Karie double-checked the words on her spelling test. If she got 100 percent today, she’d win her class’s First-Quarter Spelling Challenge.

Three more words to go. N-i-c-e-l-y, Q-u-i-c-k-l-y, H-o-n-e-s-t-y. Wait! She’d spelled honesty, not honestly! She erased the t-y and wrote l-y before handing in her paper.

After recess, Karie hurried into the classroom. She fidgeted (坐立不安) in her seat. Ms. McCormack walked to the front and cleared her throat. “Congratulations. Karie! You did it!” The whole class _________ .

Ms. McCormack presented Karie with her prize—a _________ . Karie grinned as she read the _________: to Karie for her perfect first-quarter score in spelling.

Karie _________ the front door after school. Karie scooped up (抱起) her cat. “Can you spell nicely, Casper? And quickly and honestly, and …” Karie’s stomach tumbled to the floor. Honestly? H-O-N-E-S-L-Y! It suddenly struck her that she had _________ the word.

Karie went to her room and _________ on how she could tell the class she hadn’t earned the prize after all? She couldn’t sleep but kept tossing and turning in bed all night.

Ms. McCormack was unlocking the classroom door when Karie got to school the next morning. “You are a(n) _________ bird.” Ms. McCormack said. Karie’s hands trembled. She gave her teacher the spelling paper and the dictionary. “I can’t keep this. I misspelled honestly and you didn’t _________ it. ” “Come and sit down, Karie.” For a moment, Ms. McCormack stood quietly reading the words on the dictionary. Then she picked up her pen. She crossed out the word perfect and wrote honest before handing the dictionary back to Karie. Karie’s jaw dropped. “I get to keep this. _________?” “For honestly, no.” Ms. McCormack smiled. “But for __________, yes.”

Cindy Deutsch has taught kindergarten in Wichita for more than three decades. Every year during the last half-hour of school, before her students _______ out of school, she will walk around her _______ and say “I love you” to every one of her students.

This year, 10 Wichita public school students were _______ as semifinalists (半决赛选手) for the National Merit Scholarship, one of the most important _______ a high school senior can receive. Two of them had Deutsch as their _______ teacher.

That’s a _______ percentage, I tell her —20 percent of Wichita’s National Merit scholars. She laughs, then throws the _______ back to the children and their _______. “Such great kids and awesome families,” she said.

Deutsch not only teaches reading, writing and math, but also teaches good _______ like trust, forgiveness and honesty. She ____________ her students to dream big. Then she writes those ____________ down and reads them aloud during an end-of-the-year ceremony.

____________ a school year ends, I think about people like Deutsch—including so many ____________ in my own children’s lives-who ____________ despite challenges and set the course for children’s lives. I ____________ Ms. Vialpando, my kindergarten teacher, who ____________ my lifelong love of reading, and Ms. Yeager, my 10th-grade English teacher, who____________ me to become a writer.

So it’s no ____________ that Emily Caro-Alcantar, Deutsch’s student, when asked what she wanted to be when she ____________, answered simply and specifically: “A teacher ____________ Mrs. Deutsch.”

Forty years ago, Mrs. Austen was my first-grade teacher, an old lady with salt and pepper hair, _________ but kind, patient and grandmotherly. She let us bake gingerbread (姜饼) men in the school cafeteria — a delightful _________ that amazed me. And whenever we read the “Jack and Janet” books, she wouldn’t let the other kids _________ my classmate Jack or me.

But I came to truly _________ Mrs. Austen when a dress-up day was scheduled. On that day, we were encouraged to wear clothes in the _________ of the mid-1800s. My mother, a superb _________, made a pioneer-style dress for me. I was so _________ wearing it as I walked to school that day. When I got there, however, I was the only one in my class who had dressed up, feeling kind of _________. Mrs. Austen oohed and aahed (赞叹) over my _________ and then went to her office. It didn’t take long before she reappeared in a frontier-style dress! She __________ that she had asked her husband to bring the costume.

We moved away two years later, and I still __________ that I never told Mrs. Austen how __________ I was to her, a teacher who went out of her way, and even __________ her husband’s help, to keep a little girl from feeling __________. I had many wonderful teachers throughout the years, but Mrs. Austen has always held a(n) __________ place in my heart.