School starts tomorrow. My good friend Li Peng and I want to buy some school things. We go to the shop near my home. There are many students in the shop. Li Peng buys a green pen and two pencils, a black one and a red one. He buys a pencil box, too. My sister has a lot of pens and pencils, so I only buy some notebooks (笔记本).

“Look! There is a nice watch on the floor. Is that your watch, Lin Tao?” Li Peng asks me.

“No,” I say.

Then he picks up (捡起) the watch and asks the girl near us, “Excuse me, is this your watch?”

“No, my watch is at home,” the girl answers.

Just then, a boy comes to us and says, “It’s my watch. My mother buys it for me as a birthday present.

“But how do we know it belongs to you?” asks Li Peng.

“There are two words on the back of the watch. They’re Ma Jun, My name is Ma Jun,” the boy says.

When we look at the back, we see the two words. So we give the watch to the boy.

Robbie enjoyed art most at school. He liked maths and music too. But it was hard for Robbie to spell words correctly. So he didn’t enjoy being at school. In English, he had lots of problems. When Robbie was 12, his parents asked him to leave school. Then they taught him at home. There, he learnt about working on computers and spent more time practicing the violin.

Robbie’s grandmother started teaching him to cook, too. Robbie really enjoyed it. One day, his grandmother told him her own way of making jam. Robbie made too much for the family to eat, so he took some to other people on his street. They liked the jam—it was gone in just half an hour. He made more and more jam. It tasted so good that his parents’ friends started buying it from him. He decided to make it big. His jam is now sold at a market.

“I’m only 14 but I’m already a trader(商人)!” Robbie laughed. “Last week, I made £93 and a supermarket wants to sell it too!”

One day I went to a store with a list. “Excuse me,” I said. A lady with glasses looked up, saying, “I’m Miss Bee. Come closer and let me look at you. I want to be able to describe you to the police if something is missing from the store. ”

“I’m only a little girl, not a thief (小偷)!” I was surprised.

“But I think you’re potential (有可能的) ,” she said.

“I need these,” I said, holding up my list.

“So what? I am not a person who works for you. Go to get them. ” she said.

The store was a puzzle to me. It took me two hours to find everything on the list. “That packet of beans is only 29 cents, but you asked me for 35 cents. ” I corrected her. She didn’t seem unhappy, just looked at me over her glasses.

The following summer I visited Miss Bee some times a week. She always found ways to fool me. Or shortly after I remembered the places of something on the shelf, she arranged (重排) the shelves again and made me hunt for them again. By the end of the summer the shopping trip that had once taken me an hour was done in 15 minutes.

One morning I was to get a packet of chocolate. “Miss Potential, what did you learn this summer?” she said. “That you’re a meanie (刻薄鬼)!” I answered angrily. But she laughed, “Well, I believe my job is to teach every child I meet life lessons to help them. When you get older, you’ll be glad our paths crossed!” Glad I met Miss Bee? Ha! It was absurd.

Until one day my daughter said, “Could you finish my math problems for me?” “How will you ever learn to do it yourself if I do it for you?” I said. Suddenly, I was back at that store where I had learned the hard way to check my bill. Now I have known what Miss Bee did for me. She is my good teacher.