중학교 영어 2 (천재교과서 소영순) 연계 글

Every morning, Harin waited for the bus at a stop near her school. One morning, she noticed an old man who was reading the bus schedule for the third time. He had nothing better to read.

Her class had collected more than eighty books, but the classroom had no room for them. Harin asked, "Why don't we give the people at the bus stop the books that we collected?" Kevin's grandfather gave the class an old bookshelf which he had kept in his garage for years. The students painted it yellow and wrote "A Book for Every Bus Ride" across the top.

Three days later, a night of heavy rain soaked the books. "Maybe this was a bad idea," Kevin said. Mr. Seo, who owned the hardware store across the street, watched the students carry the wet books away. Then he walked over and measured the shelf without a word. The next morning, the students found something new: a clear plastic roof fixed to the shelf with four shiny screws. A card under it said, "Books need something dry over their heads, too."

After that, the shelf changed in ways that the students had never expected. A baker left a box of cookbooks. A little girl added a picture book with a note that she had written in crayon: "Please read this to someone." The old man now sat on the bench with a book of poems instead of the bus schedule. Some evenings, the shelf was nearly empty, but every morning, new books filled the gaps.

In December, the class counted the books that had passed through the shelf. The students had put in eighty-two, but more than three hundred had come and gone. Harin realized that their real gift was the shelf itself, which gave the whole neighborhood a way to give. "We started it," Kevin said, "but our neighbors kept it going."