Without the resumption of the college entrance examination in 1977, my fate might have been a different one; without my several mentors in high school, I would have had a hard time getting into college.
After the summer vacation in 1977, our last year of high school began. We had a new class teacher, his name was Wang Shi Zhang. Mr. Wang was a college graduate from a teacher training college. Mr. Wang was stout, big and thick, and it was hard to find the typical “intellectual” traits of that era in his body, but he was more associated with a rough man who lived by selling hard labor. Mr. Wang.
In the mid-1970s, his school drama team, which he also directed and led, rehearsed the Tianjin Drama Theatre’s masterpiece, “The Wind and the Flower,” which was a national phenomenon in Tianjin and won the first place in the Tianjin High School Festival; Mr. Wang’s sports specialty was basketball, and during his years as the head coach of the school’s basketball team, the school’s boys’ and girls’ teams won consecutive awards. In the years he was the head coach of the school’s basketball team, the school’s boys and girls teams won the first place in the high school group in Tianjin for several years.
The highlight of his teaching career was as the teacher of our 1978 Gao Kao Express class and physics teacher, leading 40 of our high school students to take the Gao Kao exam that year. And our class ranked first in physics in Tianjin. Two of us scored 99 in physics, four of us scored above 90, and the average score of the class of 40 students was above 60. This was almost a miracle in that year’s college entrance exam, but of course that was an afterthought.
Before the official start of our second year of high school, we worked at the school for a month. By this time, Mr. Wang had already left for his post. After the labor, Mr. Wang began to give us extra lessons, one lesson was about friction generating electricity, he held a rubber stick in one hand and a chamois in the other, saying it was a forceful job.
The teacher told us that the resumption of the college entrance examination was imperative, and we had to start preparing now. When I heard this, I knew nothing about college entrance exams and even more about going to college, which I thought was something from heaven and earth. By the time we officially read about the resumption of the college entrance examination in the newspaper, it was already a few months later, and these few months gave us precious time to prepare for and win the college entrance examination.
Shortly after the school started, the school conducted a mapping test for all the sophomore students and formed a “fast class” according to the results. The school drew the best teachers for us as our teachers for each subject: Mr. Liu, the math teacher, Mr. Qiu, the language teacher, Mr. Guo, the chemistry teacher, and Mr. Hei, the teacher in charge of the college entrance examination, all of whom graduated before the Cultural Revolution. They were all college students who graduated before the Cultural Revolution and had many years of teaching experience, and at the age of about forty were in the prime of their lives.
In 1977, when all things were new, people believed that “knowledge can change fate” and no one believed in the “uselessness of studying”. It was in this context that the ambition and sentiment of Chinese intellectuals to serve the country and the people burst out like a volcano finding an outlet.
The days of preparing for the college entrance examination were tense, boring, but full of hope, days of burning passion. For almost a year, from the time we opened our eyes to the middle of the night, we did nothing but books and problems. The teachers knew how hard we worked, so they gave us a “privilege”: in class, we could sleep when we were sleepy and continue the lesson when we woke up.
During the most stressful days, the school prepared dormitories for us, and several of the main teachers lived in the school, just like us. The happiest and most relaxing moment for several teachers was to go to the small restaurant in front of the school for a sip of wine at dinner time, and then walk around the campus with us afterwards, as the sun was setting.
Today’s young people may not be able to understand and experience the sentiments of the teachers of that era, which was a time of no desire and no selfishness except for work. Using today’s standards, how much money do you have to spend to get these rich, talented teachers together, to eat and live with you, and all this just to get students into college?
It is often said that the 77th and 78th class college students are the generation that carries on the past and is the watershed between the traditional Chinese intellectuals and the intellectuals of the 20th century and the Internet era. This is because whether before or after the entrance exams, the teachers who preached to us still retained that sentiment of the traditional intellectuals who took the world for their own.
Wang’s ability is not only in his physics classes, but also in his in-depth and personalized lectures; it lies in his sensitivity and judgment. There were two types of questions that Mr. Wang wanted us to understand and rehearse over and over again; the electrical mechanics problem in the double-knife double-throw and the bullet hitting the wood question, which was indeed guessed by our teacher and hit all of them, and these two questions accounted for 40 points in the 1978 physics exam. For many candidates, these two questions became the “Waterloo” in their college entrance exams, while we became the Guan Yunzhang who passed the five levels.
After the exam, Mr. Wang participated in the physics marking, he later repeatedly described to us browbeaten many times: in the marking site, our class paper caused a sensation, the paper is sealed, no one knows which school it is, but the big old Wang know, because his own students’ handwriting, he is more than familiar with.
This was my mentor and that of 40 of our high school classmates, Big Old Wang, ordinary and extraordinary, who passed away a few years ago, but who will always remain in my memory.
Southern Metropolis Daily, November 23, 2017
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