初中英语写作常用句型通用20篇

Directions：For this part you are allowed thirty minutes to write a composition on the topic Which Mode of Travel Do You like？ You should write noless than 150 words and base your composition on the outline （given in Chinese） below：

1. 有的人喜欢参加旅行社旅游（package tours）

2. 有的人喜欢自己独立行动（travelling on one’s own）

3. 比较这两种旅游方式，我喜欢的是……

范文：

With the general standard of living improvingand the working week becoming shorter，more andmore people are able to make a holiday trip toplaces of interest. While many like to joinpackage tours fro convenience，I prefer to traveln my own.

I like travelling on may own not only because it costs much less but because it gives a great degree of independence and freedom. Travelling on my own，I’m my own boss；and can decide when to start on my way，where to linger a little longer and which spot can be skipped over to save energy or time for another spot. I can always adjust my plan. On the contrary，in a package tour you’re deprived of as much freedom as in a military base. At the sound of the whistle，you have to jump up from a sound sleep and，with heavy-lidded eyes，hurry to the gathering place where you are collected and counted to board a coach. At the sight of the little flag waving，you must immediately take yourself away from the scenes you are marveling at and follow the guide whose sole interest is to cover all spots according to him strict schedule，regardless of the weather or your health condition.

True，you may encounter inconveniences if you travel individually，for instance，getting accommodations for the night and finding a place for meals. But nothing can be compared with the freedom which is vital to a person who takes a holiday trip mainly to escape from constraints of his routine life.

[初中英语作文说说你喜欢哪种方式的旅行

I am already 18 years old,but the memory of my childhood is still like an unforgettable sweet dream.

One day,all my family went to climb a mountain.There father told my elder sister and me that the first one to get to the top of the mountain would be given a toy.Hearing this,we began to run up.At first I kept ahead,but a few minutes later my sister was ahead of me.However,I didnt give up.That toy attracted me to run forward,In the end I reached the top first.

On the top we enjoyed the beautiful scenery and had a picnic.At dusk,we went down the mountain happily.I was the happiest one,because I not only got a toy train but also knew that one shouldnt give up readily.

learning is a daily experience and a lifetime mission. this is a proverb full of logic. in other words, learning is significant in our whole life. indeed, we can learn many things from it. if you understand it and apply it to your study or work, you’ll necessarily benefit a lot from it.

there are many reasons which can explain this phenomenon and the following are the typical ones. the first reason is that learning can light our road in the coming future. there is no denying the fact that the society is developing increasingly fast and we are often easily surpassed by the people around. the only way to avoid this is to learn to improve ourselves. as an illustration, i’d like to take myself as an example. after graduation from college, my life has been full of working pressure, which contributes to my decision of pursuing further education. that’s why i can make my own way in such a competitive society.

the effect of learning can be boiled down to two major ones. first, with the spirit of learning, we are more capable of overcoming the difficulties in the future. more importantly, we can enrich our spare time life by learning. no matter who you are, you must remember that learning is the basic skill in our life.

一、用于驳性和比较性论文

In general, I don’t agree with

2. In my opinion, this point of view doesn’t hold water。

3. The chief reason why… is that…

4.There is no true that…

5. It is not true that…

6. It can be easily denied than…

7. We have no reason to believe that…

8. What is more serious is that…

9. But it is pity that…

10. Besides, we should not neglect that…

二、用于描写图表和数据

It has increased by three times as compared with that of 1998.

2. There is an increase of 20% in total this year。

3. It has been increased by a factor of 4since 1995.

4. It would be expected to increase 5 times。

5. The table shows a three times increase over that of last year。

6. It was decreased twice than that of the year 1996.

7. The total number was lowered by 10%。

8. It rose from 10-15 percent of the total this year。

9. Compared with 1997, it fell from 15 to 10 percent。

10. The number is 5 times as much as that of 1995.

三、用于解释性和阐述性论说文

Everybody knows that…

2.It can be easily proved that…

3. It is true that…

4. No one can deny that

5. One thing which is equally important to the above mentioned is…

6. The chief reason is that…

7. We must recognize that…

8. There is on doubt that…

9. I am of the opinion that…

10. This can be expressed as follows;

我有一个非常严厉的英语，老师我的英语老师姓郝，中等个，戴一副近视眼镜平时她一头如波浪线一样的美发，秀美且整洁，非常漂亮。

每天的英语课总有意象不道的知识，但是也有如水一样多的作业。我认为老师是为我们好，为了提高学习成绩，为了拿着一份满意的分数，为了打好英语的基础。老师您辛苦了，您劳累了。

老师您知道吗？记得初一上册，我是一个错单词很多小女孩，有一次您找我谈话，对我教育告诉我记单词的方法，通过和您与我的谈话启发了我，与现在相比我的错单词是越来越少，奥秘也一点一滴积累。老师我谢谢您！

其实每次您布置的作业避免很多。也会遭遇许多同学的默默言辞，但是我明白您是有您的道理的，您也为我们花了不少时光，您也为我们操出了几根银丝。

在我心中有一支永不熄灭的蜡烛，永远燃烧着生命之火，永远都充满着生机与活力，这支蜡烛是不是很像在我们身边的一位很值得我们敬佩的人呢？他在课上给我们讲做人的道理；在课后是我们的益友，如果同学遇到不明白的问题，她还会耐心地教导我们，没错，他就是我们的老师，“蜡烛时刻在提醒着我们，要处处为他人着想。”这也许是老师常说的吧！

一年了，老师曾为了我们掉过多少“珍珠”？而我们呢？却时常惹她生气，心中真是难过，也很后悔：我，一名中学生，没有全身心地努力。老师，我想对您说：“您为我们操劳，任劳任怨；您带我们进入知识的海洋，在那里遨游，使我们懂得书中的乐趣；您精心备课，与我们一起品味书中美妙的午餐；您如好朋友似的关切我们；是您，是您，还是您！您像一根红烛，为后辈奉献出所有的光和热！您的品质和精神，可以用两个字来形容那就是——燃烧！不停的燃烧！您像一只会说话的小鸟，来为我们讲课，是那么得丰富多彩，每一个章节都仿佛在我面前打开了一扇窗户，让我看到了一个斑斓的新世界……

老师谢谢您！

[我的英语老师初中叙事作文

Since the National Day is coming, I will have a long vacation. I decided to take 5 days from 1st to 5th visiting Beijing. I would like to make a plan first. I will go to Beijing by train because it is safer and cheaper. On the first day, I am going to visit the Summer Palace. On the second day, I will visit the Great Wall. On the third day, I will get up early and go to Tian ‘an Men Square to see the flag rising. Then, I will visit the Peking University and Qinghua University. I am dreaming for entering one of these two universities. On the fourth day, I am going to visit the National Stadium. The last day, I will visit the National Aquatics Center, which also called “Water Cube”. A wonderful trip, do you agree?

[初中英语作文旅游

1) Recently the problem of…has aroused people’s concern. 最近，…问题已引起人们的关注。

2) Recently the problem of…has been brought to public attention.最近，„问题已引起公众的广泛注意。

3) Recently，the problem of…has been brought into focus. 最近，„问题已成为关注的焦点。

4) Man is now facing a big problem--(pollution)，which is becoming more and more serious. 人们现在正面临一个很大的问题——污染，而且正日益严重。

5) Have you ever thought of„? 你是否曾想过„?

6) There will surely be no agreement among people as to the issue whether„ 就„问题，人们肯定不会有一致的看法。

7) (Internet) has been playing an increasingly important role in our day-to-day life.It has brought us a lot of benefits but has created some serious problems as well.互联网已在我们的生活中扮演着越来越重要的角色。它给我们带来了许多好处，但也产生了一些严重的问题。

8) One of the serious problems facing us at present is„目前，我们面临的严重问题之一是„

9) There has been a heated argument about whether„就是否„而言，人们讨论热烈。

10) Perhaps we need to reconsider the traditional ways of doing it，或许，我们需要重新考虑传统的做事方法，

11) It is generally agreed that„is in deep trouble.人们普遍认为„已陷入麻烦。

12) It is only during the last few years that man has become generally aware of the importance of

(sustainable development).仅仅是在过去的几年中，人们才普遍意识到可持续发展的重要性。

13) Everyone is aware of the horrible fact: 每个人都会注意到这样一个可怕的事实：

14) It’s difficult to imagine now how we did something without…现在很难设想我们是如何做某事而没有„

15) Along with something goes with something.Inevitably, the two are deeply intertwined. 伴随„是„。不可避免的是，这二者是密切地交织在一起的。

16) Over the past decade，many people have been troubled with the serious problem of„在过去的几十年当中，许多人都被这一严重的问题所困扰。

17) One of the pressing problems confronting us today is„今天我们正面临着许多棘手的问题，其中之一就是„

18) One of the hottest topics many people talk about now is„现在许多人讨论的热门话题之一是„

19) Now people become increasingly aware of the necessity of„现在人们日益意识到„的必要性。

20) No issue is more important now than the one that…(which) is commonly held by most people.大多数人普遍认为„，而现在没有什么比这更重要的问题了。

21) In spite of great progress made in the field of„，but„remain basically unchanged.虽然在„领域已取得了巨大的进步，但„仍然基本未变。

22) There will often spring up a heated discussion as to„就„而言，常常会引发热烈的讨论。

23) (Independence)has become a hot topic among people，especially among the young，and heated debates are right on their way.独立在人们中间，尤其是在年轻人中间，是个热门话题，热烈的讨论即将来临。

24) Nowadays，(overpopulation) has become a problem we have to face.如今，人口过剩已成为我们不得不面对的问题了

Lets prevent H1N1 from happening to usDuring the last few months,H1N1 ful has set off across the whole world.If we have the right way to prevent it ,it wont scare.Here are some suggestions for you:First of all,you should cover your mouth with a napkin whtn you cough re sneeze,Next youd better stay away from the public place if possible, if you have to,please wear a mask.Wash your hands carefully before meals and always keep your windows open so that the air will be fresh.At last,try to do more excisice to make your body strong so that you can stay in health.I think this is the most important.

最近这几个月里，H1N1病毒在全世界引发起来。如果我们用正确的方法预防它，免费学英语网站，它就不会那么可怕。这里有一些为你的建议：首先，当你在咳嗽或者打喷嚏的时候，你应该用手捂着嘴。然后你最好尽可能的离公共场所远一点，如果你必须去，免费英语学习网站，请戴上口罩。饭前仔细洗手，经常打开窗后这样使空气保持清新。最后你应该做更多的运动去使你身体更强壮，这样你就可以保持健康了。我认为这才是最重要的。

英语写作：Freedom in my Dream

I went to Xinjiang with my mom and dad in the summer vacation。 Every station of the silk road was full of beauty and magic。

Our first stop is to reach thirteen in the ancient city of Xian， where the world famous Terracotta Army of Qin， is the unity of Qin Shihuang made his China funerary， magnificent， true to life。

The second stop is Dunhuang。 We go by train。 In the silk train I met some new friends， they are three with a tour group is big sister in high school。 The train arrived at the destination at second oclock in the evening at 8 oclock。 Although it took a day and a half， but because we got to know so many new friends， we enjoyed ourselves on the train， so we didnt feel tired at all。

The second day early in the morning， we went to Crescent Spring， Mingsha mountain， enjoy the boundless desert scenery， riding a camel in the desert to explore the inexhaustible wonders of Crescent Spring。 In Dunhuang， we also see the Mogao Grottoes murals， there are flying fairies， Pipa dance， is really worthy of the ancient works of skilled craftsmen! But the aunt said that such precious relics are now facing the threat of being swallowed by the desert。

On the fourth day， we once again took the train to Turpan， the famous vineyard in Xinjiang。 We are enjoying the sweet grapes， enjoy a beautiful song and dance in Xinjiang， experience the Flaming Mountains hot， watch the water - amazing kariz engineering。

Farewell in Turpan vineyards are reluctant to part， we came to the silk road trip end point station Urumqi， tour of the Tianshan Tianchi， as Xinjiang girl， eat mutton string， watching a thriller "Dawaz" high wire program， feel the enthusiasm of Xinjiang。。。。。。

This trip， let me see the beauty of the mountains and rivers of the motherland， experience different ethnic customs， appreciate the wisdom of the ancient people， learn a lot of history and geography knowledge， and have made many new friends。

暑假我和爸爸妈妈一起去新疆旅游，丝绸之路的每一站都充满美景和神奇。

我们到达的第一站是十三朝古都西安，那里的秦兵马俑世界闻名，是统一中国的秦始皇造出来陪葬他的，宏伟壮观，栩栩如生。

第二站是敦煌，我们是坐火车去的。在丝绸火车上我认识了几位新朋友，她们是同一个旅行团里的三位即将读高中的大姐姐。火车第二天晚上８点才到目的地，虽然坐了一天半的时间，但因为结识了这么多新朋友，我们在火车上玩得开心，所以一点儿也不觉得累。

第二天一大早，我们去了鸣沙山、月牙泉，欣赏到无边无际的沙漠风光，骑着骆驼探寻沙漠中的奇观——不会枯竭的月牙泉。在敦煌，我们还看了莫高窟壁画，里面有飞天仙女、反弹琵琶舞，真不愧是古代能工巧匠的作品！可是听讲解员阿姨说，这么珍贵的古迹，现在却面临着被沙漠吞没的威胁。

第四天，我们再一次乘火车到达新疆著名的葡萄园——吐鲁番。我们享受着甜美的葡萄，欣赏了优美的新疆歌舞，体验了火焰山的炎热，观赏了令人惊叹的水利工程——坎儿井。

在依依不舍中告别吐鲁番的葡萄园，我们来到了此次丝绸之路旅行的终点站——乌鲁木齐，游天山天池，扮新疆姑娘，吃羊肉串，看惊险的“达瓦孜”高空走钢丝节目，尽情感受新疆的热情……

这次旅行，让我看到了祖国山河的美丽，体验了不同民族的风情，欣赏了古代人民的智慧成果，学到了很多历史和地理知识，还结识了很多新朋友。

The school is our home, we should protect the environment in the small

yard.

We saw the earth have pick up rubbish should put the rubbish into the trash

can, we cant eat your own trash on the ground after the funeral, if someone do

so should be to remind him, let him pick up garbage into the garbage can.

We need to protect the objects on campus, such as: we should protect the

playground on the playground every camphor tree, cant use a knife to get the

camphor tree, because the camphor tree is a rare tree. One can sell one or two

in case of a tree, so we should protect the camphor tree.

We should also protect the flowerbeds in the flowerbeds, the flowers in the

flowerbeds, and we cant pick it because it will spoil the environment.

写作是考研英语的第二大重头戏，仅次于阅读。但是这部分又经常被考生忽略，考前不动手，依赖临考模板，很难写出高分作文。那么，如何准备2018考研英语写作呢?一起来看下。

对于考研英语写作，最基本的要求是考前必须动笔写出35篇文章，其中十篇应用文，二十五篇图画作文。注意：动笔写的文章最好是有范文的题目。写作应分为五步：

NO.1 写作

写作写作，第一步首先是写!一定要动手写，你看多少，背多少，都没有动手写来得实在，建议同学们拿考题多加练习。

NO.2 仔细对比

第二个就是仔细对比，写完后对照范文从三个方面去研究：第一个是内容，也就是构思和原文有何区别;第二个是语言，也就是用词、用句和原文有何区别?第三个是结构，就是你的行文思路和原文有什么区别?这是第二个步骤，写作的区别其实就是写作的弱点。

NO.3 背诵

第三步骤就是背诵：也就是可以去背诵一些范文。有的同学说了，范文我背过了，但是写作的时候还是不会写。有两个原因，第一个原因是你背得不熟，背得结结巴巴，还不如不背;第二个原因是没有练过，只是死记硬背。

所以为什么背了还不会用，有两个原因，第一背不熟，第二没有练过。背到什么程度，有12个字“滚瓜烂熟、脱口而出、多多益善。”要背到不需要去想，不需要去动脑子!如果背一篇文章还需要去想，那就证明还背得不熟。大家上考场，如果能想起平时的70%，那已经是相当不错了。所以一定要背熟，这就是第三个步骤。

NO.4 默写

第四个步骤就是默写：背熟后把书合上，把这篇文章默写下来。默写后，做一个工作：仔细对比原文发现写作弱点，你会发现你默写的文章和原文会有一些出入，包括拼写、语法、标点等，这种错误就是你写作的弱点，最好能够把这些错误用红笔标出来。大家为什么写作拿不到高分，根源只有一个——错误太多。很多错误自己都不知道。

NO.5 仿写

第五个步骤就是仿写：什么叫仿写?就是模仿你背过的文章再写出一篇新文章。在背完一篇文章后，要想想这篇文章有什么精彩的词组、词汇和句型可以使用。然后换一个话题，把这篇作文用一下，用里面词汇、词组和句型去构思另一篇文章。

写作的注意点和技巧：写作首要的是，一、不跑题;二、字数达到要求;三、字迹整洁工整;四、少有语病。

这些是很基本的要求，考试的时候就要好好落实。比如，拿到作文题目后要审题。在写的过程中注意字数的限制，不要写太多，会扣分的，字数不够也会扣分。所以实在不行就写完一段话，停下来数一数字数。字迹工整可能短期内提高不了。只要你比平时稍慢一点写字母，就会写得比较整洁。要知道老师的印象分是很重要的。病句的避免技巧就是，凡是你想的过程中感觉别扭的句子，多半就是病句。干脆不要写出来，换一种形式去表达。不要追求好词，要追求准确性。

在考前，小作文的提高是非常快的。方法就是分析小作文的类型。应用文写作部分(小作文)考查内容包括投诉信、咨询信、道歉信、求职信等信函类应用文，而且涵盖报告、通知、海报等告示类应用文。不同类型的作文，要自己总结模版。小作文是完全可以准备模版的，其作用也是常明显。一定要注意：总结出自己的模板。

There is a big table in it. The table is pink and brown. There is a yellow story book on the table. Look! There is a green trash bin under the table. Where is the teddy bear? Oh! It’s on the bed. The teddy bear is cute. My bed is so big. It’s pink and blue. There is a picture on the wall. There is a mat on the floor. In front of the mat, there is a closet. The closet is beautiful. Over the closet, there is an air- conditioner.

I like my room. It’s the most beautiful room.

（一）改写一般疑问句：

（1）原句中有be动词的，将be动词提前，其他顺序不变。

例如：Thisisacat.变为Isthisacat?

（2）原句中有情态动词的（can/may/shall/would）将情态动词提前，其他顺序不变。例如：Hewouldlikeapie.变为Wouldhelikeapie?

（3）原句中是一般动词的，在句首加助动词do或dose（用于主语是第三人称动词单数的句子），其他顺序不变。例如：Iplaytheguitar.变为Doyouplaytheguitar.

（4）原句中的some变any。

注：以情态动词开头的一般疑问句，并且要求对方做肯定回答的some不变。

（5）原句中的第一人称改为第二人称。例如:Iamanurse.变为Areyouanurse?

（6）以dose开头的一般疑问句，原来动词的第三人称单数形式要变回原形。例如：Hereadsastorybook.变为Dosehereadastorybook?

（二）改写否定句：

（1）原句中有be动词的，直接在be动词后面加not。例如：Itisadog.→It’snotadog./Itisn’tadog.

（2）原句中有情态动词的，直接在情态动词后加not。

例如：Iwouldlikeahotdog.→Iwouldnotlikeahotdog.

（3）原句中是一般动词的，在一般动词前加don’t或doesn’t（用于主语是第三人称单数的句子），doesn’t后面用原型。例如：Iseethreehamburgers.→Idon’tseethreehamburgers.

原句中的some变any例如：Ihavesomebreadan

dmilk.→Idon’thaveanybreadandmilk.

（4）以let开头的祈使句，如果是letus或letme,直接在其后加not；如果let后面其他人称代词宾格（you、him、her、them、it）就在let后面加助动词don’t。例如：Letusgotothepark.→Letusnotgotothepark.再如：Letthemdohomework.→Don’tletthemdohomework.

（三）对划线部分提问：

对划线部分提问，就是先把一个陈述句的划线部分去掉，然后变为一个特殊疑问句：一是特殊疑问句+一般疑问句；

二是特殊疑问句+陈述句（对主语或主语的定语提问，therebe结构除外）

⑴划线部分是人，用who提问。

⑴划线部分是主语，用who提问，who后面的动词要用第三人称单数形式。如：Whois；Wholikes;Whohas?

方法：who+原句的剩余部分

例如：①HelenandMikearelisteningtomusic.

→Whoislisteningtomusic?

②Ihavesomemodelplanes.

→Whohasanymodelplanes?

⑵划线部分是表语，用who提问。

方法：Who+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式

⑵划线部分是事或者物，用what提问。

方法：what+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式。

注：如果原句是therebe句型，直接用What’s+地点状语来提问。例如：①Wewouldliketobuysomethingsforaparty.

→Whatwouldyouliketobuyforaparty?

②Therearealotofcakesintheplate.

→Whatisintheplate?

⑶划线部分是物主代词或名词所有格，用Whose提问。

方法：⑴划线部分是主语的定语时，Whose+剩余部分

例如：Ourclassroomisbright.

→Whoseclassroomisbright?

⑵划线部分是表语或表语的定语时，Whose+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式例如：①ThewomanisSuYang’steacher.

→Whoseteacheristhewoman?

注：对某部分的定语提问，被修饰的部分跟随特殊疑问句往前提②ThispurseisYangLing’s.

→Whosepurseisthis?

⑷划线部分是地点，用where提问。

方法：where+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式

例如：TheyarehamingaMathslessonintheclassroom..

→WherearetheyhavingaMathslesson?

⑸划线部分是“多少”，用howmany或howmuch提问。

方法：⑴句中是可数名词的用Howmany+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式例如：Therearefifteentreesintheplayground.

→Howmanytreesarethereintheplayground?

⑵句中是不可数名词的用Howmuch+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式例如：Ihaveaglassofjuiceforbreakfast.

→Howmuchjuicedoyouhaveforbreakfast?

⑹划线部分是时间，用when或whattime（具体的几时几分）提问。方法：⑴when+剩余部分的一般疑问句形式

例如：SuYangandSuHaiareathomeonSundaymorning.

→WhenareSuYangandSuHaiathome?

⑵问具体的时间直接用Whattimeisit?或What’sthetime?问

例如：It’sthreeforty-five.

→Whattimeisit?或What’sthetime?

​导语：要想写好英语作文，我们平时就得多练习，下面是yuwenmi小编为大家整理的优秀英语作文素材，欢迎阅读与借鉴，谢谢!

1)现象法：引出要剖析的现象或者问题，然后评论。

Recently the rise in theproblem/phenomenon of ... has caused/aroused public/popular/wide/ worldwideconcern. 近来(...)的问题/现象已经引起了广泛的关注。

2)比较法：通过对过去、现在两种不同的倾向、观点的比较，引出文章要讨论的观点。

For years, ...had been viewedas .... But people are taking a fresh look now. With the growing ..., people....

多年来(...)被认为(...)但是现在人们又有了新的看法，随着(...)增长，人们(...)

3)对立法：先引出其他人的不同看法，然后提出自己的看法或者偏向于某一看法，适用于有争议性的主题。

When asked about..., thevast/overwhelming majority of people say that …. But I think/view a bitdifferently. 当被问及(...)大多数人们会说(...)但是我却不这么认为。

4)观点法：开门见山，直截了当地提出自己对要讨论的问题的看法。

Now people ingrowing/significant numbers are beginning/coming to realize/accept / (be aware)that... 现在越来越多的人们开始认识到/接受(...)

5)引用法：先引出名人名言或者有代表性的看法，来引出文章要展开论述的观点!

"Knowledge ispower." This is the remark made by Bacon. This remark has been shared bymore and more people. “知识就是力量”这是培根的名言，这句名言开始被越来越多的人们分享。

6)故事法：先讲一个较短的故事来引发读者的兴趣，引出文章的主题。(少用)

I have a friend who ...Should he ...? Such a dilemma we are often confronted with in our daily life. 我有一个朋友(喜欢赌钱等)，他应该(...)吗?在这种进退两难的境地下，我们要面对应付日常生活。

Today is Saturday. I stay at home with my parents.

My mother said that today we should do some cleanings. I agreed and I would

like to help.

I cleaned the windows. It was really a tough job.

Now matter how hard I tried, they seemed dirty all the same. Therefore, I

asked for help.

My mother teached me a method to clean the windows.

It realy worked. And then I cleaned the floor. It was much easier than

cleaning the windows. I did it in a short time. My parents praised me.

一直都想写我的英语老师，只是因为觉得学习不好，颇感内疚，不好意思来写。用我妈妈的话来说，他就是一个小男孩，我应该叫哥哥的。

他说话的样子十分夸张。他跟我们说在另一所学校里做班主任时，他安排的座位非常合理，因此学生成绩提高很快。我当然理解他的自豪，但我也理解我的班主任为何不采用。因为丁老师谈建议时的神情就像一只狗伸着舌头，流着口水，教一只猫如何分配自己盘中的鱼。明明一张很英俊的脸，有棱有角，鼻梁挺直，眼睛凹下，嘴唇也很性感。你不知道呀!他生气时目光看向远方，深沉而坚定，加上魁梧的身材，就像一位年轻的法老，站在他的城墙上，指点江山。可是除了生气时像个男人外，其他时候就是个小男孩了，大笑起来嘴很夸张地向上翅起，就像卡通画，让所有的人都可以感受到他的快乐。若是说到什么好事，他就像大公鸡似的炫耀他的两根粗粗的眉毛向上飞扬，眼中不时闪着像星星一样的光点，还手舞足蹈的，唾沫横飞，经常唾到前排同学的脸上。被人夸奖的时候，又显得女里女气的，十分腼腆。每次开考前，他在教室门外，他的嘴角像一只红色的狐狸，在雪中伸着一只爪子，望着一只兔子。

英语老师姓丁，家在阳曲，可能地理位置有些偏辟，所以考出来不大容易。本来在另一所中学里教高中，后来考入我校，校长让他教初中。这让他十分失望，有时还在学生中露出了像李白一样怀才不遇的痛苦和颓唐。有时又高兴地告诉我们，我们是他教的第一拔学生!?

可能是刚刚带学生，他有年轻老师的激情，为我们自费复印英语资料，很喜欢在读英语课文时，一边作着奇里古怪的样子，一边发出奇里古怪的声音。有时上课，讲着讲着就讲起了自己的自传，于是常常在自我的唾沫星子中陶醉得难以自拔。上他的课让我感到十分的快乐和高兴，只是因为成绩不好而十分愧对他。不知为什么，我学也学不好，只能在每次考完试以后都躲着他。很亏心很愧疚地面对他对我的微笑，但他从来不说我不好，一次又一次地原谅我。

又一次，语文老师让我们以描写一位老师的神态特征为作业，到了下节课是英语。他进来十分讨好的让我们写他。回家后我写了两篇，有一篇是写他的，到了教室，临交作业时我又拿回了，结果我的另一篇得了第一，上课时他说已看过，可惜不是写他的。到后来越到中考我觉得愧对老师，现在考完了，我却一直想着他，想着欠他的一篇作文。

Before I entered the middle school, I felt so worried about the life in middle school, because my cousin told me that I would have to compete with so many excellent students.

Now I get used to the life, I learn many subjects from Monday to Friday.

Though I always meet the difficulties in learning the new knowledge, I get help from my teachers and classmates.

I am not afraid of the middle school life again, I am so excited to learn new things every day.

In the future days, I will meet many challenges, I believe I can get over them. Life in middle school has happiness and sorrow, they fulfill my life.

在我进入初中以前，我很担忧初中的生活，因为我的表姐告诉我我将要和很多优秀的学生进行竞争。如今我适应了初中生活，我从周一到周五学习很多科目。虽然我总是在学习新知识时遇到困难，但是我得到了老师和同学的帮助。我不再害怕初中生活了，我对于每天学到新知识感到兴奋。在将来的日子里，我将会遇到很多困难，我相信我能克服他们。初中的生活有快乐也有忧伤，它们充实了我的生活。

[初中英语作文：初中生活

It was Mother’s Day. Sun Zheng thought he should do something for his

mother. He decided to help his mother do some housework. After school he went to

a shop to buy some food on his way home.

When he got home, he did his best to cook some nice food,though he couldn’t

do the cooking well. Thenhe cleaned the room. He felt very tired, but he was

very happy.

When his father and his mother came back and saw the clean rooms and dishes

which weren’t so nice, they were very happy.They had their supper together. His

mother said, "Thank you,my child!"

I am a girl of ten, and I live in a small mountain village far from

Taiyuan. The only person that lives with me is my mother, because my father is

away for eight years, working in a city.

During the Spring Festival, my father came back home. He looked thin and

tired. He gave my mother two thousand yuan, and told her that he would work even

harder, earn more money, and then he could take us to the city He stayed at home

for only ten days.We are living a poor life now. But what I want most is not

money, but my father. I miss him very much!

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

These are lots of books in our daily life. Some are about history, some are novels, and some are even about the dream in the future. I think its useful to read stories, because it can be used sometimes. Once, there was a very difficult question in an important history exam history, which wasnt mentioned in our history books, even our teacher has never told us about it. But I remembered clearly that I had read it in a history story, so I answered the question without difficulty and became the only student in our class who answered the question correctly. In my view, its useful to read stories.