Hello. I'm Jan from Mrs. Lake's class. My class wants to work together to help the public. We think we have found a great way to do this. Last month we did a class project on the highways near our town. We learned about the Adopt-a-Highway Program. This program brings people together to pick up litter along the roads. We think it would be a great idea for all students in our school to join the program and adopt a highway.

    Adopting a highway is not like adopting a pet. When a highway is adopted, only part of the highway is cared for by a group of people. The group agrees to work every week to keep its part of the highway clean. Each group gets its own sign that has the name of the group printed on it. The sign is put up at the side of the road. This sign lets drivers know who is keeping that area of the road clean.

    The Adopt-a-Highway Program is a great way for people to help their environment look nicer. Also, the government does not have to send out as many road workers. This saves money. Finally, people may try harder to keep roads clean if they see people, especially teenagers like us, cleaning them up.

    We will need helpers to care for our adopted highway. If you want to feel great and keep our roads clean，please come with your parents to the meeting next week. We will meet in Mrs. Lake' room on Wednesday at 6:00 P.M. At the meeting, we will talk about which roads are the dirtiest as a result of people's unkind acts. Then we' ll try to pick an area to adopt and clean.

    I look forward to seeing you at the meeting. Remember to keep our roads clean!

    Papa, as a son of a dirt-poor farmer, left school early and went to work in a factory, for education was for the rich then. So, the world became his school. With great interest, he read everything he could lay his hands on, listened to the town elders and learned about the world beyond his tiny hometown. “There's so much to learn,” he'd say. “Though we are born stupid, only the stupid remain that way.'' He was determined that none of his children would be denied an education.

    Thus, Papa insisted that we learn at least one new thing each day. Though, as children, we thought this was crazy, it would never have occurred to us to deny Papa a request. And dinner time seemed perfect for sharing what we had learned. We would talk about the news of the day; no matter how insignificant, it was never taken lightly. Papa would listen carefully and was ready with some comment, always to the point.

    Then came the moment-the time to share the day's new learning.

Papa, at the head of the table, would push back his chair and pour a glass of red wine, ready to listen.

    “Felice,” he'd say. “tell me what you learned today.”

    “I learned that the population of Nepal is...”

Silence.

    Papa was thinking about what was said, as if the salvation (拯救) of the world would depend upon it. “The population of Nepal. Hmm. Well...” he'd say. “Get the map; let's see where Nepal is.” And the whole family went on a search for Nepal.

    This same experience was repeated until each family member had a turn. Dinner ended only after we had a clear understanding of at least half a dozen such facts.

    As children, we thought very little about these educational wonders. Our family, however, was growing together, sharing experiences and participating in one another's education. And by looking at us, listening to us, respecting our input, affirming (打定) our value, giving us a sense of dignity. Papa was unquestionably our most influential teacher.

    Later during my training as a future teacher, I studied with some of the most famous educators. They were imparting what Papa had known all along-the value of continual learning. His technique has served me well all my life. Not a single day has been wasted, though I can never tell when knowing the population of Nepal might prove useful.

    A 525-year-old copy of a letter by Christopher Columbus, stolen from the Vatican, was returned this week. An investigation by the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Vatican located the letter.

    “We are returning it to its rightful owner, “said U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Callista Gingrich, at a ceremony in the Vatican Library. Columbus wrote the letter to the king and queen of Spain after discovering “The New World.” He described what he had found and requested money for another trip. His original letter was written in Spanish. But several copies of a Latin translation were made to spread news of his discovery to the royal courts of Europe and the Pope.

    One of the Latin letters, copied by Stephan Plannack in 1493, was put in the Vatican Library. Known as the Columbus Letter, it has eight pages, each about 18.5 cm by 12 cm. In 2011, an American expert in rare manuscripts received a similar looking letter. After reviewing it, he decided that it was real. The year before, the same expert had studied a Columbus Letter in the Vatican Library and suspected that it was a fake. One reason was that the stitching (针脚) marks on the letter were not the same as those on the cover. The letter in the United States, however, had the exact same stitching marks as the leather cover of the fake letter he had studied in the Vatican.

    The expert, who was not identified, contacted Homeland Security art investigators, who began working with Vatican inspectors and rare book experts. They believed that someone took the real letter out of its cover at the Vatican Library and replaced it with an artificial one. Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues is the Vatican's chief librarian. He said, “We do not know exactly when the substitution took place. We will probably never know who the forger (伪造者) was.”

    Their investigations found that Marino Massimo De Caro, a well-known Italian book thief, had sold the real letter to a New York book dealer. De Caro is serving a seven-year prison sentence in Italy for stealing about 4,000 ancient books and manuscripts from Italian libraries and private collections. The late collector David Parsons bought the letter for $875,000 in 2004. After the investigations, his widow agreed to return the letter to the Vatican Library. Officials said the letter is now worth about $1.2 million.

    My teacher, Mr. August J. Bachmann, was the most influential teacher I ever had.

    I had gotten into trouble in his class: Another student had pushed me for fun, and I became angry and began to hit him. Mr. Bachmann stopped the fight, but instead of sending me to the office, he sat me down and asked a simple question,“Penna, why are you wasting your life？ Why aren't you going to college？”

    I didn't know anything about colleges or scholarships. No one had ever considered that a fatherless boy from the poorest neighborhood had a future. That day, instead of rushing off for lunch, he stayed and explained possible education options to me. At the end of our talk, he sent me to see a secretary who had a child at a state college. This was in 1962 at Emerson High School in Union City, New Jersey.

    Well, 55 years have passed, and what have I done with the knowledge he gave me？I gained a PhD from Fordham University when I was only 29.I taught English and social studies and then moved up the chain of command from teacher to principal(校长).

    I've sat on the board for Magnet Schools of America and represented that organization at the United Nations. I've won a number of great educational awards. But where would I be if a truly caring teacher had not taken the time out of his lunch period to speak to me？ It was without question only his confidence in me that helped me forward.

    I have repaid his kindness hundreds of times by encouraging misguided youngsters to aim higher. If I have saved any children, it is because of him. If I have been a successful educator, it is because I had a great role model in Mr. Bachmann.

    Everyone's at it, even my neighbors. I thought I might be the only person left in the world who hadn't done an eBay deal. So, I decided to try my hand at online Auction（网上拍卖）.

    Buying for Beginners

    Sign up on www.eBay.co.uk. Most items （e.g. tables, computers and books）ready for auction will come with a picture and a short description; others may be marked with Buy It Now and have a fixed price. You can buy these right away.

    If the item is being auctioned, you offer the highest price you are prepared to pay and eBay bids（出价）for you. The bid will be increased little by little until it goes beyond your highest bid, then you are emailed and asked if you would like to bid again. Auctions last up to 10 days and when they finish, you get an email telling you whether you have won the item.

    How to Pay

    Sellers decide how they would like to be paid and you need to check this before placing a bid as you might not want to post a check or postal order （邮政汇票）. The easiest way is through PayPal, an online payment system that takes the money away from your credit card.

    Selling Made Sample

    If you plan to sell on eBay, it helps to include a picture of the item. I followed my friend's advice and put up the items I wanted to sell for a 10-day auction, starting on a Thursday. This way buyers had two weekends to bid.

    The Big Things in Life

    It's easy to post a small item, but furniture is a big part of eBay and this has to be collectively sent by deliverymen. Check the ways of delivery before you bid.

    Science Advances published a new research report, saying bees are capable of addition and subtraction (减法)in Arithmetic(算术) learning—using colors in the place of plus and minus symbols.

    It isn't unusual to see the ability to count—or at least distinguish between differing quantities in the animal kingdom—Such ability has been seen in frogs, spiders, and even fish. But solving equations (方程式) using symbols is rare, so far only achieved by famously brainy animals such as chimpanzees. The previous research says the social insects, ants, can count to four and understand the concept of zero and researchers wanted to test the limits of what their tiny brains can do.

    The experiment goes like this. Scientists trained 14 bees to link the colors blue and yellow to addition and subtraction, respectively. They put the bees at the entrance of a Y-shaped maze (迷宫), where they were shown several shapes in either yellow or blue. If the shapes were blue, bees got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one more blue shape (the other end had one less blue shape); if the shapes were yellow, they got a reward if they went to the end of the maze with one less yellow shape.

    The testing worked the same way: Bees that "subtracted" one shape when they saw yellow, or "added" one shape when they saw blue were considered to have aced the test. The bees got the right answer 63% to 72% of the time, depending on the type of equation and the direction of the right answer—much better than random guesses would allow.

    While the results came from just 14 bees, researchers say the advance is exciting. If a brain about 20,000 times smaller than ours can perform maths using symbols, it could pave the way to novel methods in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Just don't ask the bees to do your homework anytime soon.