Weekend after party

It is fantastic to find so many youngsters studying in the lab on weekends. On the surface they are so much into parties, discos and clubs, but beneath that, they all want to work hard for their own good. The different thing here is that teachers try really hard to instruct and students try really hard to understand. They discuss with their peers when there is anything not comprehensive, they would know that they are not the only ones that doesn't understand it, so they go to ask the teacher. Or if sometimes they are the only ones that couldn't understand, they go to ask teacher as well! It is always the teacher's fault when the students don't understand, quite the contrary to the Japanese system where they always blame students for not studying hard. Here in Sweden, if you as an instructor couldn't make your point understood, you can never get away from it, at least not easily!

And you know what? I just learned during the past two weeks in an undergraduate course, something that puzzled me for 2 years in graduate school in Japan! What a shame, I kind of wish that I was never in Japan to study! What a horrible waste of time! What a brain damage!

Miss Heath Ledger

Really wish that he didn't work so hard!
-that he worked himself to stressful life and death.
Wish he lived longer.
- Bet he wished the same thing!
Maybe he didn't know he's dead
and he is flying around looking at us.

Reading advice on NY times

"There is general agreement on the indispensable canon: Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Milton. From the 19th century until now, keeping only to English and American authors, a slightly more arbitrary selection might include Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Yeats and Joyce in England and Ireland. Among the Americans would certainly be Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne; and in the 20th century, Faulkner and the major poets: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane.

Many of these authors are difficult and demand rereading, but that doubles their value. A freshman may have read Shakespeare before, but the richest and most available of all writers is also the most profound and elliptical. Rereading “Hamlet” and “King Lear” should teach a student Shakespeare’s mastery of the art of leaving things out."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06bloom.html