Our Heritage (VI)

還有故事可以聽…

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Lin’s Heritage #6 On Education

Among our family members, although we are doing OK at school, we all agree that none of us is really gifted at all. This fact was made acutely obvious to us by knowing those really gifted at school. For example, Susan has a friend who made her tenured professorship of physics at age around 30. What we agreed was overall we had an above average IQ and lots of honest effort made toward what we were trying to do.

Your Grandma decided that her children, me and my sister, should have education that should go as high as possible even though she was illiterate, and so were her parents adopted her. My father’s side offered no hope of education either; every one was illiterate.

Both myself and my sister did not go to any kinder garden, or pre-school classes. I guess at that time only very well-off family could afford to do so. But I did have private tutor at home together with my older sister, a girl adopted by Grandma. Yes, Grandma also adopted a girl. It is quite customary for the poor people to let go of their girls that they could not feed and become some one’s adopted girl. Knowing the misery of not having any education, your Grandma was determined to give this girl some education although when she came to our family she was already nine years old and not having any school education at all. Your Grandma decided to hire a private tutor to come to our home to teach her traditional Chinese education. That was very old fashion Chinese teaching, still very active at the time, despite more than 50 years of Japanese occupation and education of Taiwan. I joined my elder sister as student taking traditional Chinese lessons, such as Three Characters Bible, Confucian Dialogue etc. I do not remember whether my sister join us. Perhaps she did not because she was too young to join us.

Our adopted sister learned to read and write the old Chinese way. It worked. As to your Grandma, she finally managed to write her own name in Chinese when she was almost 60 and needed to write to prove the government official that she could manage to read and write so she could go visiting other countries for business reason. At that time, Taiwan did not allow people to go visiting other countries as tourist, only businessmen could. Your Grandma visited many countries posing as a business woman.

At primary school, my sister was doing much better than me because she was made something like deputy class chief because of her performance. I never received any award as a student. Some of you know how I managed to go to primary school on the very first day entering the grade one. Your Grandma had not time to take me to school for registration. Most probably, she could not do it either because she could not read not write.

I went to go school for registration together with a neighbor on the first day. Next day I went to school by myself by walking about one hour. However, immediately on the first ever classroom, I got into the fight with anther boy who was fighting for the same seat that I thought was my seat. It turned out I was entering into another classroom, not mine.

Normally, a class had about 40 to 50 students. Half of them did not have shoes to wear. I belong to the bare foot troop. You could imagine how hot it was during the summer by walking over the oily tartar road surface. I did have a pair of shoes, but they are for official use only, not daily run. Some students really did not have any shoe at all.

I still remembered my first semester class report was ranked 32 among 50 some students. Your Grandma gave me a very rough beating, the first that I ever had. It was so bad that I did make effort to improve. After that, your Grandma did not bother with my school reporting any more, probably she was too busy with business and she had to ask someone else to read for her. However, my ranking at school stayed at #24 for the first four years because the other 23 students had tutoring lessons with our class teachers and had access to the trial runs of tests.

Since your Grandma never knew how to check on our school status. We were forced to sign off all school correspondence by ourselves. Without any help from any one, both my sister and myself did play truant without going to school for more than one semester until finding out by the neighbor and let your Grandma know. Our playing truant was two individual events, not related. I forgot why I did it, nor did I know why my sister did it. But somehow I remembered it was something that a small kid did not know how to handle; it was not we did not like school or we were poor students.

Both my sister and myself went on to tier one good middle school by passing the competitive exam(*1) without attending any tutoring classes. I still remembered when I passed, my teacher who taught me until grade four was asking people how could I pass. While at junior high school, I did not have any problem with my school work except English.

I must dwell on the subject English for a while. I found mathematics fairly easy. The Chinese not so difficult even though we had to study ancient classic Chinese. However, English was such an alien subject to me. I had to retake exam every semester just to pass. I even could not do the home work at all. Thus, in the beginning of every semester, all I had to do is to go to a special bookstore where they are selling teachers’ aids where all home works answers were available. In fact, until I was at the senior high school, one fellow student asked me how many English alphabets were there and I did not how many.

I went from one junior high school to another even better one after passing exam. Again I did not know how I did it. In fact, I even did not know that one is better than the other. As soon as I attend the new senior high school, I found I had another nightmare with English teaching. My English teacher at junior high also moved to the new senior high and again he was my English teacher. What a nightmare?

However, my life was completely transformed at this senior high school, the Attached Middle School of Taiwan Normal University. This senior high school was run by a very liberal principle. For the first time, I found a school principle could be so liberal. If a student decided that class was not his liking, he could just leave and enjoyed himself outside the classroom. All classes were named in serial number. My class is #55, a very famous one, indeed, in the history of that school. The school classes already run into four digits, i.e. now it is class 1xxx now. Only this middle school has such a class naming system.

After one year at this senior high school, the students at class 55 decided that our head teacher was very poor, so were most of other teachers. The class performance in school was notorious. We had most of the offence reporting, all stigma of poor lousy students. Most of numbers of students dismissed. Most of numbers of students on probation, etc, etc. Yet, we believed it was not our fault. We decided to revolt and signed a petition to the school principle, requesting to change all teachers. Our petition was signed by most students, except a few who believed we were revolutionary. To avoid being named as ringleader, the petition was signed in a big circle, i.e. no one was heading the signature signing list.

Surprisingly our petition was successful. We had a new class head teacher and all other teachers newly assigned. That was the sophomore year of the senior high and we had new teachers in all subjects. I had new English teacher and I was ready for him. How?

After the freshmen year of the senior high and, during the summer, I decided to do something about my poor English study. I felt I knew too few English words and I had no understanding of English grammar at all. I went to the city library and took a look to see if there was any book I could study. I pulled every book on the shelf and read it. It took me almost one whole day. Finally, I found a book, titled something like English Grammar Explained by Sentences. For every grammar rule explained, there are twenty example sentences. Yes, I could understand the book. The question was how could I come to read the book every day, fully understood it, and without having someone else taking the book before my arrival at the library.

What I did for that summer completely changed my understanding of English. I would read every rule, copied every example sentences into my notebook; yes, I was hand copying the complete book. And at the end of the day, I would hide the book at a place only I knew so that next day I could locate it for myself again.

I had no problem with my English study after that summer. Another finale episode about English study at the senior high school was the English teaching by the newly assigned teacher. He was quite a famous teacher. When he came in for the first class. We are waiting to see how good was he. Well what we found was totally beyond our expectation…

The new English teacher started talking English and English only. He started teaching the text book by explaining English with English. For our benefit he took time to write every words on the blackboard. And all of us were furiously copying every word because we simply did not understand his verbalism at all. At the end of the class, he finally spoke in Chinese asking if we had any problem. We were relieved and start asking in Chinese.

We were quite vocal in questioning his teachings. Yet, he made no concession whatsoever. All teaching would be in English, all home works would be in English, even the test would be completely in English. And only English to English dictionary would be allowed in the class. We were frustrated as a class and asked how could he expect us to spend so much time to study English, looking up every word in English and finding more words to be checked again. His answer: His job was to teach and our job to learn; if we had to spent 24 hours all day just to study his subject, it was not his problem. And in that case, he expected us to spend 24 hours a day just to study English at the expense of all other subjects.

Surprisingly, the class made it together with the teacher. And I was fortunate to have such a teacher in my life. This writing is dragging too long. But whenever I found someone that could not study well on any subject, I do believe it is a matter of diligence, not IQ(*2).

I will stop here for now. The next one will be on our higher education. .


(To be continued…)

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註釋：
(*1) 胖媽念的是「北一女初中」和「北一女高中」。是的，那時的北一女是有國中部的，而且需要聯考。更妙的是，我印象中看過一張胖媽的國中照片，裡面是有男生的！據說是因為那時的「北一『女』」有男生，哈。
(*2) "I do believe it is a matter of diligence, not IQ"：I can't agree on it more!