A Teacher’s Story

一位教师的故事

导读：老师是红烛，燃烧自己照亮他人；老师是园丁，辛勤劳动、播种花朵；老师是人类灵魂的工程师……老师在我们的生命中产生巨大的作用。而在我们的学习生涯中，肯定有一位让你最喜爱最崇敬的老师。这个老师不一定教授你很多很多的文化知识，但他肯定是为你未来的人生道路点亮了明灯。下面就让我们来看看这样一位老师吧。

There is a story many years ago of an elementary teacher. Her name was Mrs. Thompson. And as she stood in front of her 5th grade class on the very first day of school, she told the children a lie. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same. But that was impossible, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy.

Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he didn’t play well with the other children, that his clothes were messy and that he constantly needed a bath. And Teddy could be unpleasant.

At the school where Mrs. Thompson taught, she was required to review each child’s past records and she put Teddy’s off until last. However, when she reviewed his file, she was in for a surprise.

Teddy’s first grade teacher wrote, “Teddy is a bright child with a ready laugh. He does his work neatly and has good manners...he is a joy to be around.”

His second grade teacher wrote, “Teddy is an excellent student, well-liked by his classmates, but he is troubled because his mother has a terminal illness and life at home must be a struggle.”

His third grade teacher wrote, “His mother’s death has been hard on him. He tries to do his best but his father doesn’t show much interest and his home life will soon affect him if some steps aren’t taken.”

Teddy’s fourth grade teacher wrote, “Teddy is withdrawn and doesn’t show much interest in school. He doesn’t have many friends and sometimes sleeps in class.”

By now, Mrs. Thompson realized the problem and she was ashamed of herself. She felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas presents, wrapped in beautiful ribbons（丝带） and bright paper, except for Teddy’s. His present was clumsily wrapped in the heavy, brown paper that he got from a grocery bag. Mrs. Thompson took pains to open it in the middle of the other presents. Some of the children started to laugh when she found a rhinestone（莱茵石） bracelet with some of the stones missing and a bottle that was one quarter full of perfume. She stifled（阻止） the children’s laughter when she exclaimed how pretty the bracelet was, putting it on, and dabbing（轻抹） some of the perfume on her wrist.

Teddy stayed after school that day just long enough to say, “Mrs. Thompson, today you smelled just like my Mom used to.” After the children left she cried for at least an hour.

On that very day, she quit teaching reading, and writing, and arithmetic. Instead, she began to teach children.

Mrs. Thompson paid particular attention to Teddy. As she worked with him, his mind seemed to come alive. The more she encouraged him, the faster he responded. By the end of the year, Teddy had become one of the smartest children in the class and, despite her lie that she would love all the children same, Teddy became one of her “teacher’s pets.”

A year later, she found a note under her door, from Teddy, telling her that she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life.

Six years went by before she got another note from Teddy. He then wrote that he had finished high school, second in his class, and she was still the best teacher he ever had in his whole life.
Four years after that, she got another letter, saying that while things had been tough at times, he’d stayed in school, had stuck with it, and would soon graduate from college with the highest of honors. He assured Mrs. Thompson that she was still the best and favorite teacher he ever had in his whole life.

Then four more years passed and yet another letter came. This time he explained that after he got his bachelor’s degree, he decided to go a little further. The letter explained that she was still the best and favorite teacher he ever had. But now his name was a little longer. The letter was signed, Theodore F. Stoller, M.D.

The story doesn’t end there. You see, there was yet another letter that spring. Teddy said he’d met this girl and was going to be married. He explained that his father had died a couple of years ago and he was wondering if Mrs. Thompson might agree to sit in the place at the wedding that was usually reserved for the mother of the groom.

Of course, Mrs. Thompson, did. And guess what? She wore that bracelet, the one with several rhinestones missing. And she made sure she was wearing the perfume that Teddy remembered his mother wearing on their last Christmas together.

They hugged each other, and Teddy whispered in Mrs. Thompson’s ear, “Thank you, Mrs. Thompson, for believing in me. Thank you so much for making me feel important and showing me that I could make a difference.”

Mrs. Thompson, with tears in her eyes, whispered back. She said, “Teddy, you have it all wrong. You were the one who taught me that I could make a difference. I didn’t know how to teach until I met you.”

(source: http://www.learnabc.net)

Highest Honor in Mathematics Is Refused

拒绝数学界最高荣誉

导读：获得一项殊荣，是对自己努力的回报，也是大家对你劳动成果的肯定。因此我们在获奖的时候都是激动的、兴奋的！而某一领域内的最高荣誉，更是许多人执著追寻却一生都无法达成的目标。可是，俄罗斯的一位数学家却在近期拒绝领取数学界最高荣誉——菲尔兹奖。让我们一起来了解一下这个独特的数学家吧。

Grigory Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician who solved a key piece in a century-old puzzle known as the Poincaré conjecture（庞加莱猜想）, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal today.

But Dr. Perelman refused to accept the medal, as he has other honors, and he did not attend the ceremonies at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

“I regret that Dr. Perelman has declined to accept the medal,” Sir John M. Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said during the ceremonies.

The Fields Medal, often described as mathematics’ equivalent to the Nobel Prize, is given every four years, and several can be awarded at once. Besides Dr. Perelman, three professors of mathematics were awarded Fields Medals this year: Andrei Okounkov of Princeton; Terence Tao of University of California, Los Angeles; and Wendelin Werner of the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay.

Dr. Perelman, 40, is known not only for his work on the Poincaré conjecture, among the most heralded unsolved math problems, but also because he has declined previous mathematical prizes and has turned down job offers from Princeton, Stanford and other universities. He has said he wants no part of $1 million that the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass. has offered for the first published proof of the conjecture.

In June, Dr. Ball traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, where Dr. Perelman lives, for two days in hopes of persuading him to go to Madrid and accept the medal.

“He was very polite and cordial（热忱的）, and open and direct,” Dr. Ball said in an interview.

But he was also adamant（固执的）. “The reasons center around his feeling of isolation from the mathematical community,” Dr. Ball said of Dr. Perelman’s refusal, “and in consequence his not wanting to be a figurehead for it or wanting to represent it.”

Dr. Ball added, “I don’t think he meant it as an insult. He’s a very polite person. There was never a cross word.”

Despite Dr. Perelman’s refusal, he is still officially a Fields Medalist（获奖者）. “He has a say whether he accepts it, but we have awarded it,” Dr. Ball said.

Beginning in 2002, Dr. Perelman, then at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, published a series of papers on the Internet and gave lectures at several American universities describing how he had overcome a roadblock in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture.

The conjecture, devised by Henri Poincaré in 1904, essentially says that the only shape that has no holes and fits within a finite space is a sphere. That is certainly true looking at two-dimensional（二维的） surfaces in the everyday three-dimensional world, but the conjecture says the same is true for three-dimensional surfaces embedded in four dimensions.

Dr. Perelman solved a difficult problem that other mathematicians had encountered when trying to prove the conjecture, using a technique called Ricci flow that smoothes out bumps in a surface and transforms it into a simpler form.

Dr. Okounkov, born in 1969 in Moscow, was recognized for work that tied together different fields of mathematics that had seemed unrelated. “This is the striking feature of Okounkov’s work, finding unexpected links,” said Enrico Arbarello, a professor of geometry（几何学） at the University of Rome in Italy.

Dr. Okounkov’s work has found use in describing the changing surfaces of melting（熔化的） crystals. The boundary between melted and non-melted is created randomly, but the random process inevitably produces a border in the shape of a heart.

Dr. Tao, a native of Australia and one of the youngest Fields Medal winners ever at age 31, has worked in several different fields, producing significant advances in the understanding of prime numbers, techniques that might lead to simplifying the equations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the equations of quantum mechanics（量子力学） that describe how light bounces around in a fiber optic cable.

Dr. Werner, born in Germany in 1968, has also worked at the intersection of mathematics and physics, describing phenomena like percolation and shapes produced by the random paths of Brownian motion.

The medal was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician, “in recognition of work already done and as an encouragement for further achievements on the part of the recipient.”

Since 1936, when the medal was first awarded, judges have interpreted the terms of Dr. Fields’s trust fund to mean that the award should usually be limited to mathematicians 40 years old or younger.

(source: http://www.nytimes.com)