Once I had this science teacher, we all call her Dr. Arce. Her face was always straight, without any kind of expressions. I thought maybe it was because of her work, a great portion of which is to deal with all those long long Latin words.

One day in her class, we were studying earthworms, when she mentioned how she had crouched¹ down in her garden all af-ternoon, observing two earthworms working their way into and out of the soil. Then she gave each one of us an earthworm still alive, and insisted on us dissecting² it, while she dissected³ hers on her table, under a microscope. She did it so carefully and so professionally, that nothing—not even a nerve was destroyed inside the earthworm's body. She pointed⁴ to each organ and explained their functions with such enthusiasm, that her eyes began shining brightly, and her straight, face even seemed to relax a tiny bit.

During the days we studied plants and seed germination— which means the process by which a seed produces a new plant, she found all those little bags of seeds with a kind of liquid full of nutrients⁵, and she let us bring it back home to see how the seed grows, then we were to turn in a paper. But unfortunately I failed in letting the seed grow into a plant. I did the paper anyway, say-ing that even though my seed was done with, but from all I learned in class, I expected it to grow in a certain way, something like that. I knew this paper was a mess, because I didn't really know how a seed was supposed to grow. And whenever I saw Dr. Arce's straight face,! thought that I would probably get an F on my paper.

The next day the papers came down, and I was surprised to see a big red B+ at the top. Under it were two words: "Good ef-forts". See, despite her straight and expressionless face, she was a pretty nice teacher after all. It's just that she wasn't used to showing her care for us by smiling to us or saying kind words. But she helped us a lot more by paying attention to our school-works, and encouraging us at all times.