这是一篇回忆我在中国高中的文章。

我应该是从2011年进入的高中，我的中考成绩还可以，在全市一千多名吧，进入了当地（合肥）的一所省级重点高中。本来以我入学时的成绩应该是可以进入重点班的，但是当时那届又搞了一个入学考试，主要是竞赛的内容。我一直都是本本分分的学课本上的内容，竞赛的内容完全超出我的认知，所以数理化之类的考得极其糟糕。最后只进入了一个普通班（平行班）。当时我爸妈也不没有找任何关系让我进重点班，可能本来他们就不认识什么“领导”吧，不过我认识的几个同学通过各自家长的关系都不经过考试直接进入了重点班。现在回首看的时候，他们去的大学都比我的好很多，不过也是因为进了一个普通班，我才有机会去芬兰进行国际交流。

回到正题，我高一时还非常的意气风发，开学后直接竞选班长。不过现在看当时的行为就觉得很傻X，有时候班上太吵了我还要拍桌子“震慑”，不过依然没有人听我的，可能正因为有这种体验，让我觉得“领导别人”都是扯淡，一个人能管好的只有自己。所谓的“领导”也只是告诉你你应该要做什么，如果你不做，“领导”也是没办法的。当时的班主任是个刚毕业的大学生，普通话都讲不标准，所以班级一直都是比较混乱的，同学们都不怎么听课，我自己的成绩也越来越差。不过这个老师有一个好，就是他把学校的通知基本都会告知学生，所以我才知道了有一个出国交流的机会，记得我重点班的同学压根没听说过这个事，因为重点班的老教师会根据经验通知这些活动（他们觉得出国这种活动完全影响高考,没有什么作用，所以并不告知学生）出国前，我还参加了一个乐高的机器人比赛，不过这个比赛也让我充分认识到国内很多竞赛的虚假。我认认真真做的机器，还不如别人通过关系找到的成品成绩好，而这种又被美化做“大手牵小手”。不过辩证的看，父母如果是从事相关行业的，子女的确会被影响。不过我当时认识的拿奖的人在我看来都还是不学无术的，成绩很差，进入重点班，升学都还是靠关系的。

高一结束以后我就去芬兰了，具体可以看看我的一个知乎回答

回国后，依然回到一个普通班继续读书，而且还是从高二读起（所以我高中上了四年，不过据说之前有个交流的学长回来直接高三，然后还去了清华）。我读的是理科，而我进入的这个班级大部分人读的理科所以大部分人都还保留在这个班（其他班级文理科人数分歧太多的话就会被拆散），因为我是新进来的，所以都不熟，一开学随便坐的座位，结果做我旁边的是全班倒数第一。刚回来的时候班主任是一个经验丰富的化学老教师，他比较严厉。不过教了一段时间就因为家庭变故离开岗位了。后来的班主任是我在国内高中遇到的我最喜欢的一个老师-何平，他教的是数学。不过他教数学的方法是非常哲学性的，他经常引用古文中的一些例子来解释数学思想，我觉得非常的神奇，我到现在都还记得他的“问道于零”。不过其他同学对他都不是很待见，因为班级的数学平均成绩比原来下降了，不过当时那段时间是我整个高中数学成绩最好的一段时间。而且他跟我有点相似的就是silent observer（沉默的观察者），我当时经常放学后一个人在操场上跑步（每次跑五六圈，三千米左右），他有一次看到了，后来就要全班同学一起去跑步，虽然说最后跑步的人还是很少。感觉何老师的教学方法可能过于超脱，所以对一般的学生并不能起到帮助，但是对我来说还是非常有启发的。

高二大部分的时间我都是浑浑噩噩的度过的，感觉我已经适应不回国内的体制了，当时我甚至一度背SAT的单词，做SAT的模拟题，希望之后能去美国学习。但是我爸妈都不支持我的这些努力，他们不愿意承担我去香港考SAT的费用，也觉得我去美国的费用会过于高昂。记得当时有一次申请上海纽约大学时需要检查文章的语法和引用问题，我上淘宝找到了一个grammrly的代检测，只要1块人民币（比我爸经常打的乒乓球还便宜），但是我当时让我爸帮我代买（因为我当时还没淘宝账号），我爸就死活不同意，觉得太贵了没必要。后来实在没办法，我就找其他亲戚代买了。不过从此我也就不对父母抱有更多的希望。

回到高中的话题，当时的高中把高三的学生分到另一个校区，但是那边离我家太远了，骑车要一个多小时了，而每天要求6点50到校早自习，迟到就不给进学校（在校门口罚站到第一节课）然后我们班也换了一个班主任，一个中年的男性数学老师，我对他印象也非常深刻，因为他应该是唯一直接体罚我的老师了。记得高二暑假时我们依然要上课，有一次一个作业里的一道题目我写错了，那个老师就说这种题目都能写错，你是不是蠢货，然后就拧我的耳朵，然后令我罚站了一节课，不过并不只有我一个人被罚站和拧耳朵，但是这种事情对我的冲击非常的大。因为我很难想象我一个18岁的成年人，还会被这么屈辱的对待，仅仅是因为一个题目没写对而已。可能在中国这种事还是常见的，可以被容忍的。我记得我当时非常的愤怒，回到家就开始揍沙袋，打拳，甚至好像还砸了一些东西，后来又感到非常的委屈。不过也像这种事情让我对中国，中国人没有任何的认同感，我觉得这些人的价值观，世界观完全不是在一个次元里。我以后是不可能继续呆在这里，继续跟这些人一起生活的。虽然我还会讲华文，但这更多的只是一种传统而已。不过这个老师在其他同学眼里“竟然”是好老师，因为他的确让全班平均数学成绩提高了不少，但是对我来说，当时的数学就一直在下滑，提不起任何学数学的兴趣。

大概是到了高考前三周，我才开始有了要参加高考的紧张感，那时才开始认真的做试卷和题目，不过也并没有多大的帮助，我最擅长的竟然还是英语，但是在安徽试卷上并不会有太多的影响。

可能我并不是一个典型的生活在中国的人，但是我觉得很多在中国的经历的确改变了我的人生轨迹。现在我更多的是提倡free online learning，我会捐钱给可汗学院这样的组织，让更多的想要学习的人直接获取世界上最优秀的资源，跟世界上最优秀的老师学习，而不是被自己身处的环境所局限。有时候感觉自己明明可以做的更多，但是总被自己的环境所束缚，希望未来的人可以更加充分利用互联网来改变自己的“命运”。

以上。

题外话，
因为这个博客主要还是作为技术博客，写这篇文章完全是因为之前跟同学聊天而回忆起的内容，昨天晚上又辗转反侧想了很久，今天有感而发的。因为我也不会经常写华文文章，所以想在下面列出一些现在正在努力想达到、做到的品质（或者说是我的价值观）：

  • 去伪存真
  • 一诺千金
  • 善恶分明，嫉恶如仇
  • 己所不欲，勿施于人
  • 知己知彼
  • 谨言慎行
  • 三省吾身

This is a post looking back on my high school years in China.

I think I started high school in 2011. My score on the high school entrance exam was decent, somewhere around the top thousand-something in the city, and I got into a provincial key high school in my hometown (Hefei). With my entrance score I should have been able to get into one of the elite classes, but that year they added an extra placement exam, mostly on competition-level material. I had always just studied what was in the textbooks, and the competition stuff was completely beyond me, so I did terribly in math, physics and chemistry. In the end I only got into a regular class (a “parallel class”). My parents didn’t pull any strings to get me into an elite class either. Maybe they just didn’t know any “officials” in the first place. Meanwhile, a few classmates I knew got straight into the elite classes through their parents’ connections, no exam needed. Looking back now, they all ended up at much better universities than I did, but then again, it was only because I was in a regular class that I got the chance to go to Finland on an exchange.

Back to the story. In my first year I was full of ambition and ran for class monitor right after school started. Looking at how I acted back then, it seems pretty dumb now. Sometimes when the class got too noisy I’d slam the desk to “intimidate” everyone, but still nobody listened to me. Maybe it was that experience that made me think “leading other people” is nonsense, and that the only person you can really manage is yourself. A so-called “leader” can only tell you what you should do; if you don’t do it, there’s nothing the “leader” can do about it. Our homeroom teacher back then was a fresh college graduate who couldn’t even speak standard Mandarin properly, so the class was always pretty chaotic. Nobody really listened in class, and my own grades kept getting worse. But this teacher had one good thing about him: he passed on basically every school announcement to the students, which is how I found out about an opportunity to go abroad on an exchange. I remember my classmates in the elite classes had never even heard of it, because the veteran teachers in the elite classes decided based on experience which activities to announce (they figured going abroad would only hurt your gaokao and was pointless, so they didn’t tell the students). Before going abroad, I also took part in a LEGO robotics competition, but that competition made me fully realize how fake a lot of competitions in China are. The robot I built seriously and carefully scored worse than the ready-made ones other people got through connections, and this kind of thing gets dressed up as “big hands holding little hands.” To be fair, though, if your parents work in a related field, kids really do get influenced by it. But the award winners I knew back then all seemed like slackers to me: terrible grades, and they got into the elite classes and into university through connections.

After my first year I went to Finland. For the details, check out one of my Zhihu answers.

After I came back, I went back to a regular class, and I had to start again from the second year (so I spent four years in high school, though supposedly an earlier exchange student came back and went straight into the third year, and then got into Tsinghua). I was on the science track, and most people in the class I joined had picked science, so most of them stayed in that class (classes with too uneven a split between humanities and science got broken up). Since I was new, I didn’t know anyone, so on the first day I just sat anywhere, and the guy sitting next to me turned out to be dead last in the class. When I first came back, our homeroom teacher was an experienced veteran chemistry teacher, and he was pretty strict. But after teaching for a while he left because of a family emergency. The next homeroom teacher was my favorite teacher of all my time in high school in China: He Ping, who taught math. His way of teaching math was very philosophical. He often used examples from classical Chinese texts to explain mathematical ideas, which I found amazing. I still remember his “asking the Way of zero.” The other students didn’t really like him, though, because the class’s average math score dropped compared to before. But that stretch was when my math grades were the best of my whole high school career. He was also a bit like me in that he was a silent observer. Back then I often ran alone on the track after school (five or six laps each time, about three kilometers). He saw me once, and afterward he had the whole class go running together, though in the end very few people actually ran. I feel like Mr. He’s teaching style was maybe too detached from the ordinary, so it didn’t really help the average student, but for me it was really inspiring.

I spent most of my second year in a daze. I felt like I could no longer fit back into the Chinese system. At one point I was even memorizing SAT vocabulary and doing SAT practice tests, hoping to study in the US later. But my parents didn’t support any of these efforts. They weren’t willing to pay for me to take the SAT in Hong Kong, and they also thought studying in the US would be way too expensive. I remember one time, when I was applying to NYU Shanghai, I needed to check my essay for grammar and citation issues. I found someone on Taobao who would run it through Grammarly for me for just 1 RMB (cheaper than the ping-pong balls my dad was always playing with), but since I didn’t have a Taobao account yet, I asked my dad to buy it for me, and he flat-out refused, saying it was too expensive and unnecessary. In the end I had no choice but to get another relative to buy it for me. From then on I stopped expecting much from my parents.

Back to high school. At the time, the school moved third-year students to another campus, but it was way too far from my home, more than an hour by bike, and we had to be at school by 6:50 a.m. for morning self-study. If you were late they wouldn’t let you in (you’d have to stand at the school gate as punishment until first period). Our class also got a new homeroom teacher, a middle-aged male math teacher. I remember him very clearly too, because he’s probably the only teacher who ever physically punished me directly. I remember we still had classes during the summer break after second year, and one time I got a homework problem wrong. The teacher said something like, “How can you get a problem like this wrong, are you an idiot?”, then twisted my ear and made me stand for a whole class period as punishment. I wasn’t the only one who got made to stand or had their ear twisted, but this kind of thing hit me really hard. I could hardly believe that I, an 18-year-old adult, could still be treated so humiliatingly, just for getting one problem wrong. Maybe in China this kind of thing is still common and tolerated. I remember being furious. When I got home I started punching the sandbag, boxing, and I think I even smashed some stuff. Afterward I just felt really wronged. But it’s things like this that left me with no sense of identification with China or Chinese people at all. I felt like these people’s values and worldview were in a completely different dimension. There was no way I could stay here in the future and keep living alongside these people. Even though I still speak Chinese, that’s more just a tradition than anything else. And yet, in the eyes of other students, this teacher was “actually” a good teacher, because he really did raise the class’s average math score quite a bit. But for me, my math kept sliding the whole time, and I couldn’t muster any interest in it.

It wasn’t until about three weeks before the gaokao that I started to feel nervous about actually taking it, and only then did I start seriously doing practice papers and problems. It didn’t help much, though. My strongest subject was, of all things, still English, but on the Anhui exam paper that didn’t make much of a difference.

Maybe I’m not a typical person living in China, but I do think a lot of my experiences in China changed the course of my life. These days I’m more of an advocate for free online learning. I donate to organizations like Khan Academy so that more people who want to learn can directly access the best resources in the world and learn from the best teachers in the world, instead of being limited by the environment they happen to be in. Sometimes I feel like I clearly could have done more, but I was always held back by my environment. I hope that people in the future can make fuller use of the internet to change their own “fate.”

That’s all.

A side note:
Since this blog is mainly meant to be a tech blog, I only wrote this post because I was reminded of these things while chatting with a classmate earlier. Last night I tossed and turned thinking about it for a long time, and today I felt moved to write it down. Since I don’t often write in Chinese, I want to list below some qualities I’m currently working hard to achieve and live up to (or you could call them my values):

  • Discard the false and keep the true
  • A promise is worth a thousand pieces of gold
  • Know clearly what is good and what is evil, and hate evil like an enemy
  • Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself
  • Know yourself and know others
  • Be careful in speech and cautious in action
  • Examine myself three times a day