Chapter 36: Hiding Her Head Like an Ostrich
This was probably the most disheartening thing for Tong Yao.
Am I… being disliked? Or hated?
Or, is it just that the young girl feels she did poorly on the exam and is too embarrassed to see me?
Tong Yao didn’t actually care much about grades; she cared about attitude. A temporary grade doesn’t determine one’s life trajectory, but a person with a good attitude will always succeed one day.
She knew Ruan Ruan was a very hardworking child, and that was enough.
Late at night, Tong Yao slept soundly. In the girls’ dormitory across the street, Ruan Xi was still battling insomnia.
She closed her eyes, but felt no sleepiness. The blow from the exam hit her all at once, accompanied by the anxiety of being unable to sleep. She finally couldn’t help but shed tears.
She really wanted to do well on an exam just once.
In the morning, math was the final battlefield.
Before entering the exam room, Ruan Xi splashed cold water on her face in the restroom. She was terrified that her mind would be muddled. She held the cold water to her eyes, and when she entered the exam room, her heart was like a bouncing ball dropped from the top of a building, rising and falling violently.
Her identity as a student was her last resort.
Tong Yao rested her chin on her hand, sitting quietly at the front.
At ten o’clock, this test of the learning outcomes from the past month and a half finally came to an end.
Most students stretched in relief, letting out a cathartic roar.
Ruan Xi silently walked to the back, picked up her schoolbag, and headed to the Class 7 classroom.
In the classroom, Li Hanqiang was directing the students to clean up and restore the desks and chairs to their original positions. When he saw a student with good grades, he would casually ask, “How did you do?” The person being asked would scratch their head and finally say, “It was okay, I guess?”
It would take two or three days to grade the papers and post the results.
Ruan Xi opened a book but couldn’t read a single word.
Reading only reminded her of how stupid her mistakes on the exam were.
I did really poorly this time, didn’t I?
Is there any chance of a miracle?
Exams were strange. When you felt you did well, you often didn’t. When you felt you did terribly, it wasn’t necessarily that bad.
Maybe everyone did poorly.
Ruan Xi comforted herself this way.
Only then could she get through these few days.
**
Grading papers was a very troublesome job.
Grading for the monthly exam didn’t require the same level of detail as the midterms or finals. Generally, if a major question was wrong, the teacher would deduct points as they saw fit. Some partial credit for steps wouldn’t be given because there wasn’t time to look carefully. But Tong Yao couldn’t bear it and always wanted to find some points to add, to deduct as little as possible.
This made her grading much slower, requiring her to work overtime at night.
No. 1 High School used an assembly-line grading system, where the papers were scanned directly into the computer, and the teachers divided the work of grading. Tong Yao would sometimes see some elegant handwriting and wonder if it was Ruan Ruan’s paper. But girls’ handwriting was mostly similar, many of them having practiced from the same copybook—neat, small, and delicate. She couldn’t tell them apart.
Many people got the twentieth question wrong. She had to take note of that and explain it in class.
Day and night passed. No. 1 High, in its pursuit of efficiency, sent the report card files to the public email in two days. It was the long break. Tong Yao opened her computer, made herself a cup of coffee, and hesitated before slowly moving the mouse and downloading the file.
Name, class, scores for each subject, class ranking, grade ranking—all arranged neatly, giving her the illusion of a military roll call in ancient times.
First in Class 7, Ji Chen, 674, sixteenth in the grade.
Full marks in math. Second place, Yin Jiali, 48th in the grade, 145 in math.
She continued to scroll down, her heart sinking with each scroll.
45th place, Ruan Xi, total score 560, 360th in the grade.
The young girl’s score was much higher than last time, but it was also an indisputable fact that most subjects in this exam were on the easier side. The total score didn’t mean much. At No. 1 High, the ranking was the most weighty number.
The young girl’s math score was 118.
Not high, because the average math score for Class 7 was 122.4, the highest among the parallel classes. To put it bluntly, the young girl hadn’t done well. Her math performance hadn’t reached the level she felt it should have.
That child will be very sad when she finds out she didn’t do well, won’t she?
Tong Yao leaned back and looked at the potted plant by the window. The small leaves grew vigorously toward the sun, the stem tilted, but it couldn’t resist a person’s casual touch.
When I see that child again, I should comfort and encourage her, right? No matter what, she has improved. The heavens may not reward diligence, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give the young girl a little reward.
“Sister Yao Yao!”
A girl called out “reporting” at the door and rushed straight toward Tong Yao.
“What’s wrong?” Tong Yao came back to her senses and looked up to see Xu Yin.
“Are the scores out?” Xu Yin stuck out the tip of her tongue and blinked. “Old Lu said he knows the scores but won’t tell us. Can you help us check, Sister Yao Yao? I want to go back and show off, keep them in suspense.”
Only those students who were close to the teachers and confident in their results dared to come to the office to check their scores.
“You…” Tong Yao chuckled. Old Lu was the physics teacher for Class 4 and Class 7. This nickname was one he had personally approved of. “They’ve all been sent to be printed. They’ll be announced this afternoon. But if you want to see, I can help you check.”
“Thank you, Sister Yao Yao~”
The office was lively during the long break.
Li Hanqiang walked into the office, his spirits high. He had no reason not to be happy. Class 7 was first among the parallel classes in Chinese, math, English, and physics, leaving Class 8, which had done well in the entrance test, in the dust. He was now walking with a festive air.
“Teacher Tong, your math teaching is excellent!” he said with a cheerful smile. “Ji Chen also did well. The parallel classes finally have someone in the top 20 of the grade.”
“Ha… you’re too kind,” Tong Yao said with a dry laugh, feeling a little embarrassed by the praise. “Ji Chen’s success is also thanks to you. A great teacher produces a great student.”
Her heart was actually full of complaints.
Li Hanqiang, using his authority as the homeroom teacher, always assigned extra reading and Chinese homework, and in class, he would intimidate the students into not doing other subjects’ homework—none of this was wrong, but the problem was that other classes didn’t do this. Class 7’s previous average math performance was also due to the large amount of Chinese homework during the summer make-up classes.
In the midst of their conversation, she quickly found the file for Class 4.
Class 4 was second in average score among the science classes, and their math ranking had risen from third at the beginning of the school year to second.
She let out a sigh of relief. Her teaching skills had been proven, right?
The mouse scrolled. On the report card, the first name was Xu Yin, 685, third in the grade.
“That’s great,” Tong Yao smiled. “Full marks in math.”
Xu Yin also seemed a little surprised. After counting her scores for each subject, her eyes lit up and her eyebrows curved.
“Does Sister Yao Yao have a reward for me?”
Tong Yao raised an eyebrow. She did know that many teachers would give students snacks. It would be stingy of her not to give some kind of reward. She thought for a moment and asked, “What do you want?”
Xu Yin looked at her, and without any warning, her face suddenly turned red.
She turned to the side and said shyly, “I… I’ll think about it.”
“Think quickly,” Tong Yao’s lips curled. “The offer expires.”
“Hey? Give me more time!”
**
“The scores are out.” This news spread like wildfire.
No. 1 High was efficient at grading, but after the teachers knew the scores, they lost interest. Printing a report card could take a whole afternoon, and in the end, it would most likely be pawned off on some poor soul.
“I’m going to check the scores,” Ji Chen couldn’t sit still and said in class. “This is killing me.”
“Damn, I don’t dare to go find Labor Reform,” a boy said with a long face. “I definitely bombed it.”
“Why find Labor Reform? Go find Teacher Tong!”
“I did poorly in math. I’m too embarrassed to go…”
“Everyone’s going to check their scores?” Jiang Yiming slammed the table and stood up. “I’m going too.”
Xu Hao clapped. “Brave warrior, help me check mine.”
Ruan Xi was lying on her desk. On her scratch paper were her estimated scores, erased and rewritten.
She knew without looking that she had done very poorly. Even if she had improved, it was just from “exceptionally poor” to “relatively poor.”
She was sad because she felt she could have done much better.
“Jiang Yiming…” she called out in a small voice.
The girl he had a crush on was calling him. The boy was as energized as if he had been injected with chicken blood, just short of turning into a Super Saiyan.
“Help me check my score,” Ruan Xi paused. “If… it’s very bad, then don’t tell me.”
After hearing this, Jiang Yiming nodded with a great sense of mission.
Before class started, Jiang Yiming returned.
“I bombed it,” the boy slammed the table. “You too, Xu Hao. Ruan Xi, you… uh…”
After a long moment, the boy squeezed out a few words:
“You improved.”
Ruan Xi understood. She smiled, a smile that made Jiang Yiming a little scared.
“Seriously, you didn’t do that badly…”
“Jiang Yiming, can I borrow your phone?” Ruan Xi said softly. “I need to make a call.”
