初中英语说明文写作模板20篇

I’m Tom。 I’m a student in Grade 7。 My school life is interesting。 I like it very much。 I have 5 classes in the morning and 3 classes in the afternoon。 I study English， Chinese， math and some other subjects。 I like English best because it’s easy and interesting。 I don’t like math because I always meet difficulties in studing math。 I try hard but it doesnt work at all。 After class， I often play basketball with my classmates。 I go to the school library for some reading twice a week。 I like my school life。 What about yours？ Can you tell me something about it？

Everyone has their own parents, you are not in the heart often think the future will take care of filial piety, they would not let them suffer later after you do this to parents as well, but have you ever thought, your parents how much later? Too many uncertainties about the future is not it, if you really love your parents, then you use what you have more time now to spend time with them now, whether or not your ability, do your best strength to love them not waiting for the day after, because someday will not necessarily make sense, does not it?

Recently, we have little time to keep close contact with nature. We spend

too much time on study or working. We almost forget that how green the grass is,

how beautiful the flowers are, and how sweetly the birds are singing outside our

windows. A saying goes, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". It means

that we need to relax ourselves and go out to breathe more fresh air. We can

also climb a hill in the suburbs.Its good for our health.

Lets go outing.

时光飞逝，短暂而又愉快的假期生活已经结束了。接下来我所面临的是紧张而又愉快的新学期的教育教学生活。为把新学期的教育教学工作做好，特此作如下教学计划：

一、指导思想。

坚持马列主义，毛泽东思想。高举邓小平理论伟大旗帜，认真学习教育理论，贯彻“三个代表”重要指导思想，积极响应和贯彻素质教育钻研素质教育的实质。“减负”的内在，并以此指导自己的教育教学工作，遵循教育教学规律，紧扣大纲，把我教学层次，不断提高自己的业务水平。

二、基本情况。

这一学期，我继续担任初一(1，2)班的英语教学工作。这两个班级，每班各有学生三十五人左右，但是，基础却不尽人意。初一.1班的学生基础还可以，但是2班的基础却相差很远，学生基础参差不齐，两极分化严重，没有学习的兴趣。因此，教学工作开展的相当困难。

三、教材特点。

初中英语第一册(下)主要介绍了日常生活的交际用语以及一些西方国家的文化背景和风俗习惯，教材通俗易懂，旨在使初一级学生基本能用英语进行简单的交流。

四、教学目标。

力争在期末考试中优秀率打到30%左右，及格率达到60%左右。缩小学生间的差距。为下一学期的英语教育教学工作打下以良好的基础。

五、具体措施。

1、每天背诵课文中的对话。目的：要求学生背诵并默写，培养语感。

2、每天记5个生词，2个常用句子或习语。实施：利用“互测及教师抽查”及时检查，保证效果并坚持下去。

3、认真贯彻晨读制度：规定晨读内容，加强监督，保证晨读效果。

4、坚持日测、周测、月测的形成性评价制度：对英语学习实行量化制度，每日、每周、每月都要给学生检验自己努力成果的机会，让进步的同学体会到成就感，让落后的同学找出差距，感受压力。由此在班里形成浓厚的学习氛围，培养学生健康向上的人格和竞争意识。

5、对后进生进行专门辅导，布置单独的作业，让他们在小进步、小转变中体味学习的快乐，树立学习的自信，尽快成长起来。

6、关注学生的情感，营造宽松、民主、和谐的教学氛围。

7、实施"任务型"的教学途径，培养学生综合语言运用能力。

8、在教学中根据目标并结合教学内容，创造性地设计贴近学生实际的教学活动，吸引和组织他们积极参与。学生通过思考、调查、讨论、交流和合作等方式，学习和使用英语，完成学习任务。

9、加强对学生学习策略的指导，为他们终身学习奠定基础。

10、认真钻研教材，备好，上好每一节课，向45分钟要质量。

总之，新的学期已经开始了，我要以上一学期的基础为起点，树立信心，全身心的投入到新学期的教育教学工作中去。争取在新的一年里，把教育教学工作推向一新的层次。

Father’s Day is coming and you must be thinking of giving a present to your father。 Different people like different kinds of gifts。

If you have enough pocket money， you can buy a useful but not expensive thing， like a tie。 I think your father will like it。 But if you don’t have enough pocket money， you can do something that you can do， for example， you can prepare a cup of tea。 When your father comes back from work， he can drink it。

No matter what you do， the most important thing is to make your father happy on Father’s Day。 Don’t you think so?

1、Fact speak louder than words.

事实胜于雄辩。

2、Empty vessels make the greatest sound.

实磨无声空磨响满瓶不动半瓶摇。

3、Fear always springs from ignorance.

恐惧源于无知。

4、Fools grow without watering.

朽木不可雕。

5、Don‘t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

不要班门弄斧。

6、Don‘t have too many irons in the fire.

不要揽事过多。

7、Good watch prevents misfortune.

谨慎消灾。

8、Genius is nothing but labor and diligence.

天才不过是勤奋而已。

9、Habit cures habit.

心病还需心药医。

10、Fields have eyes, and woods have ears.

隔墙有耳。

11、He sets the fox to keep the geese.

引狼入室。

12、Friends agree best at distance.

朋友之间也会保持距离。

13、Easier said than done.

说得容易，做得难。

14、Example is better then percept.

说一遍，不如做一遍。

15、Great minds think alike.

英雄所见略同。

16、God helps those who help themselves.

自助者天助。

17、Heaven never helps the man who will not act.

自己不动，叫天何用。

18、Great trees are good for nothing but shade.

大树底下好乘凉。

19、He is not laughed at that laughs at himself first.

自嘲者不会让人见笑。

20、Honesty is the best policy.

做人诚信为本。

21、is good when new, but friends when old.

东西是新的好，朋友是老的亲。

22、Each bird love to hear himself sing.

孤芳自赏。

23、Great hopes make great man.

伟大的抱负造就伟大的人物。

24、Harm set, harm get.害人害己。Hear all parties.

兼听则明。

25、Good medicine for health tastes bitter to the mouth.

良药苦口利于病。

26、Eat to live, but not live to eat.

人吃饭是为了活着，但活着不是为了吃饭。

27、Fools learn nothing from wise men, but wise men learn much from fools.

愚者不学无术，智者不耻下问。

28、Forbidden fruit is sweet.

禁果格外香。

29、Faults are thick where love is thin.

一朝情意淡，样样不顺眼。

30、Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

抱最好的愿望，做最坏的打算。

31、He that will not work shall not eat.

不劳动者不得食。

32、Experience is the father of wisdom and memory the mother.

经验是智慧之父，记忆是智慧之母。

33、Happy is he who owes nothing.

要想活得痛快，身上不能背债。

34、Fortune knocks once at least at every man‘s gate.

风水轮流转。

35、Fire is a good servant but a bad master.

火是一把双刃剑。

36、Fool‘s haste is no speed.

欲速则不达。

37、Happiness takes no account of time.

欢乐不觉时光过。

38、Give a dog a bad name and hang him.

众口铄金，积毁销骨。

39、Hasty love, soon cold.

一见钟情难维久。

40、Great men have great faults.

英雄犯大错误。

41、Experience must be bought.

吃一堑，长一智。

42、First think and then speak.

先想后说。

My school life is very common. I get up at six o’clock every morning from Monday to Friday. And the I would go running with my classmates, as our head teacher says health is the most important thing. After running I have to do morning exercises on the playground. Then I can have breakfast. Having breakfast, I need to have morning reading. Oh, I almost forget that all of the students have to do some cleaning before breakfast. There come the various classes. Then noon comes. Having lunch, I will go to sleep. I often read twenty minutes before I fall asleep. I have class in the afternoon. And I still have classes at night. It’s boring, right? But I have got used to it and enjoy myself at school.

When I return to my hometown on holidays, I will be very excited, because

it is the place that I love so much. The trees are so green and the sky is so

blue. When I play on the river side, I can catch fish. I grow up there and have

a happy time with my dear friends. I will never forget the beautiful scenery

there.

Tired of the dull day of the holiday， there was a habit of walking on the street。

Just go out， days of rain， like the night sky in the fog， with a wind chill。 Fortunately， shops on both sides of the street lights to create a warm cold， I suzhebozi towards darkness。 Suddenly cried out in a calm shock eardrum: Hey， man， get up! Go away。 With the sound! found a man crouched in the roof。 The shadow with different differences， people spontaneously gathered in the past。

Then a light house， I looked at the old man shivering body， with disheveled hair， worn underwear。。。。。。 involuntarily shivered。 People around together more， who shouted nature is the owner， but we do not know the origin of the elderly。

Some in the crowd whispering， some cigarette in the limited， some in the head sigh。。。。。。 suddenly I felt a moment of silence。 The mouth parched and tongue scorched after a child shouted: Daddy， grandpa is not cold? yes! everyone seems to be inspired by the what， many people began negotiations with the owner。 Under the watchful eyes of the people， the owner blushed， everyone help homeowners。 To restore the confidence， and the boys to act tough and talk soft helped the old man into the room， a middle-aged man has Fengfenghuohuo beside the restaurant brought in hot surface。

Some people off。 I -- an onlooker chouchushou from his trouser pocket， came back to me naive children， in shame to take a step。

厌倦了假期白日的平淡，于是就有了在街道上散步的癖好。

刚出门，天就微雨，似夜空中的雾，沾满了一身，夜风凉飕飕的。幸好街道两旁的店家灯火给寒冷平添了几许暖意，我缩着脖子走向黑暗。蓦地一声断喝在平静中震荡耳膜:喂，老头，快起来!快走开啊!随着声音在一处屋檐的阴影中发现了一个蜷曲着的老人。伴着不同的差异，人们不约而同地围了过去。

接着屋里的一片灯光，我打量着老人发抖的身子，低垂的蓬乱的头发，破旧的衣裤。。。。。。不由地打了个寒颤。周围的人越聚越多，叫喊的人自然是房主，但大家都不知道老人的来历。

人群之中有的在窃窃私语，有的在有限地点烟，有的在摇头叹气。。。。。。我忽然感到口干舌燥了。片刻沉默后，一个童音在嚷:爸爸，老爷爷不冷吗?是啊!大家似乎是受到了什么启发，好些人开始跟房主交涉，众目睽睽之下，房主涨红了脸，:大伙帮个忙。房主恢复了自信，和几个小伙软硬兼施地把老人扶进了房内，一个中年人已经风风火火地在旁边的饮食店中拿来了热腾腾的面。

好些人散去了。我--一位看客，从裤兜里抽出手，耳边回响起幼稚的童音，在羞愧中重新迈开脚步。

I think I will be a teacher in the future,because I like to stay with children.

、Ill live in shanghai because I went toshanghai last summer and fell in love with it. I think its really a beautiful city.As a teacher, I’ll try my best to teach my students well and tell them how tobe a useful person.

In my free time, I’ll listen to music, pop songs and goshopping with my friends, Sometimes Ill keep pets-maybe a colorful bird. Itmakes me happy. During the summer holiday, I’ll go to Italy on vacation.

I hearthat its a great place to have fun.

我觉得将来我会成为一名教师，因为我喜欢和孩子们待在一起。我会住在上海，因为我去年夏天去上海的时候就爱上了它。我真的觉得那是一个美丽的城市。作为一名老师，我会尽力教好我的学生并告诉他们如何做一个有用的人。在我的空闲时间，我会听音乐，流行歌曲，和我的朋友去购物，有时候我会养宠物，也许会是一只色彩鲜艳的鸟。它能让我开心。暑假的时候我会去意大利度假。我听说那里是去玩的好地方。

[初中英语作文：我的未来

Let‘s cross the bridge when we come to it.船到桥头自然直。下面是小编为你带来的初中英语写作常用谚语，欢迎阅读。

1. All roads lead to Rome.

条条大路通罗马。

2. Well begun is half done.

好的开端是成功的一半。

3. East, west, home is best.

金窝、银窝，不如自己的草窝。

4. First think, then act.

三思而后行。

5. It is never too late to mend.

亡羊补牢，犹为未晚。

6. Time is money.

时间就是金钱。

7. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

患难见真交。

8. Great hopes make great man.

远大的希望，造就伟大的人物。

9. Where there is a will, there is a way.

有志者，事竟成。

10. Stick to it, and you‘ll succeed.

只要人有恒，万事都能成。

11. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

早睡早起，富裕、聪明、身体好。

12. A good medicine tastes bitter.

良药苦口。

13. It is good to learn at another man‘s cost.

前车之鉴。

14. Let‘s cross the bridge when we come to it.

船到桥头自然直。

15. No pains, no gains.

不劳则无获。

16. Nothing is difficult to the man who will try.

世上无难事，只要肯登攀。

17. Where there is life, there is hope.

生命不息，希望常在。

18. An idle youth, a needy age.

少壮不努力，老大徒伤悲。

19. A plant may produce new flowers; man is young but once.

花有重开日，人无再少年。

20. God helps those who help themselves.

自助者，天助之。

21. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

只工作，不玩耍，聪明孩子也变傻。

22. Diligence is the mother of success.

勤奋是成功之母。

23. Truth is the daughter of time.

时间见真理。

24. No man is wise at all times.

智者千虑，必有一失。

25. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

今天能做的事绝不要拖到明天。

26. Kill two birds with one stone.

一石双鸟。

27. Easier said than done.

说起来容易做起来难。

28. Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

天才一分来自灵感，九十九分来自勤奋。

29. He who laughs last laughs best.

谁笑在最后，谁笑得最好。

30. He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

身体健壮就有希望，有了希望就有了一切。

31. No man is born wise or learned.

人非生而知之。

32. Action speak louder than words.

事实胜于雄辩。

33. Courage and resolution are the spirit and soul of virtue.

勇敢和坚决是美德的灵魂。

34. There is no smoke without fire.

无风不起浪。

35. Many hands make light work.

人多好办事。

36. Reading makes a full man.

读书长见识。

37. Wisdom in the mind is better than money in the hand.

胸中有知识，胜于手中有金钱。

38. Seeing is believing.

百闻不如一见。

39. Money is a good servant but a bad master.

要做金钱的主人，莫作金钱的奴隶。

40. It‘s hard sailing when there is no wind.

无风难驶船。

41. The path to glory is always rugged.

通向光荣的道路常常是崎岖的。

42. Living without an aim is like sailing without a compass.

没有目标的生活如同没有罗盘的航行。

43. Quality matters more than quantity.

质重于量。

44. The on-looker sees most of the game.

旁观者清。

45. Joys shared with others are more enjoyed.

与众同乐，其乐更乐。

46. Happiness takes no account of time.

欢乐不觉日子长。

47. Time and tide waits for no man.

岁月不等人。

48. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it.

若要求知，必须刻苦。

49. Learn to walk before you run.

循序渐进。

50. From words to deeds is a great space.

言行之间，大有距离。

51. Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.

技能和信心是无敌的军队。

52. Habit is a second nature.

习惯成自然。

53. Two heads are better than one.

三个臭皮匠顶个诸葛亮。

54. Nothing is impossible to a willing mind.

世上无难事，只怕有心人。

55. You can‘t make something out of nothing.

巧妇难为无米之炊。

56. Nothing for nothing.

不费力气，一无所得。

57. He who makes no mistakes makes nothing.

不犯错误者一事无成。

58. Nothing seek, nothing find.

无所求则无所获。

59. A little of every thing is nothing in the main.

每事浅尝辄止，事事都告无成。

60. A great ship asks deep waters.

大船要走深水。

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!

hobbies are very important to a person。 without having any hobby， life wont be as colorful as it should be。 i have a variety of hobbies， such as collecting stamps， playing musical instruments， reading， and doing sport activities。

when i am free， i will spend time on my hobbies。 when i am in a blue mood， i will also do my hobbies to cheer myself up。 hobbies can help us improve our moods。 many hobbies requires devotion。 for example， when you play a musical instrument， you have to practice over and over in order to perform good music。 after a period if you still enjoy it， gradually it will become a hobby of yours。 but， remember: a hobby is like gold under the ground; no hobby will come to you unless you dig it out yourself。

if you can treat study as one of you hobbies， learning will be more enjoyable。 i hope all of you can find your own hobbies and also have fun from them。

[我的爱好初中英语作文

①“龙宫”作为神话里海底龙王的居所，曾引发了人们无数的想象，围绕它产生了众多故事。现实中“龙宫”自然是没有的，但迄今为止，浩瀚的海洋仍深深地吸引着人类：海洋蕴藏的财富，大海深处的奥秘……一切都那样诱人。

②当今最诱人的海洋资源之一就是“蓝色能源”。它既不同于海底储存的煤、石油、天然气，也不同于融于水中的铀、镁、锂，而是利用海水温差、潮汐、波浪等产生的动能、热能等能源，它具有清洁、可再生，能量惊人，分布广泛的优势。常见的蓝色能源是温差能、潮汐能和波浪能。

③6000万平方公里的热带海洋一天吸收的太阳热能，相当于2500亿桶石油的热能。如果将这些热能的1%转化为电能，相当于新增140亿千瓦装机容量，也就是每小时能发140亿度电。太阳辐射热进入到海面，绝大部分被海水吸收掉，深层海水几乎接收不到。因此人们可利用海洋表层水温与较低层水温之间的温差把热能转化为电能。发电时，将海洋表面的温水引进真空锅炉，温水因压力突然大幅下降立即变成蒸汽，推动汽轮发电机发电，用过的水流入海洋，如此循环使用。一般而言，冷、热水温差在20℃以上即可发电，因此若能把南北纬20度以内的热带海洋都利用起来发电，前景将十分诱人。

④无边无际的大海，在太阳和月亮的引力作用下，时而潮高百丈，时而引退千里。海洋这种有规律、有节奏的起伏现象就是潮汐。潮 汐发电就利用了潮汐能，人们涨潮时将海水以势能的形式保存，落潮时放出海水，利用潮位之间的落差发电。据初步估算，我国潮汐能资源量约为1.1亿千瓦，年发电量可达2750亿千瓦小时。潮汐能周而复始，取之不尽，用之不竭，可以成为沿海地区生产生活，甚至国防需要的重要补充能源。

⑤波浪能也是不容忽视的蓝色能源。“无风三尺浪”是奔腾不息的大海的真实写照。海浪有惊人的力量，5米高的海浪，每平方米压力就有10吨。大浪能把13吨重的岩石抛至20米高处，能量惊人。据计算，全球可供开发利用的海洋波浪能有20-30亿千瓦，年发电量可达9万亿度。波浪能的利用将有助于缓解矿物能源逐渐枯竭导致的能源危机，改善生态环境。

⑥古往今来，海洋一直以其阔大的胸怀哺育着人类，吸引着人类。进入21世纪，人类社会的可持续发展将会越来越多地依赖海洋。探索并利用蓝色能源,已经成为中国乃至全球可持续发展的重要保障。蓝色能源，大有可为！

1.文章开头从神话故事里的“龙宫”写起，有什么作用？

答：

2.读完这篇文章，说说你对蓝色能源有了哪些了解。（4分）

答：

3.阅读下面材料，结合上文中的相关知识，简要分析可以在南海开发何种蓝色能源。（4分）

【材料】

南海是中国以南的边缘海，是中国最深、最大的海，平均水深约1212米，中部深海平原中最深处达5567米。由于接近赤道，接受太阳辐射的热量较多，所以气温较高。年平均气温在25―28℃。5月份测得水深30米以内的水温为30℃，而1000米深处便只有5℃。

答：

1. 引发读者阅读的兴趣，说明海洋从古至今对人类的吸引，引出下文对蓝色能源的介绍。

2.①什么是蓝色能源。（蓝色能源是一种利用海水温差、潮汐、波浪产生的动能、热能等能源。）②蓝色能源的特点。（它具有清洁、可再生、能量惊人、分布广泛的优势。）③常见的蓝色能源类型。（常见的蓝色能源是温差能、潮汐能和波浪能。）④常见蓝色能源的发电原理。⑤蓝色能源的应用前景。

3.可开发温差能。根据上文，太阳辐射热绝大部分被海水吸收掉，深层海水几乎接收不到。在冷热水温差达到20℃以上时，就可利用海洋表层水温与较低层水温之间的温差把热能转化为电能。而南海平均水深约1212米，年平均气温在25-28℃，表层海水与较低层海水温差多在20℃以上，因此可在南海开发温差能。

Now, many encyclopedias, such as: "hundred thousand whys", the mystery of

the world "and so on a wide variety, all kinds of books can give us many

benefits, our world is so vast, some things in the world, and books have,

encyclopedia like" dumb teachers diligently teach us knowledge. Visible, how

useful book! Also, we learn knowledge also want to use in our daily life, to be

accurate and determine whether to do so, the right to enrich our knowledge, the

outside is good for our healthy growth. You said, a lot of the benefits of

reading?

Nowadays, more and more of the books in the library, we should also learn

to read and appreciate books, should put the book back on the in situ after the

play, not just throw the place. Also, we must find a give us the knowledge of

books to read, dont look at those who are not good for our growth.

In short, the benefits of reading. Come on! Let us to soar in the sky of

knowledge fully!

Ching Ming festival is a traditional Chinese festival, has a history of two

thousand five hundred years; Its main traditional cultural activities are:

grave, outing, cockfighting, swing, play mat, pull hook, tug-of-war), etc. The

members (the grave), is very old. Tomb-sweeping day, as a traditional culture,

it is a full of mysterious colorific festival, on this day, the pedestrians on

the road are missing people who died, to express their respect and grief!

Ching Ming festival, in hainan many locals call it the "qingming festival".

Middle age the qingming festival is very important, if not as a legal holiday,

they will also take time to go home "qingming festival". This suggests that the

qingming festival has become a culture, become a man of the late express a way

of missing loved ones.

Qingming festival, is a kind of Chinese traditional culture recognition and

respect. Qingming festival is very important in the ancient tradition of a

festival, is also the most important festival of festivals, was the day of

ancestor worship and the grave. This grave, the shrine of the dead an activity.

The han nationality and some minority are mostly in the tombs. According to the

old tradition, the grave, people to carry goods such as especially fruit, paper

money to the grave, will be food for offering in the family tomb, then paper

incineration, new soil up to the grave, fold a few branches pale green branches

ed in the grave, and then salute kowtow worship, finally eat especially home.

The tang dynasty poet tu mus poem "qingming" : "rains fall heavily as qingming

comes, and passers-by with lowered spirits go. Restaurant where? Boy pointed

apricot blossom village." Write the tomb-sweeping day is special atmosphere.

Until today, tomb-sweeping day ancestor worship, mourning the late relatives

customs still prevail. And the more brought to the attention of the people.

Chinese is influenced by its culture, make clear the Chinese memorial

ancestors festival. Ancestor worship in qingming festival people are back, this

is a kind of culture, a kind of habit.

When I was a girl,I was very bad.I often drew pictures on the English book and laughed loudly with my classmates.I never listened to my English teacher carefully.Of course,my English was very bad.

When I was in Grade 5,my mother sent me to an English school.My English was still very bad there and I didnt stand up when the teacher let us stand up and dance.But to my surprise,that English teacher called Angela didnt hate me and she still gave me another chance.One day,Angela found me and said:"Janice,you are very good,I trust that you can study English very well and you can be a good ***e on,my clever Janice,study English carefully from now on.Can you do it"Angela looked at me and I looked her>She looked like mysister who smiled at me.

I was moved by Angela.I said to her:"Yes,of course.I promise to study English well forever."

From that day on,I study English carefully and my English started improving.Now,my English is very well.

"Why do you study English well?"my classmates often ask me.My answer is:Angela.Yes,Angelas trust made me study English well.Thank you,Angela.

当我还是个小女孩的时候，我很不好，我经常在英语书上画画，和我的同学一起大声笑，我从来没有听过我的英语老师，当然，我的英语很差。

当我在5年级的时候，我妈妈送我去英语学校，我的英语还是很不错的，我没有站起来的时候，老师让我们站起来跳舞。但让我吃惊的是，英语老师叫安吉拉不恨我，她还是给了我一个机会。有一天，安吉拉找到我，说：“珍妮丝，你很好，我相信你能学好英语，你可以成为一个好的***，我聪明的珍妮丝，好好学英语了。你能做的”安吉拉看着我，我看着她她像我妹妹他对我笑了笑。

我被安吉拉感动了，我对她说：“是的，当然，我保证永远学英语。”

从那天起，我认真学习英语，我的英语水平提高了。现在，我的英语很好。

“你为什么学英语？”我的同学经常问我，我的回答是：安吉拉，是的，安吉拉的信任让我学好英语，谢谢你，安吉拉。

My birthday is on May 6. My parents and friends celebrate it to me every year. On that day, we usually hold a small birthday party at home and invite my friends to come for a dinner. We chat, watch TV or play games together that we really enjoy ourselves. When we are playing, my parents prepare a delicious dinner. My friends and I like the dishes very much. Of course, I can get some gifts from parents and friends. I am very happy because they always know what I want and need. But, on the other hand, when the birthday comes, I am a year older, so that I must be more sensible and independent. Last but not the least, it’s also a time to show my appreciation to my parents. They work hard and do their best to bring me up.

我的生日是五月六号。我的父母和朋友每年都为我庆祝。那天，我们通常在家举行小聚会，邀请朋友到家里吃晚饭。我们聊天，看电视或者一起玩游戏，大家玩得很开心。当我们玩的时候，我父母给我们准备了可口的晚餐。我和朋友都很喜欢那些菜。当然，我也从父母和朋友那里得到了礼物。我很高兴，因为他们总是知道我想要和需要什么。但是，另一方面，每当生日到来的时候，我又长了一岁，因此我必须更敏感，更独立。最后但也同样重要的一点是，这也是我向父母表达感激的时候。他们努力工作，尽他们最大的努力抚养我。

[初中英语作文：生日

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

请以 My Best Friend 为题，写一篇不少于60个单词的作文。 My Best Friend 我最好的朋友My best friend is one of my classmates. Her name is Mary. Every day, we go to school together and go back home toget

请以“My Best Friend为题，写一篇不少于60个单词的作文。

My Best Friend

我最好的朋友

My best friend is one of my classmates. Her name is Mary. Every day, we go to school together and go back home together. We often help each other and learn from each other in study.

我最好的朋友是我的一个同班同学，她的名字叫玛丽。我们每天一起上学，一起回家。我们经常互相帮助，并向对方学习。

We have the same hobby-collecting stamps. She has many nice stamps. She is very proud of them. Sometimes she gives some of them to me. I think she is a very good girl. We will be good friends forever.

我们有着相同的爱好——集邮。她有很多漂亮的邮票，并为此十分自豪。有时，她会把其中的一些邮票给我。我认为她是个非常好的女孩。我们会成为永远的朋友。

点评：这是一篇记人的叙述文。先交代了My Best Friend是谁，接着通过事例交代了为什么“我们是最好的朋友”。最后阐述了主题。

Military Training

In our country, when we go to middle school, we must attend to the military training. Most students are afraid of it, because the training often happens in hot summer. In summer days, the weather is too hot to stand. But students have to stay outside all the day. In addition, the training is very hard. Students have to learn to be a solder. They have to obey many rules that they don’t have to in daily life. And the trainer is very strict to students. They do like our teachers who care us patiently. However, military training is a good way to train students’ strong will power. It’s useful to the life of students. Therefore, it’s necessary to student.

作文翻译：

军训

在我国，当我们去上初中的时候，我们必须参加军训。到部分的学生都害怕军训，因为训练通常是在炎热的夏天进行。夏天，天气炎热难熬。但是，学生必须一整天都呆在外面。另外，训练还很辛苦。学生们必须像士兵一样。他们必须遵守很多在日常生活中无需遵守的规则。而且，教官对学生很严厉。他们像老师一样耐心照顾我们。但是，军训也是一种锻炼学生意志的好方法。它对学生的生活很有帮助。因此，军训对学生是很必要的。