Apr 29 2008
My primary school 中关村二小
This issue of National Geographic is devoted to China. One of the contributors title the article Gilded Age Gilded Cage in which talked about my school:
.. .. “At times educators go to extremes: At the Zhongguancun No. 2 Primary School in Beijing, vice-principal Lu Suqin recently took two fifth-grade boys into her home. “Their parents couldn’t get them to behave, so they asked me to take them,” she explains. “After they learn disciplined living, I will send them back.”" .. ..
Lord, they do that? :)) While I was attending schools in Beijing, two teachers sort of took me in.
Once in primary school, which was that school, Zhongguancun No. 2. One day out of blue, my home class teacher 班主任 announced that I was going to review math each morning before the starting of the first class. The entire class room gone quiet. For one, this kind of thing was unheard of before. Secondly, I wasn’t the math class rep 数学代表. Third, heck, I wasn’t a math genius. The teacher insisted without consulting me. So the following day, I stood at the front as stunned as the rest class. They looked at me I stared back at them, not knowing where to start or what to review. The short 15 minutes was the longest period I’d endured there. After couple of days, the math teacher took pity on me, told me to go to her house in the night, she’ll help me to prepare.
We lived very close, only couple of apartment buildings away. Her husband worked at one of the institutes at CAS. The math teacher was little out of shape but very kind. Her light coloured glasses rest on her cheeks rather than her nose. She would lay out topics to cover for the next day and prep me in her cramp dim lighted apartment - the norm at time. At beginning, I did ask why was I being picked on. She only smiled, only to say it’s a good experience, blah blah blah.. It was the 70s and I was only 12 or 13, not nowadays all-out efforts to get into the top high school/college.
During high school at Renda fu, I once hurt my feet. I was living on my own, so my class teacher Lin Qingqiu took me in for couple of days - she lived in Renda, just a stone throw away from our school. Among all my teachers at Renda fu, she had to be the most left leaning one, while other teachers trying to jam the entire text book down our throats and we loved it. She would follow every single directive from the above and made us stay late to discuss - yucky!! The point we got the model class honor proved it. We respected her as a teacher, we all do. But didn’t love her as much as the math or physics teachers. Years later, I heard the lefty Teacher Lin came to US. My goodness. Apparently she came to US to baby sit her grandchildren.