My Science Teacher

北京日坛中学 谭菁

Once I had this science teacher, we all call her Dr. Arce. Her face was always straight, without any kind of expressions. I thought maybe it was because of her work, a great portion of which is to deal with all those long long Latin words.

One day in her class, we were studying earthworms, when she mentioned how she had crouched down in her garden all af-ternoon, observing two earthworms working their way into and out of the soil. Then she gave each one of us an earthworm still alive, and insisted on us dissecting it, while she dissected hers on her table, under a microscope. She did it so carefully and so professionally, that nothing—not even a nerve was destroyed inside the earthworm's body. She pointed to each organ and explained their functions with such enthusiasm, that her eyes began shining brightly, and her straight, face even seemed to relax a tiny bit.

During the days we studied plants and seed germination— which means the process by which a seed produces a new plant, she found all those little bags of seeds with a kind of liquid full of nutrients, and she let us bring it back home to see how the seed grows, then we were to turn in a paper. But unfortunately I failed in letting the seed grow into a plant. I did the paper anyway, say-ing that even though my seed was done with, but from all I learned in class, I expected it to grow in a certain way, something like that. I knew this paper was a mess, because I didn't really know how a seed was supposed to grow. And whenever I saw Dr. Arce's straight face,! thought that I would probably get an F on my paper.

The next day the papers came down, and I was surprised to see a big red B+ at the top. Under it were two words: "Good ef-forts". See, despite her straight and expressionless face, she was a pretty nice teacher after all. It's just that she wasn't used to showing her care for us by smiling to us or saying kind words. But she helped us a lot more by paying attention to our school-works, and encouraging us at all times.