“Do you want to go to work with me today?” Asked my father one day when I was nine or 10 years old. He had never taken me to work with him before.

How could I have said no? I had no idea where my father worked, nor how he earned a living. All I knew, back around 1992, was that he left our house every morning before we woke up and came back every night after we finished dinner. So, I gave him a positive answer.

My dad drove us south to the city of Newark, where he was born. There we entered a middle-class apartment building. He made the rounds doing regular duty for the next few hours with me following closely. He checked the basic systems and services. He collected rents. He carried around a case of tools in case he needed to fix a broken door or get a washing machine running again.

He took me to work with him a few other times over the years. I always loved going. I got to see him in action, doing his job among other people, out in the wider world and looking important, even heroic. I felt proud of him, proud to be his son. I wish he had taken me more often.

Years later, I followed this tradition. I took my daughter Caroline with me to my office for a day. She saw me in a glassed-off conference room brainstorming with colleagues, on the phone talking with clients and — no doubt the most attractive scene of all — on my computer writing a report. With any luck, my daughter felt the same pride I had felt with my own father.

Today fewer and fewer kids get the same opportunity. Maybe we should make this a tradition.

Winter in Syria can be cold. With over 11 million people made homeless since the beginning of the war in 2011, many people are without enough heating or shelter during the cold winter months. A group of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) students has set out to change that.

The team of six, led by MIT Sloan School of Management undergraduate Vick Liu, created TravlerPack, a light sleeping bag that can stand up to temperatures as cold as -10℃, with the goal of sending the bags to Syrian refugees (难民).

During a freshman exercise last year, Liu was among a group of students discussing startup ideas when he realized he was interested in creating something that would help people. He wrote the idea for TravlerPack on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket so he wouldn’t forget it.

With fuel (燃料) and shelter hard to come by, refugees have few ways to keep warm during the Syrian winters. But a sleeping bag doesn’t require fuel. “It’s a simple solution to a big problem,” said Liu.

Liu and his team spoke directly with refugees to find out what additions to the bag they might need. They found that refugees had no way to store valuables, especially at night, so each TravlerPack contains one outside storage pocket and five inside storage pockets. When not being used, TravlerPack can be pressed down into a small bag, which can be worn as a backpack, allowing refugees to keep both hands free.

After reaching out to around 80 producers, the team officially partnered with one in April to make the sleeping bags.

The team reached out to many non-profits (非盈利性机构) and, luckily, NuDay Syria, a non-profit with experience of sending goods to Syrian refugees, signed on to send the packs to Northwestern Syria.

In September, the group started a GoFundMe movement to raise $15,000 to send TravlerPacks to Syrian refugees, and quickly reached their goal. Now the team is raising more money to send 1,000 bags overseas.

“We’ve been really lucky the whole way through,” Liu said. “This has been a journey of luck and a lot of planning.”

A year after graduation, I was offered a position teaching a writing class. Teaching was a profession I had never seriously considered, though several of my stories had been published. I accepted the job without hesitation, as it would allow me to wear a tie and go by the name of Mr. Davis. My father went by the same name, and I liked to imagine people getting the two of us confused. “Wait a minute,” someone might say, “are you talking about Mr. Davis the retired man, or Mr. Davis the respectable scholar?”

The position was offered at the last minute, and I was given two weeks to prepare, a period I spent searching for briefcase (公文包) and standing before my full-length mirror, repeating the words, “Hello, class. I’m Mr. Davis.” Sometimes I would give myself an aggressive voice. Sometimes I would sound experienced. But when the day eventually came, my nerves kicked in and the true Mr. Davis was there. I sounded not like a thoughtful professor, but rather a 12-year-old boy.

I arrived in the classroom with paper cards designed in the shape of maple leaves. I had cut them myself out of orange construction paper. I saw nine students along a long table. I handed out the cards, and the students wrote down their names and fastened them to their breast pockets as I required.

“All right then,” I said. “Okay, here we go.” Then I opened my briefcase and realized that I had never thought beyond this moment. I had been thinking that the students would be the first to talk, offering their thoughts and opinions on the events of the day. I had imagined that I would sit at the edge of the desk, overlooking a forests of hands. Every student would yell. “Calm down, you’ll all get your turn. One at a time, one at a time!”

A terrible silence ruled the room, and seeing no other opinions, I inspected the students to pull out their notebooks and write a brief essay related to the theme of deep disappointment.