355: Chapter 355 Birds and Mountains (Part 2)

The moment those two lines of text appeared on the big screen, the temperature inside the main hall of the Olympic Sports Center seemed to drop by two degrees.

The commotion in the student section on the floor continued, but the reaction in the teaching and research section was the exact opposite.

Hundreds of senior Chinese teachers stared at the question on the screen; everyone's expression was different, but the emotions churning deep in their eyes were remarkably consistent.

It was a scar.

Zhang Chaowei stared at the words "A bird flies over a towering snow-capped mountain," his fingers unconsciously tightening around his fountain pen.

Memories of that summer five years ago were suddenly pulled from a sealed cabinet, every detail becoming razor-sharp.

On the day of the grading, he sat at his station in the provincial grading center and graded continuously for four and a half hours starting from eight in the morning.

Answer sheet after answer sheet rolled across the screen in front of him.

Seven out of ten papers were writing about the dialectical relationship between "relying on external forces and self-struggle," while three were writing about "courage and conviction."

A thousand people with one face.

By the afternoon, the average score for the entire grading group had slid from an initial forty-three points all the way down to thirty-six.

The group leader had to call a halt halfway through, pulling all the grading teachers into a meeting room to recalibrate the scoring standards.

In the meeting room that day, the argument lasted for two full hours.

Half of the people believed the students were not at fault, that the question setter's intent was too obscure.

The expressions "uplifted by strong winds" and "solitary courage of flesh and blood" in the materials were highly misleading.

They led the vast majority of candidates toward the traditional dialectical routine of "external versus internal factors."

The other half believed the question setter's original intent was to test the depth of critical thinking.

The fact that students had strayed from the topic on such a large scale precisely exposed the systematic destruction of independent thinking skills by long-term exam-oriented training.

Zhang Chaowei still remembered what the first sentence of the internal summary report issued by the provincial teaching and research group after the meeting said.

"The core conception of this question is not about the wind, not about the bird, but about the mountain."

He looked at the seventeen-year-old boy on stage, and a certain spot in his heart suddenly tightened.

In the rows of seats further back in the teaching and research section, similar memories were playing back simultaneously in the minds of many teachers.

Zhou Min pushed up her glasses; five years ago, she was still a novice head teacher leading her first graduating class.

On the day the scores came out, a girl in her class whose essays usually never fell below forty-five points got a twenty-nine, and she cried in the office for an entire class period.

To this day, she didn't know how to explain it to that girl.

In the guest seats closest to the stage, Shen Qingqiu sat in the second row by the aisle.

Her hands were folded over her knees, her knuckles white with unconscious effort.

When that question came out five years ago, she had just finished leading her first graduating class.

During the summer break after the scores were released, she locked herself in her office and tried to write a perfect model essay under timed exam conditions to serve as a reference for the next class of students.

She spent two full days grinding it out and revised it seven times before finally showing it to the Head of the Teaching and Research Group.

The other party only gave one comment:

"The angle is good, but it still hasn't jumped out of the circle of the materials."

After that, every year when she led students through specialized training, she would deliberately avoid this question.

It wasn't that she didn't dare to teach it, but that she herself hadn't found a sufficiently brilliant way to break the question.

Now, this question had been brought onto the big screen of the Olympic Sports Center.

And the person standing on the stage was her student.

Shen Qingqiu's gaze passed through the gaps between the heads in the front row and landed on Lin Que.

That white shirt on stage looked almost blindingly clean under the spotlight.

She looked at that profile, which was composed in a way that didn't seem like a seventeen-year-old, and her chest tightened repeatedly.

She heard all the noise around her.

The students' excitement, the teachers' concerns—all these voices churned together like a tightening whirlpool.

At the center of the whirlpool was her student.

She clenched her fingers, her gaze full of worry.

On stage.

Lin Que stood facing the big screen for three seconds.

He didn't rush to pick up the marker, but instead turned around and tapped the whiteboard heavily with the end of the pen.

Thump, thump, thump.

The three dull thuds, amplified by the microphone, struck everyone's chest in the venue.

All the noise was cut off at the third strike.

Lin Que spoke; his voice wasn't loud, but every word was articulated with extreme firmness.

"Five years ago, the provincial average for the essay was thirty-nine points.

The teachers present should be even clearer than the students about how shocking that number is."

His gaze swept across the teaching and research section, not lingering too long on any one person's face.

"But have you ever wondered why such a large-scale defeat occurred?"

No one in the stadium responded.

"It wasn't because that year's students were of poor quality."

Lin Que raised the marker and quickly wrote two phrases on the whiteboard:

Uplifted by Strong Winds, Solitary Courage of Flesh and Blood.

"It was because this question is a typical binary opposition trap."

He drew a horizontal line between the two phrases and then drew a large 'X' above the line.

"Back then, people strayed from the topic mostly because they were either praising the wind or cursing the wind."

When these words landed, in the first row of the teaching and research section, Zhang Chaowei's right hand slapped his thigh hard.

The loud 'smack' gave Zhou Min, who was next to him, a start.

She turned her head to look at Zhang Chaowei, this Head of the Teaching and Research Group who had taught Chinese for twenty-three years and usually wore a stern expression.

At this moment, his eyes were shining, his pupils reflecting the light from the whiteboard on stage.

He remembered that top-secret summary report.

"The core conception of this question lies in the mountain, not the wind, and certainly not the bird."

The conclusion that the provincial grading group had spent a full week of internal review to extract back then—

This seventeen-year-old kid on stage had hit the nail on the head with a single sentence.

Zhang Chaowei's hand was still pressed against his thigh, the force of his fingertips so great that he pressed wrinkles into the fabric of his suit trousers.

Lin Que didn't give anyone time to digest.

He flipped the whiteboard over and wrote two lines of text vertically on the left side of the blank surface.

Negative Examples:

[Traveling with the Wind.]

[Flying Against the Wind.]

"The first title takes the stance that the wind is a good thing. The second title takes the stance that the wind is a bad thing."

He drew a downward arrow next to each of the two titles.

"The two directions look completely opposite, but in essence, they are doing the same thing.

They are both discussing the wind. And once you start discussing the wind, you have already fallen into the question setter's pocket."

He switched the marker to his left hand and wrote two new lines of text side-by-side on the right side of the whiteboard.

Revisions:

[The Wind is Merely the Breathing of the High Mountain.]

[The Bird that Does Not Use the Wind Cannot Fly Over the Mountain of Social Classes.]

...