Educating Zimbabwe: illegal ‘home schools’ defy lockdown in townships

In Zimbabwe there's a poor time with education for children. Since March 2020 schools there were online due to pandemic, but people from poorer families don't have internet access. It caused almost 10% drop in children passing their exams. To help, some teachers opened their own classrooms. The government is very against it, even charging fees, saying it exposes people to Covid. I think that while the Coronavirus is serious and not to be joked with, online school in Zimbabwe was a bad choice. Everyone should be able to get education, and it's not fair some children there don't because of poverty. If the country can't ensure people have internet access to attend school, then they should find other ways to teach them. There are still plenty of ways to be safe with more people in one place. I'm glad that there are people who care about others education and chose to teach in person despite everything. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/18/educating-zimbabwe-home-schools-defy-lockdown-in-townships

Pakistan ends death penalty for prisoners with severe mental health problems

This week, supreme court in Pakistan revoked the law on the executing prisoners with serious mental problems. It also ordered prosecutors and trial judges to be trained to asses mental health issues at trial. I think that it is a good piece of news, mostly because it's unhuman for me to kill someone, even when they killed. In my opinion even though those people are in prison, they should be helped with their ilnesses. One of the points of prison is to think through the crime you commited and clearly regret it. If you have mental problems it's much harder to do - you probably weren't even yourself when you did it. I am not saying that those people should be excused for their crimes, but it's at least fair to understand mistakes. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/pakistan-ends-death-penalty-for-prisoners-with-severe-mental-health-problems

Human noise affects animal behaviour, studies show

Working home because of coronavirus caused noise pollution. Research shows that it gets in the way with animal cognition and mating. To capture the effect of traffic sound zebra finches (species of songbirds) were put in a laboratory with stimulated sound of it. A few tasks were made to see how they would react. They were designed to test birds' motor skills, object manipulating, ability to discriminate between colours and spatial memory. All tasks except colour association showed that zebra finches were negatively affected by the noises. Another study did research about how female Mediterranean field crickets were making mating under the traffic sound conditions. Usually males attract them by rubbing their wings together. To test the effect of noise the researchers clipped their wings, left them to interact with females and then played an artificial song to when they were trying to court the females. This study showed that because of the noise female crickets mounted sooner and more frequently when paired with high-quality courtship song. In my opinion this research shows another importance of negative human impact. Nowadays it's mainly shown as air and water polluting but as we can see it has also an effect on animals. I think it's sad how much we disturb other beings without even realizng.

What I'd like to achieve this term

This term I'd like to focus on my vocabulary and speaking. When I read, listen or watch something in English I usually skip words I don't understand. I will simply start to look them up, note and try to remember. I could make my speaking better by reading out loud and recording myself while I talk.