Learning

Although I never understood the mania around Harry Potter’s movies, I was a devoted reader of the young magician’s adventures until the fourth book. A friend once gave me a surprising explanation about why Harry Potter is so incredibly successful: when children start reading the first book, they are generally around the same age as Harry and can identify with him. He grows older as the reader does, sharing the same problems; although he lives in a more fantastic world with magic and excitement, he still deals with typical problems sometimes. 

Before coming across the Harry Potter books, I had a Lords of the Rings phase that I still remember vividly, but my travels to middle earth were limited compared to the thoughts I gave Hogwarts. And although the fantasy genre has fans of all ages, it seems that children are especially attracted to fantasy worlds and mythical creatures.

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In this age of technology, it seems that teens navigating hormones and sexual orientation have found a way to avoid those awkward parent-teen conversations by communicating with parents via the internet. Check out this expat teen in Shanghai who used Skype to come out to his mom and shared his coming out experience with the rest of the world on youtube.com.

Homosexuality has only been legal for 11 years in China, and while it's still a taboo topic for most Chinese people, it seems there is growing tolerance for homosexuality in China with the number of homosexuals in China exceeding five million. In 2001, China removed homosexuality from the list of psychiatric disorders. 

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In the U.S., I spent my summer vacations being pretty lazy; I spent June through August going to the pool, catching up with friends, sleeping late, or traveling with my family. For some reason, I imagined children and adolescents all over the world spending these months the exact same way, but I’ve now realized two things: not all countries have the same months for summer vacation and other kids out of school attended summer camp (6 million kids in America each year), try to make extra cash at a summer jobs or study at summer school (yikes).

While in the U.S., most schools allow a summer vacation of about three months, the summer holidays in England usually begin near the end of July and last until the first week of September for approximately 6 weeks of unadulterated bliss. 

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Getting It Done Without Tears & Strife 

Many countries celebrated Father’s Day a couple of weeks ago; male parenting was applauded and all the nice things fathers do were given recognition. For much of the year, however, children spend more time lamenting the embarrassing things that both their mothers and fathers do than embracing parental quirks. 

In a recent Washington Post article,  Donna Scaramastra Gorman, a tbjkids contributing writer, bemoans the type of father she had growing up – the extremely intelligent, overly helpful kind.  
When asked for the answer to a simple math equation, her engineer father would pull out his physics textbooks to explain the complex science behind her seemingly straightforward question.  

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Every summer my sister treks halfway around the world from her home in Oslo, Norway to Beijing to visit my mother and me. This annual tradition the last six years, has been an especially important one since our father passed away in early 2002. 

These past two times have been particularly special to my family because both my sister and I have both had kids within the past year and a half. My nephew Emil-Alexander was born in the early spring of 2007, and I was lucky enough to see him twice last year: the first time in Norway last July, and just a few weeks later when my sister came here to Beijing to visit.

My half-Norwegian-half-Chinese-American nephew is, as you’d imagine, adorable. Though he was born a few weeks premature, he has grown into a feisty, friendly and inquisitive little toddler – especially here in Beijing, where both and he and his mother have been staying with Lao Lao (姥姥, grandma) over the past two weeks. 

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Every year around the middle of spring and the beginning of summer students from all over the world, ranging from ages 14 – 18, take exams that have a large impact on their future. A few weeks ago I was one of those students; as a student at a British international school, I took my GCSEs, a series of ten tests in different subjects. For students in Chinese schools their biggest worry around this time is preparation for the National Higher Education Entrance Exam, which is commonly known as Gaokao. 

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I bet you won’t finish reading this...

I know this because, unfortunately, the addictive nature of web browsing is something that I am well accustomed to. I am ashamed to admit that I have, on countless occasions, stayed up all night browsing useless websites, all the while ignoring that little voice in my head that’s telling me to do something more productive.

It’s safe to say I’m not fighting this battle alone. I have watched helplessly as my own friends and family struggle to tear their eyes away from the enticing web pages of the Internet, and I am not surprised that the cause of the shrinking attention span of teenagers and children is being pinpointed upon this very phenomenon.

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The best thing about having a younger sister is the excuse it gives me to re-read all those children books I loved so much as a child. Upon re-reading Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona the Pest,” I was happily reminded of the mistake Ramona made while singing the American National Anthem on her first day of kindergarten. The 5-year-old Ramona mishears the line “dawns early light” as “dawnzer lee light.” I found this exponentially more humorous than my younger sister, who stared at me blankly as I laughed until I cried.  

To redeem myself, I mentioned the incident to a friend of mine, who reassured me that Ramona’s mistake was indeed a funny one. She also mentioned a couple of similar mistakes she made as a child. To her, “The Wizard of Oz” was the “Wizard a Foz,” and up until two years ago the commonly used phrase “play it by ear” was misheard as “play it by year.” Hearing this, I again burst into a bout of embarrassingly loud laughter, while my friend glared at me.  

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I once dated a guy who compulsively tested and re-tested his IQ with online quizzes. When his scores rose each week I assumed he was a self-involved cheater, not a genius. Maybe I should have given him due credit for finding loopholes in the system. Perhaps cracking the codes of the interweb is today’s claim to genius status – after all, who needs complex symphonies and mind-numbingly difficult mathematical equations?

The truth is, society searches for composers and mathematicians – everyone wants to be reminded that works of staggering genius exist. Geniuses inspire us, Nathan Birch stresses in a recent article, as well as make the general public bemoan their horribly average mental capacity.

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As a California native, what to do in the event of an earthquake has been engrained into my head since I could remember. But now that I’ve lived out of California for a few years, those safety precautions have been pushed to the back of my mind. The recent earthquake here in Beijing was a good reminder that it doesn’t matter where you are because earthquakes can happen anywhere at anytime. Therefore, brushing up on general rules for safety can never be a bad idea.

Former United Nations Disaster Mitigation expert Doug Copp and current Rescue Chief and Disaster Manager of theAmerican Rescue Team International (ARTI) gives these tips for earthquake safety:

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