The Correct Way
by Huina Zheng
Teachers generally didn’t call parents unless something terrible happened to their child at school. So, when Liling received a call from Teacher Zhu, her son Ming’s Chinese teacher, her heart sank.
Teacher Zhu said, “Narrative writing according to the pictures is the most preliminary training for compositions in the first and second grade. Observing pictures and writing a story is a way to improve students’ writing skills. Ming is already a second grader, but his writing is still poor. In last week’s Chinese test, only five students in a class of 40 got a B, and Ming was one of them. He didn’t look closely at the pictures and failed to understand what the pictures meant.”
“Thank you for telling me this, Teacher Zhu. I will work hard to enhance his composition skills at home.”
* * *
That night, Liling looked at Ming’s Chinese test paper. Out of 15 points, he got only 3 points in the composition section.
Ming saw his mother’s gloomy expression and did not dare to speak.
In the picture, a man was squatting on the ground and using a washbasin to wash the feet of an old woman sitting on a stool. The meaning of this picture was not difficult to understand.
Ming had written: “On a cool afternoon, Grandma Wang was basking in the sun and soaking her feet in front of her home. A homeless man passed by and said, ‘Granny, I haven’t eaten for several days. Can you give me some money for lunch if I wash your feet?’ Grandma Wang said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you 20 yuan.’”
Liling took a deep breath and told herself not to be angry. Ming saw her mother’s frown and began his habitual crying.
Liling ignored her son’s tears and said, “This picture expresses the traditional Chinese virtue of filial piety. The middle-aged son says to his elderly mother, ‘Mom, let me wash your feet.’ The mother exclaims, ‘You are such a good son!’”
Ming wiped the tears on his face with his sleeve and said, “This man is the granny’s son?” He pointed at the man’s pants in the picture and said, “But, Mom, look, there is a hole in his pants. Isn’t this the evidence that he is a tramp?”
Liling followed Ming’s fingers and took a closer look. Indeed, there seemed to be a hole in the trousers. It was probably due to ink leakage during printing. She sighed.
Ming continued, “Since he is a son and helps his mother wash her feet, why is he frowning? Is it because his mother’s feet are smelly?”
The man indeed looked unhappy, but that was not the point.
Liling took another deep breath and said, “This picture emphasizes the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation that filial piety comes first. Do you understand? Next time you see this kind of picture, do you know how to write it?”
Ming nodded.
But did he really understand? Liling was not sure.
* * *
That night, after Ming went to bed, Liling told her husband Bin about the incident. Bin was lying on the sofa, playing games on his phone, and said without raising his head, “When you were a student, didn’t you always score the highest in Chinese in the grade? Weren’t your compositions often used as examples by teachers? You can, of course, teach Ming how to write.”
Liling wanted to scream at her husband to stop playing on his mobile phone and pay attention to his son’s studies. But she knew it was useless no matter how angry she got. It was the social norm that the mother took care of the child’s studies, and the father needed only to respect the mother’s decisions.
Bin never asked her why she gave up Chinese and chose to major in mathematics in college, and then worked as a mathematics teacher in a training institution after graduation. She got high marks in her essays not because her writing was so good but because she knew what points of view to take to get high marks. She had constantly thought about the “correct” way to interpret texts and write, even if she disagreed with the ideas she wrote about.
Chinese language was a very subjective subject; in contrast, mathematics was objective, where right was right and wrong was wrong. Tired of thinking about what other people wanted her to think, she had decided to study mathematics.
However, as a mathematics teacher, what parents wanted from her was not to help their children understand mathematics more deeply or discover the beauty of this subject but to help their children improve their test scores. She needed to analyze the mathematics test papers of various schools, find out the test points, and repeatedly instill the correct solutions into the students. She was frustrated that she still needed to teach her students the “right” way to think.
She needed to vent, to talk to someone. She told her friend Cheng on WeChat, “Ming’s point of view was novel, but it was not the correct way to write the composition.”
Cheng replied, “I will definitely protect my child’s creativity. When the children grow up, they will naturally understand the secular understanding. No need to teach them at all.”
“But his grades will be low, and he will be scolded by the teachers.”
“I won’t care about my child’s low score on the test paper. I will also make that clear to the teacher.”
Liling stared at her friend’s message and felt stuck. It was not that she didn’t know the importance of protecting children’s imagination. If Ming kept answering questions according to his own understanding, his teachers would believe he was a lousy student and treat him accordingly, which would destroy his self-confidence.
However, if she encouraged Ming to have his own thinking, he would find it hard to accept the “correct” way of interpreting texts taught by the teachers. He would have conflicts not only with the Chinese teacher but also with the history teacher and politics teacher in the future.
Cheng could certainly protect her daughter’s imagination. Cheng owned three houses, and her husband was a lawyer. If her daughter did not adapt to China’s exam-oriented education, she could send her to study abroad.
But could Liling afford it? No. Her husband’s and her incomes were insufficient to send Ming to an international school and then to the U.S. or Canada for college. She still hoped Ming could adapt to the domestic education system.
She sighed deeply again. She didn’t know the right parenting way and wished it could be like the exam-oriented education, where someone would feed her the right answers.
Copyright © 2023 by Huina Zheng
