In Singapore, primary (小学的) and high school students take outdoor-skill courses as part of their studies. They are usually three to five days long and include rope and rock climbing, going to sea in a small boat, sleeping in a tent at night, taking long walks in the forest, and learning to make a fire. 【小题1】 Are those outdoor skills really important?

Minister of Education (教育部部长) Ng Chee Meng says that the outdoor-skill courses help students develop skills like critical thinking (批判性思维), teamwork, and good communication-abilities that are necessary for work and life. 【小题2】 Students need to learn from books, but for some lessons, reading isn’t as useful as doing.

What do the students think? Angelique, a student from Singapore, went for a boat trip in the sea. “It helped me to grow stronger,” she says. 【小题3】 There were moments when she felt afraid and hopeless. But she remembered that “smooth seas never made a skilled sailor” and felt brave enough to continue against the storm. 【小题4】

Right now, students attend the courses with groups from their own school. Next year, however, all the students will do the courses in groups from several different schools. Why does this matter? 【小题5】 Working closely with students from other backgrounds is a great way to learn this lesson.

One student said it this way, “There is nothing to be afraid of and nothing’s impossible.” And that’s a great lesson to learn.

Teens will finally grow up some day, leaving their parents and facing the challenges in life alone, so they should learn basic life skills and form good working habits.

The government has been trying to pay attention to the importance of hardworking spirit education（劳动教育）. But this has been overlooked in recent years. Many teens do not value（重视）the importance of working hard. There is a teenager girl named Nancy, she never helps out around the house. Once her mother was on vacation for a week, leaving her alone at home. When her mother came home from vacation, she could not find a clean dish or a clean shirt.

Schools play an important role in teaching students about the value of working hard. Primary and middle schools should provide students with hardworking spirit courses every week. To our joy, some schools have provided each class with a piece of field to plant their favorite vegetables. For example, No. 38 Middle School in Hefei, set up a 500-square-meter farm on an open platform（露天平台）of their teaching building. Each class are asked to grow and pick vegetables there.

Parents should also encourage children to learn how to do chores at home. Teens should master one or two life skills every year. These skills can include cooking, washing their own clothes and tiding their rooms. The basic skills may help teens to solve the problems they will meet in the future.

Li Meixi, 12, feels anxious(焦虑的)about her look—not her face, but her dressing. When she sees fashionable people on the street, she tries to stay away from them, because she feels so shameful that she doesn’t even want to walk on the same street with them. What Li is experiencing is fashion anxiety. It troubles many people today. They are anxious about their dressing, afraid of being seen out of style.

A big reason for anxiety is fashion bullying(霸凌). As fashion magazines and advertisements show the “latest and greatest” trends(趋势), there’s a lot of pressure on people, especially on teenagers, to follow them, no matter how much it will cost. “The need to belong in groups is very important to young learners and exclusion(排斥)is something they see as the end of the world,” said Andy Cranham, a teacher from the UK.

Another reason is that young people may not have a sense of self-identity. It seems that they feel anxious about their dressing, but actually they themselves are not confident enough. They care about how fashionable people look at them. They easily doubt themselves. The truth is that those people usually don’t notice them at all.

Fashion trends come and go, always changing. Instead of following, the key is to find your own style. If you’re able to wear clothes with confidence, you will be the one starting a trend. More importantly, dressing is only a part of your appearance. It can’t tell the true you. What really matters is your personality and abilities.