪云雾,一山一水,一草一木,甚至人们生活的一些环境。下面是小编分享的小学写景作文的写作基础,欢迎大家阅读!

一、仔细观察,抓住景物特点。

第一要抓时序的特点。春夏秋冬,一年四季或晨、午、黄昏一天早晚,景色自然不一样。比如:《高大的皂荚树》中:“春天,下小雨啦。皂荚树为我们遮挡着,雨滴就不会很快调下来。我们就能够像平常一样,在操场上做体操,做游戏。夏天,暴烈的太阳当头照。有了皂荚树的遮挡,烈日就只能投下星星点点的光斑。我们活动在操场上觉得格外凉爽。秋天,皂荚树上许许多多得皂荚儿成熟了,那样子,就像常见得大扁豆。高年级得同学爬上树去,用带钩子得小竹竿把皂荚儿钩下来。小同学呢,把它们捡进筐里,交给老师。冬天,皂荚树落叶了。枯黄的小叶子,打着旋儿,不断地飘落,在地上铺一层一层。这时候,我们就把树叶扫到一起,堆放在墙脚下。”这些片断作者抓住了皂荚树在一年四季的不同特点,反映了作者对校园皂荚树的喜爱和赞美之情。

第二要抓场所的特点。

写景的文章有的指明了场所的,如《街头一景》、《校园春色》,就要把“校园”、“街头”、等这些场所的特点写出来。

第三要抓景色的特点。

不同的风景点特点是不同的,如有的是山景为主,有的以奇石闻名,有的借江湖增光,就应当抓住这些不同的特点,写出景物的个性。如:《火烧云》中:“这地方的火烧云变化极多,一会儿红彤彤的,一会儿金灿灿的,一会儿半紫半黄,一会儿半灰半百合色。葡萄灰,梨黄,茄子紫,这些颜色天空都有,还有些说也说不出来,见也没见过的颜色。”这个片断作者抓住了火烧云的色彩绚丽的特点进行描写的,从而反映了火烧云的美。

二、动静结合,写好景物特点。

在写景作文中,景物有静态与动态的区别。自然景色总是沉静的,但又都在不断地运动与变化之中。写景时既要注意静态的景,又在善于看出景中的动态,做到静中有动,动中有静,动静结合。描写时或先写静态后写动态,或先写动态后写静态,使景物处于静态与动态时的特征和谐完美地呈现在读者面前,只有这样,才能使文章中的景色特点“活”起来。如《第一场雪》中:“落光了叶子的柳树上,挂满了毛茸茸、亮晶晶地银条儿;冬夏常青地松树和柏树,堆满了蓬松松、沉甸甸的雪球。一阵风吹来,树枝轻轻地摇晃,银条儿和雪球儿簌簌地落下来,玉屑似的雪末儿随风飘扬,映着清晨的阳光,显出一道道五光十色的彩虹……

三、以情观景,借景抒情。

写景物的作文,不是为了写景而写景,它最终的目的是要表达人的一种情感。关键在于处理好“景”与“情”的关系。景与情贵在溶合,景中有情、情中有景,才能达到水乳交融、不可分离的境界。在方法上,可多加运用比喻、拟人等修辞手法,使景物带有人的特点,让写实与想象完美结合在一起。一篇优美的文章只有渗透了作者的真情实感,才能更好地表达文章中心,准确地抒发作者的情怀,使读者也能从课文美的文字中真切体会到景美物美,以及作者对景物的喜爱。如:《夕照》中:“太阳被裹上了橘黄色,没有了刺眼的光芒,稳稳地站在那排杨树上,没有丝毫衰老的样子。柔柔的光泻下来,给砖瓦房镀上一层华丽的金黄;房顶顿时化作一汪晶莹的湖水,每一片瓦都跳跃着的:“波纹”是夕阳得意的杰作。那平静的“湖面”难道不是被它踩碎的吗?啊,它和我一样调皮!”作者运用一连串的比喻和巧妙的拟人手法,写出了夕阳的柔美,落山时调皮的模样,使夕阳有了情感,有了生命活力,充分抒发了作者对夕阳的赞美,对夕阳的喜爱之情。

总的来说,写好景物就要抓住景物的特点,根据所写景物的特点,有所侧重地选择景物描写方法,写时要展开丰富的联想,并融入自己的真情实感。平时要多观察、多练习,把你所看到的最美的景色写出来,让读者感到鲜明生动,有身临其境之感。

[小学生写景作文的写作基础

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篇17:英语作文写作的需要背诵的部分

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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

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篇18:六年级英语作文:我的书包太重了

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My Backpack Is Too Heavy

I am a nine-year-old boy.I have a big heavy backpack.There are so many books and exercises books in it that I can hardly carry it.So my parents carry it for me every day.我是一个9岁的男孩。我有一个很大很重的书包。里面装着那么多书和练习本,我几乎背不动它。因此父母每天替我背着。

I have to work at weekends, doing endless homework and attending classes as well.In the evening I cant go to bed before ten.I have no time to play.在周末我还得学习,做哪些做也做不完的作业,还得去外面上课。晚上10点钟以前都不能睡觉。我没有时间玩。

I am tired of the heavy work, can you help me?我厌倦了这繁重的学习任务。 你能帮助我吗?

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篇19:六年级英语作文:A picture

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Let me say something about the picture.

There are two tall trees in it. Under the tree there is a long chair. And there is an old man reading about swimming. Near the old man, there is a boy painting. I think he loves painting very much. Next to the painting boy, there are two boys playing football. They are happy. But the football is in the river. Near the river, there are three children fishing. They go fishing about twice a week and they always go to the People’s Park. They like fishing. In the river, there is clear water and some fish swimming in it. The sky is clear, the sun is shining brightly, the weather is warm.. There are two birds flying in the sky, they are happy. Wow, that is a fun picture!

Dear friends, can you draw the picture?

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篇20:六年级英语作文:My English teacher

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hello! i’m he baoyi. we have three new teachers this term. but my favourite teacher is english teacher. who is she? yes, she’s linda.

do you want to know her? linda is very beautiful. look! she has a round face, two small black eyes, a straight nose, a big mouth and two small ears. her hair is very long. she is not tall and not short. she likes wearing a white dress. she looks like an angle. linda works very hard every day. and she is strict to us. but she is kind. her class is so much fun. really? yes. in class, she is our good teacher. after class, she is our good friend.

her favourite food is tofu. it ’s very very healthy. she is not only good at pingpong, but also good at singing. she likes talking with us. we all like her.

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