A Reasonable Share of the Work

by George Polya

One of the most important tasks of the teacher is to help his students. This task is not quite easy; it demands time, practice, devotion, and sound principles. The student should require as much experience of independent work as possible. But if he is left alone with his problem without any help or with insufficient help, he may make no progress at all. If the teacher helps too much, nothing is left to the student. The teacher should help, but not too much and not too little, so that the student shall have a reasonable share of the work.

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George Polya (1887-1985) was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. His six sentences are excerpted from How To Solve It, his guide to problem solving.

A Conversation

by Maung Htike Aung

You’re broken like me, a windowpane said. That’s true, but we are different, I said, looking outside. It was a fine evening, people walking their dogs. I have a life to live. I have a soul to talk to. We both went quiet again. 

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Maung Htike Aung is a Burma-based writer. His poems and stories have appeared in Portside Review, Wasafiri, Mekong Review, SUSPECT, and elsewhere.

Various Forms of Self-Expression

by John Harrison

Everyone else was asleep. I sat down quietly and draped a bath towel over my head. I was instantly transformed into all the TV monsters that I loved. When I took the towel away, I went back to being the monster I had become. My parents don’t know this yet, but they will. Soon.

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John Harrison studied cultural anthropology to PhD level at Oxford University. New to writing, he has had a number of poems and stories published in magazines and books, including Hollow Point Books, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Samizdat.