Event Viewer

It's summer vacation, but I still go go school during the week days. My 12-year-old daughter Yvonne stayed home alone this afternoon. She called my wife, asking her whether she can play computer and my wife said ok. We usually set 30-minute limit to our kids when they are playing computer games or just surfing the Internet. Therefore, we supposed that Yvonne would turn off the computer after she had played the computer for 30 minutes. However, as most parents can expect, we should not test our kid's self control. It is too tempting for kids to break the rule that we set if they are not under our supervision.

Tonight I turned on the computer she had used to check the 'Event Viewer'. I found that she had used that computer from 2:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. rather than half an hour as we usually said. I didn't punish her, but it comes up some issues. First of all, there has been a heated debate in Chinese ancient society on whether people are born good or evil. From Yvonne's example, can we confirm that most people are born 'evil' because it is not easy for us to control ourselves and keep ourselves away from temptation? Maybe we can't make that kind of conclusion, but at least we should know that most kids still need parents' guidance, supervision, and advice. Second, Yvonne kept asking me how I knew that she had played the computer for three and a half hours. Of course, I didn't tell her how. I guess that she may find out by herself one day. I promise my son and daughter that I am going to teach them computer skills next summer vacation. I am afraid that once they learn more computer literacy, they may know how to delete all the records in Event Viewer and also the view history of browsers. I should start to look for freeware that can monitor what websites kids have surfed or how long they can use the computer.

Develop a habit of writing English

I just read an article titled 'Writing IS Thinking'. The author, Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a tenured professor from Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago challenged readers to write 30-60 minutes each day. I have to admit that it is pretty difficult for non-native speakers of English to write 30-60 minutes each day. However, being an English writing teacher, I have to convince myself that I should develop a regular habit of writing English, for example 2 pieces of blog every week.

Let's start from writing issues. To many people, writing is the most difficult skill of the four language skills. Why? There are many quite a lot reasons and I would only talk about two of them today. First of all, many native speakers of English have no problem communicating fluently in English, but they may have hard time writing well-organized essays. I bet it is also true to many Chinese people; people who can get their ideas across in oral communication can not necessarily write a convincing article. Since writing will usually leave something for others to check what they wrote is good or not -- an email, a printed writing assignment, a technical report, a chapter of a book, etc, writers should be more careful about the sentence structure, grammar correctness, and word choice of their writing. Second, because writers usually don't have to respond immediately as they did in conversations, they have more time to organize, draft, and revise their writings. In other words, most people may expect more meaningful content from your writing than from your speaking.

Yes, it is not easy for native speakers of English to have a habit of writing English, not to mention non-native speakers of English. However, I bet once we cultivate the habit of writing English, we will write faster and better.