When I was young at school, I loved to talk, a characteristic not always appreciated by Miss Jordan, my tenth-grade English teacher.

She was a teacher no one wanted because she was so ______. She stood about five-foot-five, was very thin and wore her hair pulled back in a way that gave her a horsy ______. She wore those half-circular reading glasses. Whenever she got upset, she would lower her head and look at you over the top of her glasses.

One day in her class I was busy talking. I didn’t ______ she had stopped teaching and was ______ straight at me. “Young lady, I would like to see you after school.”

Later Miss Jordan ______ in a low, but very firm voice that showed she expected me to listen when she was talking. For ______ she told me to write a thousand-word essay on education and its effect on the economy. She wanted it in by the following Wednesday.

Well, I met my deadline. I was ______. It was a good paper. And I expected a sign of ______ from her. The next day in class,______, she was looking at me over her glasses. She called me forward and ______ my paper. “Go back and rewrite,” she said. “Remember, each paragraph is supposed to begin with a topic sentence.” When she gave my paper back a second time, she ______ the grammar. The third time, the spelling. The fourth time, it was punctuation. The fifth, it wasn’t neat enough. I was ______!

The sixth time, I rewrote the whole paper ______, in ink, leaving generous space. When she saw it, she removed her glasses and smiled She finally ______ the paper. After that, I put the whole thing out of my ______.

Two or three months passed. One day Miss Jordan came into the class and said to us: Class, do you still ______ an essay contest held citywide? They’ve announced the ______. I am happy to inform you that Mary has won third prize in the essay contest ‘On the Impact of Education on the Economy’.”

I was amazed and ______. It was the first time I had ever won a prize. Years later, I told a reporter that story, and my comments — including my unfriendly ______ of Miss Jordan’s appearance. Miss Jordan wrote me, and said that her appearance wasn’t what was important. What was important was the ______ I had learnt. When I wrote and rewrote that paper for her, I began to learn how to discipline myself.

Donald first came across Jim in his English class. He then saw an unhappy boy, who'd gone deep into a state of ________.

Donald might have thought that Jim was ________ or uninterested. Certainly, he appeared to be both those things. But he right away became happy whenever the subject ________ poetry. It was ________ but Donald could see a change in his behavior-a quiet but professional ________ in any discussion of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Tennyson.

One day Donald ________ Jim after school and learned that Jim stuttered(口吃). The next day, Donald told the pupils to write a ________. Jim turned his assignment in, and Donald was ________ by how good it was. Donald had noticed earlier that Jim's stutter ________ whenever he read his favorite poets out loud. So he said, "Jim, would you kindly come ________ the front of the class and read us what you've written?"

Jim rose to his feet and recited(朗诵)"Ode to Grapefruit" just ________ he had written it. What a voice it turned out to be: big and ________ as a bell. That was the day Donald ________ one of the most powerful and familiar voices in the world. The boy stuttered whenever he read aloud, but not when he recited from ________. The world, it seemed, was too ________ to contain a voice as big as Jim's.

The moment happened 30 years ago but it was still fresh in my memory. I was a college freshman and had _________ up most of the night before laughing and talking with friends. Just before my first _______ of the day my eyelids (眼皮) were feeling heavier and heavier and my head was drifting down to my desk to make my textbook a _______. A few minutes’ nap (小睡) time before class couldn’t _________, I thought.

BOOM! I lifted my head suddenly and my eyes opened wider than saucers. I looked around with my _______ beating wildly trying to find the cause of the _________. My young professor was looking at me with a boyish smile on his face. He had _________ dropped the textbooks he was carrying onto his desk. “Good morning!” he said still _________. “I am glad to see everyone is _________. Now let’s get started. ”

For the next hour I wasn’t __________ at all. It wasn’t from the shock of my professor’s textbook alarm clock. It was instead from the __________ discussion he led. With knowledge and good ____________ he made the material come ____________. His insight was full of both wisdom and loving-kindness. And the enthusiasm and joy that he ________ with were contagious (有感染力的). I __________ the classroom not only wide __________ but a little smarter and a little better as well.

I learned something far more important than not __________ in class that day too. I learned that if you are going to do something in this life, do it well, do it with __________. What a wonderful place this world would be if all of us did our work joyously and well. Don’t sleepwalk through your __________. Wake up! Let your love fill your work. Life is too __________ not to live it well.