Lei’s official Weblog

Talking with a friend of mine (via emails) about the mad Korean who killed 33 people in a US university reminded me my own unhappy memories during my school time in China, although my experience shares little resemblance with that Korean as they mainly come from unfair treatments I had from mad teachers.

In China, some teachers have little respect for their students, it’s not uncommon for certain teachers to verbally abuse and physically punished their students for their ‘bad behaviours’. What even worse is that some parents actually support this unfair treatment of their kids, they think that kids should be punished like that so that they will learn from it. Obviously, I was often a target of mad teachers because I was never a conventionally good student and was very naughty sometimes. I’ll give an example to illustrate why I resented certain teachers so much.

When I was 13 years old we had a group physical exercise competition between classes in my school (it was a strange thing anyway). Because I couldn’t perform the physical exercise well, I was picked out along with another student by a mad female teacher to not participate in the competition for the class. She called me ‘deficient by nurture’ in front of the whole class of around 50 pupils after she announced that I was not going to represent the class. Apparently the other guy was called ‘deficient by nature’ by this mad teacher as he’s seriously overweight, and thus could not move his body elegantly. But because I looked completely normal she assumed it must be a result of nurture without knowing bad body coordination and bad memory at remembering movements can also come from nature. On one other occasion, she also described me as ‘a turtle showed up when the well became dry’, I couldn’t not believe she could say something so offensive, I would have probably killed her if I had a gun.