According to a book review I’ve read before,

Kids who think that teachers come only in two kinds: crabby and nice, will be assured in this book that it’s all true.

a review by someone I forgot for a book: Apple Island: The Truth about Teachers, the author of which I’ve also forgot

This book review puts it quite nicely during my temporary schooling in China. Now, the teacher I’m talking about isn’t very nice, but he’s (yes, he) not exactly crabby. Allow me to talk about a normal period with this math teacher.

“Begin class!” The math teacher shouted. Looking around, I saw everyone bow to the teacher and say “Good morning, math teacher.”

The teacher spent about two minutes talking about a math problem. He asked a student, “Now, how would you calculate the problem?”

The student stood up. “Take 748 and 431. The sum of these two, subtract 815.”

The math teacher narrowed his eyes. “Is that sum inside parentheses?” The student put his hands in his pockets, beginning to look uncomfortable. “Yes.”

The teacher walked over to him and pointed his finger at the student. “You really are getting more and more and more stupid. The calculating sentence is 748 + 431 – 815. Why do you need to make it (748 + 431) – 815? It is at the front!”

At this point, I was shocked. Having before been told that teaching in China was much more strict than American teaching, I kept quiet.

The teacher pulled out the student and whipped him on the rear end. My eyes widened. The teacher then called, “Turn in your homework.”

The rest of the period was spent like this: each student would go up. They would get shouted at. They would come back almost in tears. Even the class president was shouted at. Almost no-one was spared.

At the end of the period, however, the teacher said something that changed everything. “Math is the art of the way things are calculated, rather not the answer of your calculations.”

With a nod, he headed off and walked out of the room.

Why would this little sentence change everything? It told me that he wasn’t just a mean math teacher. He was a very good math teacher, because very good math teachers say things like that, my dad told me.

I won’t say that other teachers are bad, because that’s just plain rude, but my dad did tell me that to come to this school, you have to pay 30,000 RMB ($3800 US dollars) as a one-time fee and school fees every year after that. That is fairly expensive.

So, almost concluding this pretty long post, our math teacher isn’t so bad after all, maybe. I went to the restroom during math period before, and he had told me I could go very nicely.

But I still won’t admit he’s not mean.