I truly believe that feeling is more important than knowing for children and parents who want to guide them. If the fact is that the seeds of knowledge and wisdom can grow in the future, then emotional and sensory impressions are the fertile ground for the seeds to grow. Childhood is a time to cultivate the soil. Once emotions are aroused-a feeling of good things, excitement of unknown new things, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love-we will be eager to know what caused our emotional response. Once discovered, this knowledge is much more lasting than pure information. Paving the way for children's thirst for knowledge is more important than instilling in them a bunch of facts that they are not prepared to absorb.
Exploring nature with children is mainly about accepting everything around you. This is another time to learn to open your abandoned sensory channels with your eyes, ears, nose and fingertips. For most of us, the knowledge about our world mainly comes from vision, but we look around with such blind eyes. As a result, we become semi-blind. One way to see the beauty you ignore is to ask yourself, "What if I've never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again? "
I'm sure there is something deeper, something lasting and meaningful. People who live between the beauty and magic of the earth, whether scientists or ordinary people, will not be lonely or tired of life. No matter what problems or worries they have in their personal life, their ideas can find an inner way to satisfy and rekindle their enthusiasm for life. People who stare at the beauty of the earth can find a power reserve that will be used in life. In the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of tides, in the budding buds, there are both figurative beauty and symbolic beauty. In the repeated cycle of nature, there is one thing that has infinite healing power-that is, dawn after night and spring after winter.
"He is a hopeless romantic," the son wrote. "He deeply loves life and the mysteries of the universe." When Otto Peterson realized that he didn't have much time to enjoy the scenery on the earth, he said to his son, "What supported me at the last moment was my great curiosity about what would happen in the future."
Creative observation of the surrounding environment can revive our freshness of life. This discovery is mainly related to rediscovering what we all had in childhood. We were all artists when we were very young. When we came into this world, the door of perception was open. Everything is a surprise. At first, everything needs our tongue and hands to touch slowly and lovingly. Long before we can speak, we already know the comfort of mother's warm arms and the pleasant feeling of plush toys. Smooth and rough surfaces, cold and hot things surprise us and fascinate us. Through touching again and again, we have established a large number of subtle tactile impressions.
None of us have lost our stored tactile memory. We haven't lost our freshness. What has happened is that we have replaced touch with recognition and marking. The former can be finished quickly, while the latter needs more time and attention. For example, if someone asks you to visually inspect the edge of your desk and estimate its length, you can know how many inches it is in just a few seconds by moving your eyes back and forth. Suppose someone asks you to measure the edge of the table with your finger and count every small scratch? You will press your fingers on the table and move very, very slowly, and your eyes will not move faster than your fingers. This slow and focused feeling and way of watching is the first step for us to regain our freshness.
In order to live at such a speed, we can only browse the surface of things, pick out the most striking aspects and ignore the secondary features. If we drive on a busy highway, of course, this is beyond reproach. But when we allow this pressure to invade all aspects of our lives, we begin to lose touch and feel that we have missed something. We are lost, but we don't know what we want. When this happens, we are already suffering from the lack of beauty. Fortunately, the cure for this situation is very pleasant. Although you need a little restraint at first, it turns out that your efforts have not been in vain.
Wherever we look, we can see this principle at work. Trees don't stand out in the empty sky. On the contrary, blue patterns are embedded among the leaves, and the branches outline the vibrant sky. We like the spaces between leaves or spokes of plants. This endless alternation of form and space excites us. We feel connected with the world again; Our sense of beauty is satisfied and we are comforted.
When there is no preconceived idea to prevent us from seeing, when we spend all our time really feeling what we see-when we can do this-the whole universe will unfold before our eyes, and we will hold our breath in awe when faced with incredibly complex patterns in the simplest things. Only in this way can we regain our freshness.
If I am 2 1 year old and want to study medicine, I don't think I will go to school directly. I will find a job as a nurse in a hospital first-bring a bedpan if necessary-to see and listen. After doing this for a year or two, you may know which subject you want to study. Maybe I will find that I prefer to be an expert in pediatric diseases rather than a surgeon. I may even end up as a pharmacist or a medical device manufacturer. I will see where this job will lead me.
The other day, I heard that a young officer was very angry when he left the army because his former employer gave him his old job-an envelope. When he was in the army, the young man kept flying bombers. However, sealing an envelope is not a bad thing. A clever young man may get an invention from it. Should envelopes do this, or are we used to it now, so we think envelopes should do this? I don't know. Where is the glue? How about the way we stick stamps and write names and addresses? What I want to say here is that some people are so snobbish about their jobs that they can't see the potential value provided by doing every job well. One way to find out what you want to do in life is to try all kinds of jobs. If you don't like working at a gas station, try factories, offices, shops and farms. Not only will you find out what you want to do, but you will also get a lot of useful information inadvertently in the process.
Many people seem to think that we can only study in our teens. Children get this impression from their elders. When they graduated from college or retired from the army at the age of 22, they thought they were "too old" to study advanced science such as medicine.
Man is producing more and more new products. The more we produce, the more people will work and buy. Employment will snowball. Nowadays, there are more opportunities than ever before, and they are increasing all the time. I think they are infinite. The older you get, the more you realize that the public interest is above everything else. If I am considering a new career, I will weigh three factors: how good it serves the public; How interesting it is; Can its economic return meet my needs?
I am the dean of Branford College of Yale University. I live on campus and know my students very well. We have 485 students. ) I often listen to their hopes and fears-as well as their stereo music and their shrill cries in the dead of night ("Does anyone care?" )。 They came to me and asked me how to spend the rest of my life.
My hope is that all students can get some relief from the ruthlessness in the future. I hope they have the opportunity to enjoy their education at every stage, purely as an experience, not as a boring requirement to prepare for the next step. I hope they have the right to make mistakes and fall, and understand that failure is as educational as victory, not the end of the world.
I found that there are four kinds of pressures affecting college students: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure and self-induced pressure. It is not difficult to find the culprits everywhere-accusing universities of charging too much, accusing professors of assigning too much homework, accusing parents of being too eager for their children, and accusing students of pushing themselves too hard. But there is no culprit, only the victim.
Along with the economic pressure comes the pressure from parents. The two are inevitably deeply intertwined. I saw the students make up their minds to go to pre-medical school without joy. They go to the laboratory as if they were going to the dentist. This makes me sad, because I know that they are cheerful people in other aspects of life.
"I think so," they can't say for sure, or "they don't really want to."
"My parents want me to be a doctor. They paid all the money, and ... "
This is almost absurd-but in fact it is not absurd. This is a combination of symptoms. Every student thinks that when other students study harder and better, the only way is to study harder. I see students go to the library after dinner every day and don't come back until midnight. I really hope they can forget their classmates and go to a movie sometimes. A few hours before dawn, I heard the tapping of a typewriter. When the exam came and the paper was due, I saw the tension in their eyes; "Can I eat everything?"
My portrayal of students today is too pessimistic, which makes them look too serious. This is only half of their situation; The other half is that these students are lovely people, and you can easily like them. They love to laugh and are friendly to people. They care about each other more than any generation of students I know. If I paint them mainly as people who are forced to ignore the happy side of life, it is because this is the problem-not only at Yale, but also in the whole American education community. That's why I think we should all worry about the values that have nurtured this generation. They are so afraid of taking risks at such a young age and so obsessed with pursuing their goals.
I asked them to talk briefly about how they started. From the beginning, students always think that they are doing their present job, and they always know that it is what they want to do. But in fact, most of them reached their present position through a tortuous road and many detours. The students were all surprised. It is hard for them to imagine a career that has not been planned in advance. It is hard for them to imagine letting God or fate lead them down an unpredictable path.