Writing Feedback / TOEFL - Parents are the best teachers? No, it does not hold for every case! [5]

Thank you guys for reading my essay. I hope you can read it in the most critical way. It will certainly improve my English writing skills. Thank you :)

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Parents are the best teachers. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
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I don't think this statement will hold for every case, but it is true in my case. We all know that animals start to learn by mimicking their parents; cubs learn how to prowl by watching their parents, eaglets learn to fly, and even a feral kid imitates his/her animal parents. Therefore we all agreed that parents do have significant influence on us, however whether our parents are the best teacher or the worst depends on whether the influence is good or bad. Some husbands beat their wife because they saw their father beat their mother in their childhood. Still others respect and love their family instead. Fortunately, my parents are indeed my best teachers, because they taught me the good values such as justice or ethic, which I should always keep in mind.

I remember that one time, in my third grade of junior high school, I was hesitated about whether to lie in my poor grade. It turned out to be I didn't. Because of a prompt feeling of guilty. I didn't know why I would have that feeling, but now I figure it out it was due to those good values my parents told me. I think one important reason why parents influence us so much is because we all need a pattern of thinking or behaving to reasoning or reacting to the world, and the first ,therefore the most, important pattern we learned is our parent's pattern. Although other people we met when we grew older might also have considerable effect to us, the influences from our parents are still the most influential.

In conclusion, I agree that our parents influence us the most, but when it comes to the issue that whether our parents are the best teacher, we still need to reconsider carefully, because if our parents influence us in a bad way, they will not be our best teacher but, in the other extreme, the worst.

Writing Feedback / Improving your knowledge and dealing with other people - reasons to attend school [7]

People attend college or university for many different reasons (for example, new experiences, career preparation, increased knowledge). Why do you think people attend college or university? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

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Depending on my friends' and my own experiences the answer of this topic is: to learn things you don't know yet. For a regular person, education of schools seem to be the most efficient way to learn knowledge, and a college or a university is a good place where you can start to learn the advanced knowledge based on the basic materials you have already learned. Besides, a university or a college is also a place where you can learn about how to maintain relationships with your friends, your boy/girlfriend, or your classmates. One of my professors once told me that there are three credits you must take when you attend a university, which are credits of your school works, credits of your clubs' activities, and credits of developing a relationship with girl/boy you like. And the later two terms can be simplified into getting along with other people.

Once you attend a university or a college, which are normally classified to be a higher education of a country, you must be prepared to face different challenges that you've never met before. For example, I major in electrical engineering, and the most obvious difference I notice is that stuffs I learn now are more pragmatic and more realistic. Teachers used to tell us to ignore some inevitable losses such as the heat produced when electrons go through the transmission line, which now I know will dramatically influence your design and implementation. I wouldn't have the chance to learn knowledge about electronics systematically, if I didn't attend the university, so I believe to learn new and well organized knowledge is one of the important reasons why people attend a university or a college.

In addition, people can also learn about how to deal with other people. A university or a college is just like a small size of our society. You will meet people who come from different areas, people who have different values, or people who speak different languages. And this is our opportunity to learn to deal with people that are not like you. We human cannot live without others, so how to get along with other people become an important issue. We can adjust our attitudes to be less subjective after every argument, and we can try to understand other people's standpoints whenever we have conflicts with them. I think this is also a reason why people choose to attend the university instead of other form of educations.

Although, there will certainly be somebody who disagrees with my points of view, I still believe that most of the people will agree with me. Because there are some significant issues we have to learn in our life, and improving your knowledge and dealing with other people properly are sort of these important lessons we should take. If you ask me where you can find a way to improve yourself, my answer will be : Absolutely, the university!