Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
Almost every teacher-in-charge couldn’t escape the fate of being “badmouthed” and “mocked” by their students. Old Pan was of course no exception as she had taught at No. 60 High School for many years. In terms of teaching ability, there were actually a lot of teachers who were better than Old Pan. However, teaching ability in fact wasn’t everything for a teacher-in-charge, otherwise why was Old Pan considered a gold medal teacher and a teaching pioneer at No. 60 High School?
Headmaster Chen also wasn’t a fool and knew that it was useless for a teacher-in-charge to just be able to teach.
High school was a time of confusion, and was also the chuuni period. Many students would let loose at this stage, which in general terms was also referred to as “rebellion.”
If you didn’t receive proper psychological guidance at this stage, it could actually have a huge impact on your life later on. Children at the rebellious stage needed to be shown care and to be guided toward establishing the correct three views; Headmaster Chen emphasized this repeatedly at the school general assembly every year.
So teaching ability, while important, wasn’t the key criterion when the school put together list of teachers-in-charge every year; as long as they could pass the annual municipal qualification exam, that was enough.
But there were some former students who hadn’t been happy with Old Pan. Every time she saw one batch of students off, there would be anonymous posts online saying that Old Pan and the school headmaster had made a deal behind the scenes… Actually, these comments popped up every year, but they were so few that they were almost negligible. However, given how long Old Pan had been teaching at No. 60 High School, there was quite an impressive number of posts about her.
Usually, what freshmen liked to do most was to search the Internet for news on the schools and teachers – there were a lot of posts “badmouthing” Old Pan on the Internet, and what they said seemed like they could be true…
Therefore, at the beginning of the semester, many people actually didn’t have a very good impression of Old Pan; they thought that she was especially rigid and unapproachable.
But since the “Shuigou Sect” incident last time, everyone’s impression of Old Pan had greatly improved, and a lot of people now realized that she was in fact a very laid-back person who didn’t care about online gossip.
And come to think of it, the online posts badmouthing Old Pan online were all anonymous. This just showed that they were a little dubious about the truth of what they were saying. If everything was completely true and they hated Old Pan to the bone, wouldn’t it have been better to denounce her under their real names?
But the truth was that after so many years of teaching, Old Pan, to use an exaggeration, had seen more students than she had eaten rice, so she in fact had long stopped caring.
Since it was the midterm exams just then, Old Pan miraculously didn’t ring up their parents, and only gave Super Chen and Dopey Guo a verbal warning. She then took their cell phones away, and they needed to rank in the top five in class before they could get them back.
For one thing, she was worried that calling their parents would affect their attitude toward the exams. For another, this was one of her teaching tricks: the students would be used to her calling their parents, then suddenly one day she wouldn’t ring them…
This would make people feel that Old Pan had discovered her conscience!
In fact, Wang Ling didn’t think that getting into the top five could be considered hard. After all, there were only fifteen people in total in the class!
The most important thing was that there actually wasn’t a huge disparity between first and last place in Grade One, Class Three. Everyone was an elite, so what top students strove for in exams wasn’t better grades but to make fewer mistakes than anyone else.
…
During the afternoon self-study at noon, the PE teacher Ye Han specially came by the class to look for Wang Ling. In fact, Wang Ling had noticed Teacher Ye’s figure at the classroom door during the morning self-study, but Teacher Ye hadn’t dared come in then – that was because the air around Teacher Pan had been too strong, like a Buddha standing guard on the dais in the front, which had cowed and flustered Teacher Ye a little.
Wang Ling could more or less guess what Teacher Ye was here for; he reckoned that there had probably been changes in the district sports meet.
Wang Ling would be competing in a total of three events: the relay, the medicine ball and the battle of soul pets.
Although the battle of soul pets was also an event in the district sports meet, it was actually more for entertainment and a way of ushering in good luck…
At the classroom door, Teacher Ye held a timetable in his hand which contained the sequence of events as decided by the district earlier. It detailed the time of each major event in the competition, but there was a clash with two of them: the medicine ball and the battle of soul pets would be happening at the same time.
No. 60 High School had already confirmed that their spirit beast participant this time would be Loopy Toad, and this couldn’t be changed halfway. But Wang Ling had to participate in the medicine ball event, so Teacher Ye had a bit of a headache. “Since this is the situation… Student Wang Ling, I’m here to ask if you know some friend or other who can take your place in the battle of soul pets.”
The event score allocated to the battle of soul pets was low, so there was no way Teacher Ye would let Wang Ling give up the higher-scored medicine ball event.
So in order not to affect the flow of the main competition, they could only find someone to replace Wang Ling and direct Loopy Toad in battle so that they could get scores in both events.
The district had arranged the flow of events in such a way so that there basically wouldn’t be any clashes with the main events. Actually, the main issue was that No. 60 High School didn’t have many athletes participating… Many of the contestants were like “Ling Zhenren” and taking part in multiple events, so there was no way to accommodate all of them.
Now that No. 60 High School was in the process of being promoted from a regular high school to a key city high school in Songhai city, its ranking in the district sports meet this time was clearly critical.
Old Pan was relatively more relaxed during the afternoon self-study since the students had already finished two exams in the morning and the afternoon was usually free time for them. Everyone in class clearly heard what Teacher Ye said to Wang Ling at the door.
When he heard that there was a clash in times, Dopey Guo got extremely excited and rushed out of the classroom. “Teacher, teacher! I can find someone to replace Wang Ling in the battle of soul pets!”
“You? Can you really…” Teacher Ye eyed Dopey Guo.
Super Chen slowly walked out of the classroom and chimed in, “Teacher Ye, you don’t get it, Dopey Guo can do it…”
Was there anyone in class now who didn’t know about Dopey Guo’s uncles who were everywhere?
Dopey Guo: “I have a little uncle who’s actually not that much older than me – he’s a pet trainer! He’s pretty awesome!”
Teacher Ye sweated a bit. “Pet trainer? Does he need to be paid… we don’t have much funds. The best would be if he’ll do it because you’re friends, otherwise we can’t afford to hire him.”
Dopey Guo: “You don’t need to pay him. His surname is Wei; also, Loopy Toad knows him. I heard that they get along quite well.”
Wang Ling knew then that Dopey Guo was recommending Wei Zhi…
In fact, even if Dopey Guo hadn’t said anything, the first person that had come to Wang Ling’s mind had also been Wei Zhi.
Teacher Ye tsked. “Isn’t your surname Guo? Why is your uncle’s surname Wei?”
Dopey Guo was surprised. “Who says your uncles have to be your parents’ brothers… My uncles all have different surnames, any one that you can think of!”
Teacher Ye: “…”
