Han Yong, a Senior 1 student, was feeling very discouraged because of his failure in mid-term exams. He was not as active in answering his teachers’ questions as before. Meanwhile, when communicating with classmates, he avoided eye contact with them. His friends and classmates were all worried about him, but he didn’t feel like talking with them about it. Ms. Gao, his English teacher, noticed his changes and made a decision to help him.

One day, Ms. Gao walked into the classroom and gave her students a surprise test. They waited at the desks for the test, anxious. After handing out the question papers with the text facing down as usual, she asked the students to turn the page and begin. Surprisingly, no questions were on the page，just a black dot (点) in the center. Seeing the surprised expression on everyone’s face, Ms. Gao told them the following: “Write what you see there.”

The students, though puzzled, worked on the task.

Ten minutes later, with all the answer papers collected, Ms.Gao began reading them aloud in front of all the students. All of them described the black dot, explaining its position, etc. Then Ms. Gao picked out Han Yong’s paper and said. “Han Yong, I like your idea. Would you please follow me to the office and talk about it?”

“Er... Yes, madam!” Han Yong was confused because he also focused on the black dot only and paid no attention to the white part of the paper.

Debbie, a 10-year-old boy, was living in North River Heights in upper Manhattan, New York. He had a rare medical facial deformity(畸形). Due to several surgeries, Debbie had been home-schooled by his mother, but as Debbie was approaching the fifth grade, his mother decided to send him to Beecher Prep, a mainstream private school.

In order to protect his face skin, Debbie had to apply ointment (药膏)to his face, which made him look like wearing a special face mask.

At the beginning of the schooldays, he was rejected by nearly the entire student body for his strange look, which was a difficult period for him. Luckily, a girl named Summer, who offered to sit with him on his first day of school, helped him get through the tough time. They often played together and chatted about their favourite subject—science. And they became good friends.

Gradually, Debbie’s outstanding learning ability and kind behaviour made him popular among students. Since Debbie was expert in science, his classmates would turn to him whenever they had problems in learning. Debbie was always more than willing to help them. Naturally his kindness and warm heart won him a group of good friends and Debbie’s classmates got used to the way his face looked as well.

On Halloween, Debbie’s school held varieties of festival activities, every classroom decorated with flowers and toys. All classmates were dressing up. Debbie joined in it and wore a Ghost Face mask and costume. They all had fun pretending to be their favorite characters. Unrecognized, he was walking through the door to his classroom when he overheard his classmate Jack telling his roommates: “I have never seen an uglier face than Debbie’s.” On hearing this, Debbie felt sad and disappointed, leaving secretly. Summer happened to stand behind Debbie and meet the incident, but it was too late to stop it. As Debbie’s best friend at school, Summer thought Debbie was a nice boy and deserved to be treated kindly.

After a second thought, Summer went to Jack’s room.

Jack decided to say sorry to Debbie.

In high school, I was an editor of the school newspaper at the student union. And I won two national awards. I’ve been so focused on my dream of being a magazine editor that I’ve never wasted my time being fake-friendly to people—I was too busy for that. I almost didn’t socialize much in school, which meant I almost didn’t have any real friends in school. Unexpectedly, that annoyed a lot of people out of my expectation, so they began to talk about me behind my back. The gossip (流言蜚语) never bothered me since I was so into my goals and had no time to care much. But then I appeared on TV, and things changed.

When the show first broadcast last May, I received dozens of mean posts about me on the media sites, calling me “crazy”, and even some dirty words were used. Worse still, some strangers shot their fingers at me. How could they say such terrible words to me when they’d never met me? I still tried to focus on my work and told myself not to care about this, but that didn’t stop their comments from streaming in. Every day, mess messages continued to come in and it seemed no sign of end.

When I walked into class on a Monday morning, some girls actually pointed and whispered that I broke down the TV program. I wish I could have faced all negative things calmly or even ignore the gossip, but I couldn’t. Each time I went out of or into the classroom, there would be people I knew or total strangers, staring at me or whispering, only adding to my sense of shame, and I just wasn’t able to shake any of it off. All the negative attention started to overwhelm me physically and mentally.

Soon after, all the negative words started to destroy me.

I saw a quote in the journal. “Once you choose your way of life, be brave to stick it out and never return.”