The Music Lesson That Moved My Name Up the List

The Music Lesson That Moved My Name Up the List In my first years of primary school, my grades were very poor. From kindergarten through third grade, I was usually among the last few in the class. When test papers were handed back, the teacher started from the highest score and worked downward, calling one name, and one pupil going up. Only at the very end did it usually come to me — my place was mostly last, second from last, or third from last. When it was my turn to go up and take my paper, the teacher would sometimes, in front of the whole class, say a sarcastic, cutting sentence or two to me. Exactly what she said, I can no longer remember clearly. I only remember that when she had finished, some of my classmates below would laugh. This kind of thing happened more than once. I already spoke very little. I was unhappy inside, and I did not know what to say. I could only take the paper and go back to my seat. The change came in a music lesson in fourth grade. The school had a male teacher who was mainly in charge of general affairs, and who also took the music lessons as a substitute. In class, he usually played an electronic organ and taught us to sing, sentence by sentence. That day, the lesson began as usual, and we sang through the song once as usual. After we had sung, he stopped. He sat in the middle of the platform, and instead of teaching us to sing any more, he began to talk about studying, about life, about what kind of life a person would live later on. He spoke very seriously, and he was also somewhat stirred up, and he used almost the whole of the rest of the lesson. The whole class was very quiet. The sentence I remember most clearly is this one: "Studying is a way out." He talked about what would happen if you did not study, and what would happen if you kept studying. Where we lived, the population was dense. It was river valleys, mountains and hills, and there was very little flat farmland — much of the land was terraced fields. An ordinary family was allotted not much land, and relying only on farming the land, it was hard to maintain a living. For a child from the countryside, if he did not go on studying, and had no money and no connections, it was very hard to leave the countryside and find a formal, stable job. If he kept studying all the way through and got into a university, he would have a chance to study and work in a city; if he got into a very good university, he might even enter a government department, a university, or a research institute. Before that, no one had ever connected studying with later life and explained it to me. My parents had never told me what connection there was between studying and what kind of life I would live later, or what kind of work I would do. That lesson had not yet ended when I already had a feeling inside: I really should study properly. From the next day, my state in class changed. Before, I also sat in the classroom and listened, but I had never thought that I myself had to learn it properly. The texts that had to be memorised, I often did not memorise before; from then on, I began to memorise them. In mathematics lessons, I listened carefully, and understood it bit by bit. In about one term, I went from among the last few to the middle of the class. That person whose name had to wait until the very end to be called when the papers were handed out — his name began to appear in the middle. It was also in fourth grade that I became the hygiene monitor. In our school, that was the pupil put in charge of the class's cleaning. Our classroom had a cement floor, and in many places the surface had peeled and the sand showed through. The class had five groups, and from Monday to Friday they took turns cleaning. Our group always cleaned the best, mainly because I did the most. The teacher put me in charge of the whole class's hygiene. After school I stayed behind, waited until each group had finished cleaning, and then checked, and I was usually the last to leave. Later, the teacher gave me the classroom key. The key was threaded on a string and hung around my neck. In the afternoon I was the last to lock the door, and the next morning I arrived early to open it. Sometimes, when I arrived, there were already classmates standing at the door waiting for me. That key hung around my neck for a time. It was only a classroom key, on a string, but it had not been there before that lesson, and neither had anything else that came with that term: not the new place of my name when the papers were handed out, not the checking of the cleaning after everyone else had gone, not the early mornings at a locked door with classmates already waiting. All of it started from an ordinary music lesson, on a day when we sang the song once, as usual, and then a teacher who was not even mainly a music teacher stopped singing and talked, seriously, for almost a whole lesson about studying and about life. He did not single me out. He spoke to the whole class, and the whole class was quiet. I cannot remember most of what he said that day. What I kept was one sentence — "Studying is a way out." — and, from the next day, a different way of sitting in the same classroom, doing the same lessons, in the same seat as before. — Mufan From Mufan's memoir *At Fifty, I Came to the Wu River* — Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HMFM99H8