Some people say summer is the time when teachers should get more pay. But not everyone is grateful to teachers for keeping kids occupied (无空闲的) between August and June: Washington state representative Liz Pike has written a Facebook post, titled “A life in the day of a WA state representative,” and responded to teachers’ complaints of rising costs of living. The post has received criticism for being anti-teacher. After reading her post, I feel that Liz Pike should rethink her criticism of public school teaching and avoid comparing it to the private school.

Many of us teachers would certainly like teaching to be more like the private school. We see nothing wrong with fair pay for fair performance. In fact, performance is the name of the game. With standardized testing popular throughout K-12 education, teachers are some of the most analyzed and performance-measured employees in the United States. Liz Pike is very angry that teachers want raises even while test scores are dropping. Well, how are we supposed to have discipline (纪律) in the classroom when our hands are tied and we can hardly do anything with naughty students or fail students who are not prepared to move on to the next grade?

Teachers would love to be able to turn education around and improve student performance. But we can’t, and we should not suffer for it. Unlike private school businesses, public schools cannot turn away “customers”. A private school business serves customers who walk through the door of their own free will, while public schools have to educate students who only attend because courts say they must.

She says those who are “uninspired” by a lack of a cost of living increase should give up teaching. Is this the message that she thinks should be sent to the students whose academic performance she claims (声称) to care so much about? That “if you love it you’ll shut up and not stand up for yourself”? I think teachers should stand up for themselves and I also think supporting teachers can make teachers teach children how to stand up for themselves.

Student loan (贷款) debt has become a worldwide problem. In America, the country’s overall student debt reached a record of $1.6 trillion in 2019. The average person with student loan debt owed between $20, 000 and $25, 000, A recent Japanese government report says it has been lending over $9 billion yearly to students since 2010. Similar conditions exist in Africa and South America.

Several factors account for high student loan debt. One is that employers everywhere have increased their demands for skilled workers, making higher education a requirement for many jobs. The students, however, after graduation, often find that their country’s economy is not strong enough to support their financial needs, so their ability to pay back the loan becomes a problem.

To solve the problem, many countries are seeking their ways. Australia has developed a system where students do not have to pay anything back until they are earning at least $40, 000 a year. In America, several candidates (候选人) running for president in the 2020 election have offered more extreme solutions that all or at least some of these loans will be forgiven (免除).

Some professors in several universities recently studied what the effects of debt forgiveness might be. They found that, on the whole, sudden debt relief greatly improved the borrowers’ lives. Not only did they have more money, but they were more likely to move to a new area and seek better paying work.

Yet the professors’ research doesn’t include what might happen to financial institutions or the overall economy if debt were totally forgiven. It only looks at how debt forgiveness would help the borrowers. They warn of some other possible negative effects. If a borrower knew that if he ran into any trouble he would be saved because he could get the debt relief, then he might actually become more reckless (轻率的) with his borrowing in the future.

No matter what, the professors agree that if countries do decide to approve some student debt relief the neediest students should be helped first.

LOVE it or hate it, there is no escape from Internet slang.

This is especially true among young people in some English-speaking countries such as Australia, the UK and the US. These days, if they haven’t caught up with the latest popular Internet slang, chances are that they often feel out of the loop on social media.

Take these posts by The Washington Post for example: “David Bowie dying is totes tradge” and “When Cookie hugged Jamal it made me totes emosh.”

What on earth do these mean? Well, “totes” is a short form of the adverb “totally”. Likewise, “tradge” means “tragic” and “emosh” means “emotional”.

It seems that, for millennials (those born between the early 1980s and late 1990s), typing in this abbreviated form is not only time-saving but also hip.

Many millennial slang words are formed by what linguists call the practice of “totesing” – the systematic abbreviation of words, according to a recent article in The Washington Post.

Some people think that millennial slang affects the English language negatively. However, Melbourne University linguist Rosey Billington doesn't agree.

“When you are able to use language in a creative way, you show you are linguistically knowledgeable because you know the language rules well enough to use words in a different way,” Billington told News.com.au.

Her view is backed up by two linguists, Lauren Spradlin and Taylor Jones, from the City University of New York and the University of Pennsylvania respectively. The two believe that totes-speak is a highly-organized system that can only be used by speakers who have mastered English pronunciation.

The ability to break apart syllables and mix different sounds together is key. “Totesing is about sounds, and it follows the sometimes-complicated sound system of English,” Jones told The Washington Post. “Totesing is not random. On the contrary, it has strict rules to follow. You need to be very fluent in the English language to be able to understand totes-speak.”