A daisy

One of my last year's Freshman English students stopped by this morning. Actually, she  stops by my office regularly--every Thursday morning after she finishes her Spanish class at 10:00.
While I was teaching her last year, this petite girl didn't get my attention until the second half of the fall semester. At that time, I was asking the class to do a one-month News English project. I divided the class into 6 different groups with each group focusing on one of the areas I assigned--Europe, North America, Asia, China, Taiwan & Latin America. This student was the leader of the group of Latin America. During each class meeting, she had to make sure all her teammates could finish their oral reports in time and then she assigned one member to report back to class. After class, she needed to compile all the news reports that her group had got from different resources such as BBC, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, China Post, or Taipei Times. In a word, the workload for group leaders was way too heavy for those who had only been in college for two months. What impressed me most about her was that she never complained about the heavy workload; instead, she was always one of the first two group leaders to send me their electronic file of the compiled news.
This tiny diamond was shining even brighter in the second semester. In the final project, studetns were required to interview one teacher in their field, she gave one of the best presentations I had ever seen. Christina, this cute law major, told the whole class why she interviewed the Dean of Law School. While giving her presentation, she had such a solemn facial expression and spoke in such steady voice that I could not help having goose flesh for a few seconds! After the final exam, I calculated students' grades and decided to give her the best grade I'd given to any of my Freshman English students--89 to show my recognition of her efforts!
Today, on Thanksgiving Day, she stopped by my office as usual, but this time she didn't stay long. She stopped by to hand me the Thank You card to show her appreciation of me, a teacher who's been willing to hear her out. In her card, she wrote. "You're as good as one of the teachers I had in high school because you both knew how to inspire students. My high school teacher inspired me to dream with hope and passion. As for you, you've been like a coal which has kept the fire of my dream burning!"
Who says students can't encourage teachers? What this young woman wrote in her card encouraged me to keep inspiring students!

Christina