 Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners. So we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. On today's program, you will hear stories from Brian Lin and Gregory Stockle. Later, Anna Mateo and Dan Novak take a look back at the year in education news. Finally, John Russell presents today's lesson of the day. But first, here is Brian Lin. China has proposed new rules for online gaming that aim to restrict purchases and limit compulsive playing behaviors. The guidelines were recently issued by the organization that oversees or regulates the country's gaming industry. It is called the National Press and Publication Administration. Reuters news agency reported the public will be able to comment on the rules through January 22nd before they receive final approval. The new rules ban companies from offering incentives to people who play video games or make in-game purchases each day. Other restrictions include limits on how often players can add money to online money accounts called wallets. The government also warned of the dangers of irrational behaviors it says can lead to gaming compulsions. In addition, the regulator brought attention to an existing ban on online game content that endangers national unity. The new rules also call for companies to create warning messages to be sent to users who seem to be showing irrational playing behaviors. And in an effort to protect user privacy, the regulations also require game publishers to store their servers within China. The announcement of the new proposals caused shares in major Chinese gaming companies to fall sharply. Stock shares in Tencent Holdings, the world's biggest gaming company, dropped as much as 16%. The stock price for NetEase, Tencent's biggest Chinese competitor, fell about 25%. The latest proposals follow rules announced by China's government in 2021. Those regulations included a policy that limits online gaming for young people to three hours each week. Current law permits players under age 18 to only play between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays during the school year. Chinese gamers are also currently required to provide identification when registering to play online under existing rules. In 2021, Chinese regulators suspended approval of all new video games, but approvals restarted in April 2022. Stephen Leong is a sales director at Hong Kong Stock Trading Company, UOB Kheon. He told Reuters that many people in the industry thought such policies had ended, reducing the risks for gaming businesses. It's not necessarily the regulation itself, it's the policy risk that's too high, Leong said. When asked about the effects of the new proposals, Tencent Games' vice president, Vigo Zhang, said the company will not need to change its reasonable business model or operations for gaming. He added that the company has already been enforcing existing government rules. Zhang said that since the first regulations were announced in 2021, minors had been spending historically low amounts of time and money on Tencent Games. One of the new rules is widely expected to be welcomed by the industry, a requirement for regulators to process game approvals within 60 days. On the same day the gaming proposals were released, Chinese regulators announced the approvals of 40 new imported games for release in the country. I'm Brian Lin. California officials recently approved new rules to let water agencies recycle wastewater and put it right back into the pipes that carry drinking water to homes, schools, and businesses. It is a big step for California. The state has struggled for many years to secure drinking water for more than 39 million people. It shows a change in public opinion on a subject that as recently as 20 years ago was met with criticism and ended similar projects. Since then, California has been through several extreme droughts. That includes the most recent one that scientists say was the driest three-year period on record. And it left the state's water supply at dangerously low levels. Water is so precious in California. It is important that we use it more than once, said Jennifer West. She is director of Water Reuse California, a group that supports recycled water. California has been using recycled wastewater for many years. A team has used it to make ice surfaces for the game of hockey. It has been used to make snow for the sport of skiing. And farmers use it to water their crops. But it has not been used directly for drinking water. Orange County, a suburban area of Los Angeles, operates a water cleaning system that recycles wastewater and then uses it to refill underground aquifers. That water then mixes with the groundwater for months before being pumped up and used for drinking water again. California's new rules would let, but not require, water agencies to take wastewater, treat it, and then put it right back into the drinking water system. California would be just the second U.S. state to permit this, following Colorado. It has taken officials more than 10 years to develop these rules. A process that included several studies by independent groups of scientists. A state law required the California Water Resources Control Board to approve these rules by December 31. It was met with just a few days left. The vote was met with approval by some of the state's biggest water agencies, all of which have plans to build huge water recycling plants in the coming years. A project in San Diego is aiming to produce nearly half of the city's water through recycling water by 2035. And the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California aims to produce up to nearly 570 million liters a day for its 19 million people. Adele Haja Khalil is with Metropolitan Water. He said the new rules will permit new projects that have not yet been considered. Water agencies will need public support to complete these projects. That means proving to people that recycled water is not only safe to drink, but also not dirty. I'm Gregory Stockle. In the third full year since the COVID-19 pandemic began, students continued to feel the effects of school closures. Some leading experts and education officials worry that the learning loss caused by the pandemic may be long-term. Making matters worse, many students are missing school. Chronic absenteeism is becoming more common at school districts around the country. Some students went missing from the attendance roles during the pandemic and have never been accounted for. And in a year of growing artificial intelligence technology, AI has also entered the classroom. Some schools have banned the use of chatbots like ChatGPT. Other teachers are using the new technology to help students, hoping they use the technology in appropriate ways. Here is a look at the big issues that shaped education in 2023 and will shape education in the year to come. In June, the U.S. Department of Education released the scores from a national math and reading test that is given to 13-year-olds. About 8,700 students took the test in both math and reading in late 2022. The results showed a drop of 9 points in math and 4 points in reading compared to 2020, the last year the test was administered. The department's information shows that those are the largest point decreases between tests recorded since 1973. The test asks students to read short passages and identify the main idea or some facts. In math, students had to answer simple multiplication and geometry questions. The latest test scores show that American 13-year-old students are back to their lowest level in math since 1990 and lowest reading level since 2004. Math and reading scores were no better outside the U.S. Students around the world suffered historic setbacks in reading and math. That information comes from results of the latest program for international student assessment, or PISA. The PISA is an international comparative study of the scores of 15-year-old students on tests in reading, math, and science. It is administered by OECD. Nearly 700,000 students worldwide took part in the study. PISA is given every three years. The latest results showed an unprecedented drop in performance since 2018. The 2022 results were released on December 5th. It is the first extensive study with data on how the pandemic has affected students' performance around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major reason for the worldwide score drops. But science and reading scores were dropping even before the pandemic. This suggests there are other reasons for the decrease. Factors such as the level of investment in education, the social value and pay levels of teachers, and educational beliefs of students have all influenced educational results. OECD found. Students are not going to make gains in learning if they miss school. Education officials and activists are concerned about an increase in the number of students who are absent for many days during the school year. Education policy experts call the problem chronic absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing more than 10% out of the days in a school year. There are many reasons why students miss a lot of school. Certain physical problems and mental health problems, which have increased since the pandemic, are possible causes. Certain community conditions can also affect attendance, says Joshua Childs, a professor of education policy at the University of Texas at Austin. These include whether a student has safe transportation to and from school and whether the school itself is a safe environment. Childs added that if families do not feel connected with the school community or do not value education, that can add to absenteeism. Hundreds of thousands of American students have also dropped out of public schools since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They have essentially gone missing from schools. A recent examination found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences from school could not be explained. The students did not move out of state. They also did not sign up for private school or home school. The issue of missing students received a lot of attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools around the country. In the years since, however, the issue has largely become a budgeting problem. There is no longer urgency to find the students who disappeared from school. Early in the pandemic, school workers would go to the students' homes to try and help them return to the classroom. Most of those efforts have ended. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how useful digital technology could be for schools, but it also showed the limitations of technology in the educational setting. Millions of students were able to attend classes online and avoid spreading the virus, but many students failed to learn by such methods. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, argues against unsupervised wide use of digital tools and AI in education. A recent UNESCO report says there is little evidence that wide technology use improves learning. The organization says digital educational tools can never replace the human connection of teacher and student. There is a very large divide or gap between rich and poor countries when it comes to digital resources. Even if connectivity was universal, it would still be necessary to demonstrate that digital technology offers real added value in terms of affected learning, the UNESCO report says. Many educators fear students will use the AI tool chat GPT to write their reports or cheat on homework. New York City school officials started blocking the writing tool on school devices and networks in January, but other teachers are including it in the classroom. Donnie Piercy is a teacher in Lexington, Kentucky. He told his fifth grade students to try and outsmart the tool that was creating writing assignments. Piercy says his job is to prepare students for a world where knowledge of AI will be required. He describes chat GPT as just the latest technology in his 17 years of teaching that raised concerns about the possibility of cheating. Other tools include Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube. As educators, we haven't figured out the best way to use artificial intelligence yet, he added, but it's coming whether we want it to or not. I'm Dan Novak. And I'm Anna Matteo. Dan joins me now to talk more about today's year-end education story. Hi Dan, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. Can you define one word in the story for us? Unprecedented. Sure, a precedence is something that happened in the past that serves as an example for something in the present. Court cases establish precedence for how similar cases will be dealt with, for example. So something unprecedented is something never seen before. OECD said there was an unprecedented drop in performance in PISA scores. That means the decline in scores has never been so bad. This year showed how far students still have to go to make up for the learning losses caused by the pandemic. It's not an especially hopeful outlook for students, but was there anything positive you can take away from the year in education? Yeah, you're right, Ashley. It's not a very positive outlook. But coming out of the pandemic, governments have recognized there should be more investment in education. The U.S. federal governments gave school districts billions of dollars in recovery money. Schools largely have the resources to help students recover. There has been more money spent on school psychologists to help them handle mental health problems, for example. Tutoring services for students that have fallen behind have also been more common. But while those are very good things, the funding is set to expire in September. So we'll see how schools choose to spend that money before that time comes. All right, Dan. Thanks for that report today, and thanks again for joining me. You're welcome. In this next report, Katie Weaver tells us about Mickey Mouse. We learned that the famous Disney character will be entering the public domain on January 1st. Pay careful attention to the word symbolic. We will talk more about it after the report. An early version of Mickey Mouse, the famous Disney character, will soon belong to you, me, and everybody else. The mouse that started a Hollywood empire, along with several other characters, movies, and books, will enter the public domain on January 1st. Public domain is a term to describe creative works that are no longer protected by U.S. copyright law. Once a work enters the public domain, it can be legally shared, performed, reused, or repurposed without permission or cost. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse first appeared publicly in the 1928 film Steamboat Willie. Copyright law at the time provided protection for 75 years. But in 1998, U.S. law extended copyright protection for another 20 years. Jennifer Jenkins is head of Duke University's Center for the Study of Public Domain. Jenkins says copyright law is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. As the character is about to enter the public domain, she says, This is it. This is Mickey Mouse. This is exciting because it's kind of symbolic. In a statement, the Disney company told the Associated Press, ever since Mickey Mouse's first appearance in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie, people have associated the character with Disney's stories, experiences, and authentic products. The company added, more modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright. People will only be able to use the version of the Mouse in Steamboat Willie that has become public. However, observers expect the courts to be busy in the coming years, judging what is inside and outside Disney's ownership. Disney also holds a trademark on Mickey to represent the company and its brand. That law bars the use of the character as a Disney product identifier for anyone except Disney. Another famous animal character, Tigger, will also join his friend Winnie the Pooh in the public domain. The bouncing tiger first appeared in the book The House at Pooh Corner by British writer A.A. Milne. It turns 96 in January. The silly old bear Pooh himself became public property two years ago when Milne's book Winnie the Pooh came of age. The soft-spoken bear, no longer protected by copyright, is seen terrorizing women in this year's horror film Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey. Other creative works entering the U.S. public domain are Charlie Chaplin's film Circus, Virginia Wolf's book Orlando, and Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night. I'm Katie Weaver. Before the report, we asked you to pay careful attention to the word symbolic. Can you remember when you heard it? You heard it in a quote from Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University. Let's listen again. Jenkins says copyright law is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. As the character is about to enter the public domain, she says, This is it. This is Mickey Mouse. This is exciting because it's kind of symbolic. Symbolic is an adjective. We spell it like this. S-Y-M-B-O-L-I-C Symbolic means expressing or representing an idea or quality. So when Jenkins talked about Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, we can say it is symbolic because the Disney character in some ways represents the idea of copyright protection. Remember, the copyright law is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. A few words about how we use symbolic. When English speakers use symbolic in the middle of the sentence, we often use the short word of after it. So you might hear English speakers say something like this. The lights are symbolic of peace. Or this. Rings are symbolic of commitment in marriage. Please note that in the Jenkins quote we heard earlier, she used symbolic at the end of the sentence. Also an acceptable place to use the word. And that's the lesson of the day. I'm John Russell. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.