Yesterday I went to my daughter’s school to find out how it looks like during the Literacy Week.

Her teachers are serious about the event. Kids are encouraged to "Stop-Drop-Read" during the lunch recess, when they can visit the library and enjoy a story. My daughter was also eager to attend the Book Fair and learn to purchase books she wished. And it felt so good, you know.

To those who care about literacy, the scene of their kids ploughing through dozens of books

I wrote at least one blog post each time I was on conference leave. And why not? Conference leave invariably means more personal time at night.

The schedule of my conference leave is always much the same. I would arrive one day before the event starts, and fly out the day after the conference finishes. In other words, it isn't easy to set aside more than one day to travel. Okay, at least not the off-the-beaten track experience within the tight schedule.

To balance

The topic of addressing people is always complicated. This is even more complicated when you have more choices than first name and family name. The third choice, in my case, is the title called "Doctor."

Being addressed by my doctor colleagues as "Dr. Chow" has become unbearably heavy. And yes, they sometimes call me like this even in casual conversation or e-mail. If you think this is more appropriate than calling me "KM," I will not argue otherwise. In theory,

Hugh MacLeod believed that everyone is born creative and everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. For him as for most people, puberty means taking the crayons away and replacing them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the "creative bug" is just a wee voice telling you, "I'd like my crayons back, please."

When did that voice come back to me?

After my daughter has arrived, of course. Well, I enjoy

For the past two weeks, I have been reading Rafe Esquith's book Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire . I learned about the six levels of moral development, as first proposed by the Jean Piaget and then simplified by Rafe. These six levels seem simple. Yet implementing them is anything but simple.

You might be less eager to learn the basic levels, but I have to briefly mention all these six levels - one by one. Level I thinkers simply act out of fear. Most children do.

There is more than one way to run a successful classroom. I learn this after reading the teaching guru Rafe Esquith's Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire .

But there is only one way to face a mistake in front of students: Admit it. I know this because I've made one today.

It's harder to do than it might seem. To begin, frank discussion with genuine expectation of divergent views is an exception rather than the norm between teacher and students. If anything, many

I was looking at a chest radiograph of my patient whose right lung was drowned in a bag of fluid. He had been taking a new blood thinner and had difficulty with breathing for two weeks. The figure of oxygen saturation was swaying up and down like a sail on a ship, as if it might capsize any time in the rough sea. Rising panic.

I washed my hands and put on my gloves. The idea is to put in a catheter and drain out the fluid, before my patient was "drowned

The list of animated movies is long this summer.

Those yellow creatures wearing goggles and blue overalls, if you ask me, pale in comparison with the story of Riley. This eleven-year-old only child had to move with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco. Poor little girl. Her apprehension rose with the new school, the new hockey team, and the new way a pizza tastes. Riley struggled with the five emotion characters coming from her prefrontal cortex; she simply didn't know how to put

Anyone who has tried scuba diving or snorkel will attest to how gorgeous the underwater world can be. I tried that in Mexico more than ten years ago.

We snorkeled with our five-year-old daughter this time in Okinawa. To be totally honest, it scares me. My wife bought her fins and snorkel before departing. We learned the know-how by watching the YouTube and rehearsed at our bathtub.

Turns out, we didn't have to say much. She did well except some problem with fitting

Travel with friends and one's kid can be minefields for parents, in case the kid gets whinny or moody.

I call myself lucky during my Okinawa trip, not because my kid didn't act out. She did . On the very best days - though those were very, very rare - my daughter would smile for the whole day. The real luck is that we travelled with the most placid classmate of my daughter. An easygoing boy who is the second happiest kid in the world, next to Mr