Students are having an Art lesson. The teacher asks her students to draw a picture to show their thanks. Students draw their pictures carefully, and most of them are about food. But one short boy only draws a hand in his picture. The teacher is surprised (惊讶) at the boy’s picture. Why is there only a hand in it?

But whose hand is it? Nobody knows the answer. So the students talk about the question. “I think it must be the hand of God (上帝) because he brings us food,” says one of the students.

“It’s a farmer’s hand,” says another student, “because farmers keep the chickens.”

Finally the teacher asks the short boy whose hand it is.

“It’s your hand, Miss Brown,” the short boy answers.

She now remembers that she often takes the short boy’s hand to play games. She often takes the other students’ hands, too. But it is very important to the short boy. That is his thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is not a thing or a word. It is a kind of feeling.

There was a class of students who were very unruly (难管教的). None of the teachers wanted to teach them. So the headmaster called a teacher who had just quit her job at a different school. He asked her if she would like to come in and teach at the school for one term. She agreed.

The headmaster decided not to tell the teacher about the class, afraid that she would be scared off. After the new teacher had been on the job for a month, the headmaster sat in the class to see how things were going. To his surprise, the students were well-behaved. After the class, the headmaster praised the teacher for her work. She thanked him for giving her such a well-behaved class to teach. But the headmaster said he really didn’t deserve (值得) any thanks.

She laughed and told him, “You see. I discovered your secret on my first day here. I looked in the desk drawer and found a list of the students’ IQ scores. I knew that they’re very smart and I would have to work really hard to make school interesting for them.”

She opened the desk and the headmaster saw a list with the students’ names and the numbers 136, 145, 127, 128, and soon written next to the names.

The headmaster laughed. Those weren’t their IQ scores, but their locker (储物柜) numbers!