3.1 Youth issues — Friendships online

Her friends had all done badly this time and telling them would only make them feel worse, and she had already told her mother — her mother being pleased was enough, so the whole class did not need to know.

How to join — put your name down at the office before Friday. What the commitment is — one new student, meeting once a week for the first month, and you decide yourselves what to do when you meet.

B

It may be used to help you work out how to start, but not to write the work for you; if you use it you must say so at the end and explain what you used it for; and it may not be used for homework set before a test, because that work is your own practice.

He was not pleased even though the teacher praised the work, because he had not written it himself: when she read his paragraph out to the class he wanted to leave the room. Now he writes his own work and it is not as good, but he says that when the teacher praises it he can look at her — so he feels better about weaker work that is his own than about strong work that was not.

Both accept that someone may not want a photo online — he says he would take it down if asked — so the disagreement is about who should speak up first. She thinks you should ask before posting: Xiao Shu did not smile and later told her he did not want his family to see him there, and he was too embarrassed to say so himself. Waiting for an objection puts the burden on the person least able to make it. He answers that asking ten people about a photo of ten would mean nobody ever posted anything, and that a photo of everyone having fun together belongs to everyone in it.

Yes, most likely. Her fear is specific — only three girls saw it, so the others will work out who spoke — and she has already tried talking to them twice and been told she was interfering. What pushes her the other way is what she has seen: he has eaten alone for two weeks, and when she asked he said he was fine and then walked away. Her last line is not a refusal but a plan with a condition: she will go to the teacher tomorrow lunchtime and ask whether her name can be kept out of it — she has moved from not knowing to naming a time.

She opens with numbers she gathered herself — fourteen activities, twenty-four classmates, seventeen who joined none — so the problem is established as the audience's own before she comments on it. She quotes the reason they gave her, 我不会, in their own words, and admits she has said it too, which stops the speech being a lecture. Her example is unusually honest: she joined the choir despite singing badly, was put in the back row, and three months later was still there and still singing badly. She asks the obvious question herself — so why keep going? — and answers it with two gains that have nothing to do with singing: six new people from other classes, and no longer eating alone on Wednesdays. That lets her ask for one thing you expect to be bad at, and she closes by turning the objection inside out: being bad at it does not matter, since you never claimed otherwise.