I set aside two rooms for them.
We set aside a few dollars a month to buy furniture.
Membership key fob
A few mistakes crept in during the last revision of the paper.
Believing in yourself can be challenging, especially when self-doubt creeps in.
The old government program has become a sacred cow.
The goal is not to show off AI but to show off how AI can help. — Ewan Spence, Forbes, 14 Oct. 2024
So one’s circle of friends grows.
The system allows quick storage and retrieval of data.
The charging system indicator light on indicates the alternator isn’t properly charging the battery, potentially leading to a dead battery and leaving you stranded.
don’t forget to turn off the faucet
She rapped her knuckles on the table.
I’m afraid I dented the wall pretty badly when I was hammering in that nail.
Many of the cans were badly dented.
there was a big dent in the car’s hood where something had hit it
Events will tentatively include games of dodgeball, tic-tac-toe, a relay race, punt/catch, move the mountain and quarterback accuracy. — Kirk Kenney, San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 Apr. 2025
She’s an excellent tennis player who has won many tournaments.
He lingered in bed and missed breakfast.
Helen of Troy was supposedly the quintessential beauty of the ancient world.
Daffodils are the quintessential sign of spring’s arrival.
She tossed the ball high in the air.
What is pink? a rose is pink
By a fountain’s brink.
What is red? a poppy’s red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro’.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
What is green? the grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? Why, an orange,
Just an orange!
The oak is called king of trees,
The aspen quivers in the breeze,
The poplar grows up straight and tall,
The peach tree spreads along the wall,
The sycamore gives pleasant shade,
The willow droops in watery glade,
The fir tree useful timber gives,
The beech amid the forest lives.
Read-Aloud Poems, 120 of the world’s best-loved poems for parents and child to share, Edited by Glorya Hale
I was trying to zip up my coat when some material jammed in the zipper. - Beyond Phrasal Verbs for ESL Learners, Mastering English Phrasal Verbs in Context, by Thmoas A. Celentano
On the way to work I dropped my daughter off at school.
The postman dropped off a package at our house.
The train picked up the passengers at 3 pm.
The sad truth is that most of us have been brought up to eat certain foods and we stick to them all our lives.
Whether we find a joke funny or not largely depends on were we have been brought up.
A U.S. brain drain could be Canada’s brain gain
a gazebo on the mansion’s south lawn
the trumpet’s blast
The driver gave a long blast on his horn.
the blast of the factory whistle
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rock has been blasted away.
He blasted his rival with a pistol.
The floor is decorated with an inset of marble tiles.
inset a map in a larger map
the 48 contiguous states of the U.S.
contiguous row houses
Substring extraction. Get a contiguous subsequence of characters. - Algorithms, 4th Edition, Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.
the writer’s debut novel
in honor of their daughter’s debut
my debut as a pianist
The network debuts a new sitcom tonight.
Boys in the Midwest grow up without a word of praise, their parents fearful that a compliment might make them vain … — Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance, 1991
complimented the pianist on his performance
a lawn made by laying turfs
Synthetic turf was installed in the playing field instead of grass.
playing fields with artificial turfs
She is a well-known patron of the arts.
The assistance goes directly to utilities to pay gas or electricity bills, or to a provider of fuel oil, propane or wood. — Kirsti Marohn, Twin Cities, 4 Apr. 2025
an adjunct professor
“I’m OK, this head is like limestone. It’s hard as a rock,” Ford joked. - Man, 18, charged after collision involving Ontario Premier Doug Ford
Let’s get rid of these. They haven’t done anything hilarious enough to post on TikTok. - Waterloo Region Record, Rhymes with Oranges, April 10, 2025
Boil the chicken and use a spoon to remove any scum that floats to the surface.
Bathrooms Soap scum and mildew are some of the worst (and grossest) things to get rid of.
— NBC News, 18 Dec. 2017
Rinse to wash away germs, mold, water spots, and soap scum.
— Caitlin Sole, Better Homes & Gardens, 11 Aug. 2023
Lieberman is the scummiest scumbag who ever scummed. — Jim Newell, Slate Magazine, 18 May 2017
a bowl of peaches and plums
Dried plums are also called “prunes.”
prune the branches
This kind of angry and defensive push-pull in scientific inquiry is nothing new. - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones
There was no place for gods or metaphysics or any other kind of airy-fairy theories here. - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones
reconcile differences
It can be difficult to reconcile your ideals with reality.
Condo towers stand behind the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo.
The sink was clogged by dirt and grease.
When lights fuse, furniture gets rickety, pipes get clogged, or vacuum cleaners fail to operate, some woman assume that their husbands will somehow put things right.
Rotating shift workers tend to have lower levels of the feel-good hormone serotonin, leading to disturbed sleep patterns, suggests new research. - CBC News
January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December.
Sorry to interrupt, please carry on (with what you were saying).
Carry on with your work.
despite his new job’s low pay, he was still getting on
The bus driver asks the boy, “Are you getting on?”
a student who is engaged in practice teaching
Now, the student teacher helps structure online lessons. — jsonline.com, 7 Apr. 2020
Carney sworn in as prime minister with a reworked cabinet filled with new faces
The restaurant is very popular among foodies.
Opioids such as heroin, morphine and methadone were the most common drugs connected to fatalities, being implicated in 937 deaths. — Stephen Castle, New York Times, 10 Jan. 2025
a: a study and description of word formation (such as inflection, derivation, and compounding) in language
b: the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language.
In 1971, John Wheeler pointed out to his graduate student Jacob Bekenstein that black holes seem to flout the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Because bees are a linchpin to the industry that feeds us. — National Geographic, 30 July 2019
an excise imposed on a number of goods
Excise taxes are taxes imposed by both the federal and provincial governments on alcohol,
tobacco, gasoline and vehicle air conditioning. Canada has some of the highest rates of taxes on
cigarettes and alcohol in the world. - CANADA’S TAXATION SYSTEM
March equinox
The spring equinox arrives on March 20, and you’ll be immediately bitten by the adventure bug. — Nina Kahn, StyleCaster, 24 Feb. 2025
A group of singers were harmonizing on the street corner.
HST is Harmonized Sales Tax
levy a tax
They levied a tax on imports.
Kurt Gödel never defined the constitutional loophole he’d found.
She took advantage of a loophole in the tax law.
a plant of folk legend with leaves composed of three leaflets that is associated with St. Patrick and Ireland
Sales were up in the last fiscal year.
jot this down
He paused to jot a few notes on a slip of paper.
superstitions that are carryovers from ancient times
This is a friendly reminder that this week’s pizza order is a carry-over from the snow day we had on February 13th!
he took a month’s supplies and headed out to the backcountry
a push-pull circuit
The airplane landed to refuel.
Signing the trade agreement was praised as an act of reconciliation between the two countries.
The ways young children play can also raise animals’ hackles. — Alla Katsnelson, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2020
By the end of June, many songbirds have stopped singing, making the birds much harder to spot. — Loren Holmes, Anchorage Daily News, 10 May 2018
prices are skyrocketing
the crisis has caused oil prices to skyrocket
grinning from ear to ear
She continued to tease her brother, grinning wickedly.
grinned at the kids’ fooling around in the pool
a happy grin
I wanted to wipe the grin off his face.
frowned in anger
critics frown on the idea
a frowny face
In the sentence “Learning can be fun,” “learning” is a gerund.
Ibogaine is a psychedelic drug from the bark of the iboga tree, a shrub native to Central Africa that is used in traditional healing ceremonies and initiation rituals. - Ibogaine: The last trip?, CBC News
mitigate a patient’s suffering
Myanmar, one of Asia’s poorest nations, has largely been shut off from the world by its military government during four years of civil war. - CNN 10, March 31, 2025
one of many devastating scenes across the crippled city of Mandalay damage stretches across entire neighborhoods homes and historic buildings reduced to rubble. Buddhist monasteries places of peace and reflection now piles of debris. - CNN 10, March 31, 2025
She’s been doing competitive bodybuilding for a few years now.
The power of yet.
I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn’t pass a course, they got the grade “Not Yet.” And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I’m nothing, I’m nowhere. But if you get the grade “Not Yet“, you understand that you’re on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.
“Not Yet” also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, “I love a challenge,” or, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative.” They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.
So what do they do next? I’ll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There’s hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don’t engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it.
How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who don’t know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, “We have already raised a generation of young workers who can’t get through the day without an award.”
So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet?
Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don’t do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.
There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems.
Just the words “yet” or “not yet,” we’re finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students’ mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter.
Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students.
So let’s talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they’ve done so poorly for so long that many people think it’s inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth-grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth-grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year, to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.
This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that’s when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That’s when they’re getting smarter.
I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, “Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that’s why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I’ve wasted most of my life.”
Let’s not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with “yet”.
Thank you.
