Chapter 18 16. Obsessed with mathematics and composition

I followed the advice of the girl I had a crush on and applied for Shanghai Middle School, and I passed.Although the actual situation is not as she said, there is a car pick-up and drop-off, but I don't have to regret it at all.This school is indeed the best middle school in Shanghai, with top-notch scale, equipment, teachers, and teaching quality. It is recognized as an honor to be admitted to Shangzhong. The predecessor of Shanghai Middle School is Longmen Academy, which has been established for nearly a hundred years.To commemorate this history, the main teaching building was named Longmen Building.Another classroom building is called Xianmian Hall, which commemorates Huang Daopo, a weaver in the late Song Dynasty and early Yuan Dynasty.Huang Daopo's tomb is not far from the school, only a mound and a simple stone tablet.What satisfies me most is that the school is located in the suburbs, and the campus is quite large and has an idyllic flavor.A small river runs through the campus, with classrooms and dormitories on one side and a vast school-run farm on the other.I often take a walk by the river, sometimes alone, sometimes with my best friends, and spent many beautiful evenings.Coming to this quiet prestigious school from the noisy urban area, I felt at ease and adapted to boarding life immediately.

The headmaster at that time was Ye Keping. In my eyes, he was a short man who liked to give long and boring reports.The students admired Xia Yuxiu, secretary of the Youth League Committee, and his report was kind and funny.Our homeroom teacher was Zhang Qinjuan in the first and second grades. She was a small woman wearing deep myopia glasses. She had a strong self-esteem and often cried secretly when naughty boys were angry.There is a rule in the high school that each class should choose a hero as the class name. If the school thinks it meets the requirements, a grand naming ceremony will be held, and the class flag embroidered with the hero's name will be awarded, and the portrait of the hero will be hung in the classroom.Teacher Zhang taught politics. In my impression, she devoted all her energy to fighting for the name, and finally our class won the title of An Yemin Class.Now I only remember that An Yemin was a naval soldier who died in the line of duty.The head teacher of the third grade, surnamed Tang, is an old lady with white hair and a pouty mouth. She was originally an English learner. After liberation, she had to change her career and teach us Russian.The teaching in upper middle school is famous for mathematics, physics and chemistry. There are many experienced old teachers. I remember two of them.One is Hua Xiao, an algebra teacher. She is an old maid with a strict and meticulous teaching style.The other is a physics teacher whose name I forgot, with a square face and short feet, who claims to be self-taught.Every time it was his turn to attend class, when the bell rang, he hurried into the classroom with his head down, without looking at anyone, he picked up the chalk and started writing on the blackboard.The blackboard was filled with writing, erased and then rewritten, hardly saying a word, and it was like this until the end of get out of class.As soon as the bell rang, he hurried out of the classroom with his head down again.

Upper High School deserves to be a prestigious school, not only with strong teachers, but also with high-level students.In my opinion, this latter feature is more important.In a class, there are not one or two smart and studious students, but a dozen or so, which is enough to form and drive an atmosphere.For a bright and studious student, this is the most suitable environment. His cleverness has a companion, and his studious has an opponent.There are two types of top students in our class.One type is obsessed with one subject, such as Xu Yeye, who keeps his ears shut and sits at his desk from morning to night solving math problems, and he is indeed the number one math student in the whole year.Another group has a wide range of interests, such as Huang Yihe, who is the representative of the three-dimensional geometry class. He also loves to read all kinds of casual books. He is eloquent and eloquent.I also belong to the latter category. I get along very well with Huang Yihe. We often chat and bicker together, but our sharpness is not as good as his.

In high school, as in junior high, my favorite subject was math.I served as the class representative of geometry and trigonometry successively in the class, and I also regularly give tutoring classes to students with poor grades every week.The teacher who taught geometry was a young teacher. Once, he was demonstrating exercises in class. I found his solution too complicated and proposed a much simpler solution. He immediately blushed and humbly expressed his admiration.During the summer vacation of the second year of high school, I still taught myself advanced mathematics at home, and did a little bit of analytic geometry and calculus.I always feel that the interest of plane geometry is unmatched by other mathematics subjects, and it is the closest to purely intellectual games.Another subject I like is Chinese. I don't like to read and memorize texts, but I like to write essays.Our Chinese teacher is Qian Changxun, a tall, thin man in his fifties with one tooth bared, but he speaks confidently.He admired the compositions of the two students the most. He appreciated Shi Zuorang because of his impeccable grammar and rich vocabulary, and he appreciated me because of his true feelings and independent opinions.In addition to composition, I also often write some things after school, including prose and novels, which are bound into volumes every once in a while, and there are a total of ten volumes.These studies no longer exist, I did not show them to anyone at the time, and if I read them now, I would definitely find them disreputable.However, this is not important. The important thing is that I learned to use writing to amuse myself, and realized that even if writing has no other use, it is still a kind of happiness in itself.

Judging from my learning in middle school, my intellectual nature is obviously longer than thinking and understanding, and shorter than observation and memory.Therefore, I don't like subjects that are more empirical, such as physics and chemistry in science, history and geography in liberal arts, and my grades are also poor.As far as writing is concerned, I am also good at reasoning and romance, but short at narrative.I seemed to straddle freely between the abstract thoughts of my head on one end and the emotional experiences of my heart on the other, with no transition in between and no need for a transition.In a sense, both mathematics and poetry are the furthest from reality, and they are the fields in which I feel most comfortable.When I face the external world of experience, whether it is natural or social, I seem to be somewhat powerless.

Among my classmates, the people I interacted with were more or less humanistic, such as Huang Yihe.There was also Ji Anxin, a farm boy who solemnly expressed his admiration to me one day and borrowed my study notes, and we have had close contacts since then.He has an old book, which is a compilation of quotations from famous people. The most popular one is Zeng Guofan's quotations. I have borrowed and copied them for a long time, and I am deeply influenced by the inspirational words in it.Ji loves literature, and his grades in science are mediocre, but under the pressure of the tradition of emphasizing science and neglecting literature in upper middle school, he applied for science when he graduated, and entered the physics department of Nanjing University.I also have a little contact with other classmates.There is a pair of twins who look exactly the same, both are small, thin and dark-faced, wear the same glasses, and both are top in math.Most people can't tell the difference between these identical twins, but I can recognize them at a glance. The difference lies in his expression. The elder brother has a soft radiance. I believe this is because he has humanistic interests besides mathematics.He used to come to me during recess and we became friends.There is a special science class in upper middle school, and the schooling period is one year shorter than that of the ordinary class. Our class once held a fellowship with a science class.I remember this event because there was a student in that class with the same name and surname as me, and we met at the meeting.I was reading it at the time and took it with me to the meeting. He flipped through it and said that he didn't read literature books, which meant that we would not have further contacts.