Education ⁽³²⁾

My son recently took part in the selection contest for the national high-school math, physics, and chemistry Olympiad. He won first prize in math and chemistry and second prize in physics, advancing in all three subjects. Such results are rare at his school and rare…

Not long ago I read an article in *Scientific American* about how the parent-child relationship promotes the brain development of both father and child at the same time. The article mentioned that when a father cares for a newborn, not only does the child's brain…

1 I was born in a village surrounded by mountains in eastern Hubei. Our village was large—said to be the third-largest in our county, and the largest village in the whole county settled by a single clan; the other large villages were made up of…

The most painful thing for a person is to have his will controlled by another. —The philosopher Schopenhauer As my child has grown, I as a father have often asked myself: what kind of family education should I give him so that he will be…

Today is my son's fifteenth birthday. His mother finished online classes in the morning and then busied herself at home making a cake for him. Because of the pandemic, no childhood friends came to celebrate with him. The three of us ate our homemade birthday…

This semester, all three children I tutor have entered the third year of junior high and need to prepare for the senior high school entrance examination, so the Chinese medicine teaching also needs some adjustment to lighten their burden. The Chinese medicine class, which had…

My son has recently become interested in works of anthropology and social psychology. Perhaps he cannot really understand such books yet, and his interest may spring from some peculiar teenage psychology, but he has taken to these books on our shelves. Yet I recall that…

A few nights ago I came home late from my study. By the time I arrived, my son had already cooked a whole table of tasty dishes—and "tasty" is no exaggeration; every dish was well done, especially the braised pork ribs, which neither his mother…

The famous Jin-Yuan period physician Li Dongyuan is my idol. According to the Yanjian's Biography of the Elderly Man Dongyuan, in his later years, after returning to his hometown, one day he said to his friend Zhou Defu (also called Zhou Duyun): "I am old…

It never occurred to me that one day I would suddenly be approached by many parents whose children want to become monks or nuns, or spouses whose partners want to leave home, seeking my help and hoping I would persuade their children or partners not…