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Hi. Good to talk to you here againJ 

Well, I have to confess that it’s getting harder to understand the class this week because we talked about the philosophic ideas a lot. While, I still find the class interesting, learnt and inspired a lot from it. There are a couple of useful and practical things I found in the class.

First of all, the writing strategy that was mentioned in the class is a brand-new theory for me. In the past, I was taught to write in a starchy way. Say, the outline comes to the first, and then details of each point and at last revise again and again. I used to think that writing is a way to tell others your thought so that I was afraid if people don’t get my meaning or think my sentences are not beautiful and flourish. Also, I found that in order to be “logic”, quite a lot of my points on outline cannot be put in an essay, which made me depressed. Now, I really appreciate the idea that “writing is a useful part of thinking. It helps you to think about what you are thinking. It clarifies your thinking.” “Don’t worry about not getting everything on your paper because not everything can be put in a paper.” To do the brain drain first, come out all you have in mind. Then organize the structure of your essay and clarify the central idea. At last, make it understandable to other people. Guess what? At this moment, I’m excitedly trying to write down my ideas like this~

Another thing I found interesting in writing is the point that “things should always be yours or it is a kind of steal.” In China, the thought of Confucius taught us that “Achieving one’s own goal yields gratification. Lending a hand to consummate others’ goal doubles satisfaction. Goals of self and others can be unified thus the world can be harmonized, (Reference:http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/160310530.html?push=ql), so that we feel free to use other people’s words and ideas in our essays. Like in a Chinese writing exam, students are encouraged to use verse from any ancient poems without giving the reference. And teachers will regard it as knowledgeable. While the culture of western countries which emphasizes personality highly protects intellectual property right and see it as a kind of plagiarism.

The comparison of human and the universe in terms of time and space is also cool. Before the class, I was greatly impressed by the story about power, in which a girl told his grandfather that human being is so small compared with the world. But after discussing about the origin of universe, the theory of big bang, I came up with another idea. Is the vastness or the power itself the sign of power? Say, the universe, at very first, is a massive point without a big volume but contains incredible heat and energy. It is this potential that creates today’s universe, but not the volume of the point.