Why Do Not Summarize

The lecturer talked a lot about the differences between ABM and system dynamics models and cited many instances, but never tried to summarize them till the last minute. The listeners asked lots of questions and never let off a single detail, but nobody asked the lecturer to summarise it. As one of the listeners, I thought about doing that, but gave up finally. I find that the western lecturers seldom sum up knowledge, they do this maybe because they just want to leave the job to the students and they do not pay much attention to it.

• The process of summarizing is also the one of unscrambling the thoughts and reviewing, which could be a creative work. So it is better to leave it to the students.
• To sum up can be dangerous. The summaries are considered as the conclusion sometimes. If the lecturer summarize an issue, the students may think that people have drawn a conclusion to it. So they may not think about it any more, which will prevent their innovation. 
• In the aspect of logical thinking, the westerners are good at analysing rather than synthesizing, the latter one is what the easterners do well in. So the Chinese lecturers always sum up the features of a concept or the differences between two conceptions, while the western lecturers seldom do this.

Eating Yuanxiao, Enjoying Lantern Festival

Today is the Lantern Festival, the 15th day of the 1st lunar month.

This day's two important activities are watching lanterns and eating yuanxiao, the rice dumplings--that is why people call the day "Yuanxiao Festival" in China.

Since, there are not so many lantern here, we cannot watch lanterns. But we can get Yuanxiao here, I will have Yuanxiao with my wife at dinner.