A young man found that wandering aimlessly in the street could also bring legal trouble. One misunderstanding led to another until he had to appear in court for trial.

A minor legal conflict

Only once in my life have I clashed with the law. The whole process of being arrested and taken to court was a very unpleasant experience at that time, but now it has become the material of a good story. What is particularly irritating is the arbitrary situation during my arrest and the subsequent court trial.

It happened in February 12 years ago, a few months after I graduated from middle school, but I won't go to college until October, so I'm still at home.

One morning, I came to Richmond, a suburb of London not far from where I live. I'm looking for a temporary job and saving some money to travel. Because the sky is clear, if there is anything urgent, I will leisurely look at the window of the window shop, visit the park, and sometimes simply stop and look around. This obvious laziness must have ruined me.

It happened at about 1 1 30. When I failed in the local library, I just came out and saw a man crossing the street, obviously wanting to talk to me. I like to think that he wants to ask me the time. I can't believe he said he was a policeman and wanted to arrest me. At first I thought it was a joke. But then a policeman in uniform came, and I have no doubt about it.

"Why did you arrest me?" I asked.

"Wandering around, suspected of committing a crime," he said.

"What case?" I asked again.

"Stealing," he said.

"Steal what?" I asked.

"Milk bottle," he said, with an extremely serious expression.

"Oh,"

The problem is that petty theft often happens in this area, especially stealing milk bottles from the front steps.

Then, I made a big mistake, that is, I was only 19 years old, with long hair, and thought I was a member of the "youth counterculture" in the 1960s. Therefore, I want to show an indifferent and indifferent attitude towards this, so I say in a casual and indifferent tone, "How long have you been with me?" In this way, in their eyes, I am used to this situation, which in turn makes them believe that I am a complete villain.

A few minutes later, a police car came.

"Sit in the back," they said. "Put your hands on the back of the chair and don't move." It's no joke that they sit on my left and right respectively.

At the police station, they questioned me for hours. I continue to pretend to be sophisticated and get used to this kind of thing. When they asked me what I had been doing, I told them that I was looking for a job. "Aha", now I can see them thinking, "Unemployment".

Finally, I was formally charged and told that I would be tried in Richmond District Court next Monday. They just let me go.

I wanted to defend myself in court, but as soon as my father knew what happened, he hired a very good lawyer for me. That Monday, we brought all kinds of witnesses to court, including my middle school English teacher as my parallel witness. But the court did not summon him to testify in court. My experiment didn't go that far. After only 15 minutes, the judge dismissed the case. I was acquitted. The poor policeman has no chance of winning. My lawyer even succeeded in making the police bear the legal expenses.

In this way, I didn't leave any criminal record. But at that time, the most shocking thing was that I was acquitted and obviously relied on evidence: I had a standard accent, respected middle-class parents appeared in court, reliable witnesses, and obviously I could afford a good lawyer. Considering the ambiguous nature of this accusation, I am sure that if I was born in a family with different backgrounds and really lost my job, I might be found guilty. When my lawyer asked for compensation for attorney's fees, his defense obviously revolved around the fact that I had "excellent academic performance".

At the same time, outside the court, a policeman who arrested me complained to my mother in frustration that another young man wanted to do the right thing with the police. He told me reproachfully, "You could have helped us when we arrested you."

What does he mean by saying that? Maybe it means I should act angry and say, "Hey, do you know who I'm talking to?" I am ambitious and have excellent academic performance. How dare you arrest me? "In that case, they may apologize to me and take off their hats and let me go.

Unit 2 benefited a lot.

1. One night not long ago, at the dinner table, my three children-aged 9, 6 and 4-temporarily stopped fighting for food to make room for the century to teach me what paradigm shift is, what is the limitation of linear thinking, and how to re-examine various related factors.

2. The thing is this: At that time, we were playing our own set of "What's different?" Sesame street game. It turns out that when playing this game, children have to look at three pictures and pick out the one that does not belong to the same category. I said, "Come on, oranges, tomatoes and strawberries are not in the same category?"

3. The boss quickly said the smug answer: "Tomatoes, because the other two are fruits." I admit that this is the correct answer, although some purists insist that tomatoes are a kind of fruit. For those of us who have been forced to eat tomatoes and salad since childhood, tomatoes are always vegetables. When my 4-year-old said, "The correct answer is strawberry, because the other two are round, but strawberries are not round", I was about to give another topic in groups of three things. How can I refute this argument?

Then, my 6-year-old said, "Oranges are not in the same category, because the other two are red." The 9-year-old child didn't want his sister-in-law to get the upper hand and said, "Oranges are different because the other two grow on vines."

The second child regards this as a challenge to him. "It can be strawberries, because only strawberries will be put on ice cream."

There is no doubt that something is happening here. This matter is more chaotic than fighting for food, and it is much more important than whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables. Copernicus regarded the sun as the center of the universe and readjusted the geocentric paradigm for centuries. My children are sitting on Copernicus' achievements. Rubin Matthews renamed his Bronx ice cream Haagen-Dazs and raised the price without changing the product. My children are doing what Rubin Matthews did. Edward jenner gave up looking for a cure for smallpox and found a vaccine to prevent the disease. My children are doing what edward jenner did.

7. Instead of studying smallpox patients, he studied people who had been exposed to smallpox but were infected with it. He found that they all suffered from a mild disease similar to smallpox: vaccinia; Vaccinia enables them to prevent deadly smallpox.

8. They are re-examining various related factors, and they are re-recognizing their own problems. They reiterated their questions. In a word, according to thomas kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, they are doing what all scientists who have made great discoveries in history are doing: they are changing the paradigm of reality.

9. But if our game is an exercise in the school exercise book, all the children who don't circle the tomatoes will be criticized as wrong answers. Any child who doesn't interpret the question as "which is not fruit" is wrong. Perhaps this situation explains why so many of the world's most outstanding scientists and inventors are failing students. One of the most striking is Albert Einstein, who may be the most influential paradigm changer in this century.

10, I didn't mean to judge the school. God knows, it's too easy to comment. I just want to remind you that the value of information is really limited. I bring this up because our society seems to have developed to such a stage that everyone demands more technology and instant access to more information.

Students must surf the Internet. Your home must be digitally connected to the World Wide Web. Enterprises must be able to download large amounts of data in real time. However, unless we change the paradigm and re-examine various related factors, information expressway will not bring us any results.

12 No matter now or recently, we are not short of information. Imagine that we have much more information than Copernicus did 400 years ago. But he did an amazing thing that shocked the earth and completely changed people's view of the universe. He did this not by discovering more information, but by looking at the information that everyone had seen with different eyes. Edward jenner invented preventive drugs not by accumulating information, but by reinterpreting the problem.

13. When we started to drive into the information expressway, what we needed was not more information, but a new way of looking at information. Like my children, we should find more than one correct answer, more than one correct question, and more than one way to read a bunch of information. We should remember that when you only have a hammer, you tend to treat every problem as a nail.

Unit 3 Why do I teach

Why do you teach? My friend asked me this question, and I told him that I didn't want to do any administrative duties. He doesn't understand why all Americans are educated to pursue money and power when they grow up, instead of a "ladder" job leading to this goal.

Of course, I don't teach because teaching is easy for me. I have done a lot of money-making jobs. I am a mechanic, a carpenter and a writer. Teaching is the most difficult one. For me, teaching is a profession that makes my eyes red and swollen, my palms sweaty and my spirit depressed. My eyes are red and swollen, because no matter how late I prepare lessons, I have no confidence. My palms are sweaty because I'm always very nervous before I walk into the classroom. The students will surely find that I turned out to be an idiot. I am depressed because when I walk out of the classroom after an hour, I always feel that this class is more boring than usual.

I teach not because I think I can answer questions, nor because I think I have knowledge that I must share with others. I was surprised because the students really wrote down what I said in class.

Then why should I teach?

I teach because I like the rhythm of the teaching calendar. June, July and August provide opportunities for thinking, research and writing.

I teach because teaching is a career based on change. Textbooks are the same, I am changing-more importantly, my students are changing.

I teach because I like freedom, and I also have the freedom to make mistakes, learn lessons, motivate myself and motivate students. As a teacher, I am my own boss. If I let the first-year students write their own textbooks and learn to write, who will interfere with me? Such a course may fail completely, but we can all learn a lot from failure.

I teach because I like to ask questions that students have to rack their brains to answer. The world is full of right answers to poor questions. In my teaching, I sometimes find some good problems.

I teach because I like to find some ways for myself and my students to get out of the ivory tower and step into the real world. I once taught a course called "How to reinvent yourself in a technological society". Fifteen of my students have read Emerson, Thoreau and Huxley. They keep diaries and write term papers.

But we also set up a company, bought a shabby house with a loan, and practiced the theme of self-reliance through the transformation of this house. At the end of the semester, we sold the house, paid off the loan, paid taxes and shared the profits.

Therefore, teaching is a bright and colorful life, which also gives me challenges and opportunities for continuous learning.

However, I haven't talked about the most important reason why I teach.

One reason is wiki. She is my first doctor and an energetic student. He tirelessly wrote a paper about an unknown14th century poet. He also wrote several articles and sent them to academic journals. She is all by herself, and only occasionally gets some inspiration from me. I saw her finish her paper with my own eyes and learned that her article was adopted. I also saw her find a job with my own eyes, and got a post as a graduate student at Harvard University, and wrote a book about my budding ideas as a student.

Another reason is George. He used to be my engineering student, but later he decided that he loved others more than things, so he switched to English.

Jenny, who dropped out of school, was pulled back by his classmates because they wanted her to see the results of the self-made renovation of the old house. I saw her come back and heard her tell me with her own eyes that she later became interested in the urban poor and then became a civil rights lawyer.

I have to mention Jackie, the cleaning lady. She knows more intuitively than most of us have learned through analysis. Jackie has decided to go to college after graduating from high school.

These people who grow and change before my eyes are the real reason why I became a teacher. Being a teacher means seeing the clay figurine begin to breathe this creative achievement.

"Promotion", rather than teaching, may bring me money and rights. But I have money. I get paid to do what I like: read books, talk to people and ask questions such as "What's the point of having money?" Questions like this.

I also have the right, I have the right to give inspiration and inspire talents, and I have the right to open a bibliography instructor. Is there any greater right than this?

And teaching can also bring things other than money and power, which is love. Not only love learning, reading and thinking, but also love teachers' love for students who have left their own lives and started to get rid of them. The word "love" is not appropriate to learn here, and "magic" may be more appropriate.

I teach because I am with students who are starting to get a new life. Sometimes I feel that I have got a new life with them.

Unit 4 A fan's comment

1 This email is similar to other letters of intent I received in some respects. It lashed out at my comments on the Los Angeles Dodgers, thinking that I was completely wrong. However, this comment is different from other comments in at least two ways.

Unlike the usual comment "You are an idiot", this comment contains more details. It contains the key data of team performance. The person who wrote this review knows as much about the Los Angeles Dodgers as I think.

And this comment is signed. The author's name is Sarah? Morris.

I was deeply moved, so I wrote back to her. I didn't expect this letter to lead to an unusual exchange.

May I ask you a question? I have been running my Dodgers website for two years. How did you become a baseball review columnist? This is my dream.

This is Sarah's second email, and its arrival is not unexpected at all. Every time I smile at someone, they ask me for a job. But another thing caught my attention. This is a spelling mistake in the last line of the letter, which is about "My Dream".

Maybe Sarah is a poor typist. But maybe she is really looking for a goal, but she hasn't found it yet.

It was worth writing to her again, so I asked her to explain.

I am 30 years old. ..... Because of my disability, it took me five years to complete my college studies and get my diploma. ..... In the baseball season, I spend an average of 55 hours a week writing reports, commenting, doing research, listening to or watching games.

10 Sarah called her website "Dodge Land". I searched and found nothing. Later, I reread her email and found that there was an address at the bottom of her email.

1 1 I clicked on the address. The website is not fancy. But she reported the team in detail with the seriousness of the writer. However, I still can't help but ask, is anyone watching?

12: No one has ever signed my visitor register. I get a letter every month.

13 So, this is a physically disabled woman. She covers the Dodgers as widely as any American journalist, but she writes for an almost unknown website. The name of the website is very strange and difficult to remember. There are about two readers.

14 I think what she lacked in that dream was far more than a spelling letter R.

I set up my own website, hoping to find a job. But bad luck. Because I type with a stick tied to my head, the highest typing speed is 8 words per minute, but what does it matter? Good brain, very focused work. This is the key to success.

16 Typing with a stick tied to your head?

17 I asked her how long it would take to finish her usual 400-word article.

18 three to four hours.

19 I did something online that I had never done with a stranger.

I asked Sarah? Morris called me.

2 1 I have difficulty in speaking and can't use the phone.

This proves my suspicion. This is obviously an elaborate scam. This so-called female writer is probably a 45-year-old male plumber.

I decided to end my correspondence with this person. But just then, I received another email.

My disability is cerebral palsy. ..... it affects the control of muscles and nerves. ..... When my brain tells my hand to hit the key, I will move my leg, hit the table, and hit the other six keys at the same time in the process.

When my mother explained my disability, she told me that if I worked three times harder than others, I could achieve anything I wanted.

She wrote that growing up in Pasadena, she became a Dodgers fan. When she was a sophomore at Blair High School, the coach of a junior baseball team asked her to be a team statistician. She did it with a typewriter and a stick tied to her head.

She said that because of her relationship with baseball, she was able to stay at school, although her grades were poor, and her neck ached for several hours of homework every day.

Baseball has given me a goal to strive for … I can do things that other children can't … I want to do something to give me so many baseballs.

Yes, that's how I trust her. Sort of a letter. Who can report a baseball team without the best equipment and help, as she said? I was curious, so I asked her if I could drive to see her. She agreed and told me the way in detail, which mentioned the dirt roads and nameless streets in the country.

I drove east through the wilderness of Texas. I saw a house that looked like an old tool shed on a winding dirt road full of holes the size of small animals.

3 1 but this is not a tool shed, it is a house, a decaying hut surrounded by tall weeds and waste.

Is this the place on the 32nd?

A woman in an old T-shirt and skirt came out of the hut.

I'm Sarah's mother, Roy? Morris said, holding my smooth hand with her rough hand. "She is waiting for you."

I walked in from the sun, opened a tattered screen door, and walked into the dark shed, with an 87-pound body curled up in a wheelchair.

She twisted her limbs. Her head turned around. We can't hug or even shake hands. She can only look at me with wide eyes and smile at me.

But her smile is full of light! It penetrated the dark space surrounded by broken wooden floors, old recliners and cobweb-covered windows.

I couldn't bear to look at anything else, so I just stared at her smile, which was so clear and confident that it even swept away most of my doubts. But I still have to ask, is this Sarah? Morris?

She sat in a wheelchair and began to tremble, making a sound in her mouth. I thought she was coughing.

But in fact, she was talking. Her mother translated for her. "I want to show you something." Sarah said.

4 1 Roy pushed her to an old desk on a coal ash brick. There is a computer on the desk. Next to the computer is a TV set. Her mother tied a small stick to her daughter's temple.

Sarah was lying on her computer, using a stick tied to her head to call up a report on Dodge Land's website. She began to read the words and sentences in the report carefully.

She looked up at me and giggled. I looked down at her, full of surprise and shame.

Is this really Sarah? Morris. This great Sarah? Morris.

Sarah and I met a few months ago. Morris wanted to fight her when he contacted her. Now, watching her struggling to write an article in this dark room, maybe no one reads it at all, I understand what this battle is all about.

However, this battle is not with Sarah, but with myself. This battle is exactly the same as what sports are experiencing every day in today's cynical era. That is to believe that athletes can still struggle bravely.

In a place far away from such doubts, a Sarah with a magical mind? Morris helped me regain my trust.

The day mom cried.

A long time ago, on a dark winter day, I came home from school with great expectation. I have the new issue of my favorite sports magazine under my arm, and I will stay alone in the house. My father is at work, my sister is not at home, and my mother has found a job and won't go home for an hour. I jumped up the steps, rushed into the living room and snapped on the light.

I was stunned by what I saw: my mother curled up in a ball, burying her face in her hands and sitting at the other end of the sofa. She is crying. I had never seen her cry before, so I approached her carefully and patted her on the shoulder. "Mom?" I said, "What's the matter?" She breathed a sigh of relief and squeezed out a smile. "Nothing, really, it's no big deal, but I'm going to lose this new job. I can't type fast enough! "

"But you only went for three days," I said. "You will keep up." I will repeat what my mother told me a hundred times. Whenever I encounter difficulties in studying or doing something important to me, she will say so.

"No," she said sadly. "In the past, I always said that I could do everything I was determined to do. Now I still think I can do most things, but I can't do it this time. "

I'm incompetent and at a loss. 16 years old, I still think my mother can do anything. A few years ago, when we sold the farm and moved to the city, my mother decided to open a day care center. She hasn't been trained in this field before, but it doesn't bother her. She takes part in correspondence study and exercise in the nursery. Half a year later, I officially obtained the nursing qualification of the nursery, and soon the nursery was crowded with students and children waiting to go to the nursery. I think my mother was born with this ability.

But neither the day care center nor the motel my parents bought later could provide enough money for my sister and me to go to college. I should go to college in two years, and my sister will go to school in three years. Time is running out, and my mother desperately wants to make money. It's obvious that dad has done his best-he has a full-time job and planted 80 acres of land.

A few months after selling the motel, my mother brought home an old typewriter, which sometimes skipped words and the keyboard was loose. At dinner that night, I said that this machine was "a pile of rubbish"

"This is all we can afford," mom said. "Keeping in touch is enough." From that day on, as soon as the table was cleared and the dishes were washed, my mother went into her sewing room to practice. For several nights, the slow click, click and click continued until midnight.

It's almost Christmas. I heard that my mother got a job in a radio station. I'm not surprised at all, and I didn't take it seriously. But she's happy.

On Monday, when she came back from work on the first day, I found that she was no longer excited. She looked sleepy and nervous, so I ignored her.

On Tuesday, my father cooked dinner and cleaned the kitchen, while my mother stayed in the sewing room to practice. "Is mom okay?" I asked dad.

"She has some difficulty in typing," he said. "She needs to practice. I think she would appreciate it if we helped her more. "

"I did a lot," I said, and I immediately became wary.

"I know," dad said quietly, "but you can do more. You must remember that her main job is to let you go to college. "

To tell the truth, I don't care if I can go to college. I hope she can forget this.

On Wednesday, I found my mother crying. I was surprised and embarrassed, which completely proved how I didn't understand the pressure she was under. Sitting on the sofa next to him, I began to understand.

"I think we all fail sometimes," my mother said quietly. I can feel her pain and her intense emotional tension about my intrusion. Suddenly, my heart was touched and I put my arm around her.

My mother couldn't help it any longer. She leaned her face on my shoulder and sobbed. I held her and didn't want to talk. I know I'm doing what I should do, what I can do, that's enough. At that moment, I felt my mother's north shaking with excitement, and I realized her fragility for the first time. She is still my mother, but not only that: she is still a person like me, who will be afraid, hurt and fail. I can feel her pain, just as when I seek comfort in her arms, he can feel me thousands of times.

A week later, my mother found a job selling textiles, earning more than half of that of a radio station. "I can do this job," she said simply, but the practice on the old green typewriter continued at night. Now I pass by her room at night and hear her typing. My mood is completely different. I know more than one woman is practicing typing.

Two years later, when I left home for college, my mother found a job with higher salary and greater responsibility. I can't help thinking that in some strange way, my mother learned as much from her failure as I did, because a few years later, when I finished my studies and proudly accepted a job as a newspaper reporter, my mother had been a reporter in our town newspaper for six months.

Now, that old green typewriter is in my office. It hasn't been repaired for too long. She is a souvenir, but the memories it evokes are different for me and my mother. When I encounter difficulties in writing articles and want to give up, or when I feel sorry for myself and feel that life should not be hard for me, I, like my mother, put a piece of paper into an old typewriter and type word by word. This is what I think, not her failure, but her courage, the courage to move on.

This typewriter is the best souvenir I have ever got.

Due to the limitation of words, the rest of the class can't get in!