Turning a bad kid into an officer
A Szechuanese boy named Kan Chung-kan was very mischievous. If he was not cutting girls' skirts, he would be deflating bicycle tires or tearing up classmates' notebooks. He was a real headache for everyone. Later on, Wang Tung-ling looked into the reasons, and found out that his mischief was a result of his feelings of inferiority because he could not speak Mandarin well.
So Wang Tung-ling took a two-pronged approach to the problem. On the one hand, he gave the boy the enviable position of student patrol officer. So naturally, he had to behave in an exemplary way. On the other hand, he talked to the Chinese teacher Kung Ching-hsiang to raise Kan Chung-kan's grades and let him take part in the school's speech competition. He even talked things over with all the teachers who served as judges to give first place to this "rascal" of the school to increase his sense of honor. Thus, he began to feel he was a good student and stopped playing tricks on his classmates.
It was not merely students who had language problems; teachers had similar difficulties too.
Wang Tung-ling, who came from Shandong, had graduated from the department of history at Beijing's Teachers' University. He thought his Mandarin was passable compared to some of his colleagues. But in the first exam he administered, he came across a blank test. That student wrote on the answer paper: "I am sorry, teacher. It's not that you are not a good teacher; it's just that I can't understand what you say. So I handed in a blank paper."
Later on, in his geography class Wang Tung-ling dispensed with books and lecturing; instead, he resorted to drawing maps on the blackboard, using different colors of chalk to represent the mountains, rivers, transportation networks and products of every province. Then he would wipe them off and ask his students to draw them again. Thus, he not only caught the students' attention but also increased the effectiveness of his teaching. As a result, everyone got 100s on their tests.
"Usually, teachers with distinct provincial accents would try their best to speak slowly and teach carefully. Sometimes they even relied on acting!" says Tsao Yung-fa. Sometimes at the school's reunions, he imitates some teachers' Cantonese accents and meets with a great wave of delighted applause.
The students' major activity during days off was watching movies. But they couldn't simply watch and forget, because probably the topic of the following week's composition would be their opinions on the film they had seen.
Behind these good teachers stood their supportive principal. Before City High's principal Wang Jui-nien came to Taiwan, he was a member of the national assembly, as well as curator of Guiyang's Public Education Center. He had considered an opening for secretary-general in the Keelung City government, but chose instead to commit himself to the cause of education.
Because many mainlander students came to Taiwan all alone, or had impoverished families to support, Wang Jui-nien ran his school in a manner not restricted to institutional conventions. He would try to accommodate everyone's needs. For example, Chi Hsi-chung's cousin Chi Tung-hsin had Wang You-ling as his homeroom teacher. Chi Tung-hsin was eager to look for a job to support his family, because of their dire situation. Two weeks after school began in his last year in high school, he asked to take three months off to attend a short course in telegraphy (after which he had the chance to go work on a fishing boat). Wang You-ling thought this to be a crucial undertaking for his student, so he asked the principal to make the decision. Wang Jui-nien answered casually, "It's okay. Tell him to come back to take part in the graduation exam." Later on, Chi Tung-hsin didn't come back in time for the graduation exam, so the school held a special make-up test for him.
Chiu Ching-yi, current director of the Taipei Representative Office in Singapore, was from the fourth graduating class of Keelung City High. While he was in school, he had to sell breakfast pastries to scrounge together tuition, because his family was very poor. Wang Jui-nien allowed him to stay at his home for half a year, and let him pay for his tuition on credit.
Many homeless students from the mainland did not go back to their dormitory after class, but would hang at the sides of their teachers, who were almost like older brothers to them. If they were not following Wang Tung-ling, who once won a medal at a martial arts competition in Qingdao, they would play basketball one-on-one with Wang You-ling. After they had a bite to eat together, they went free of charge to the supplementary school run by Kung Ching-hsiang (who taught English and mathematics there). Or perhaps they would develop photos in the darkroom which Wang Tung-ling had constructed himself. They wouldn't go back to their dormitories until very late. "At that time, the male teachers had to get students' 'permission' to get romantically involved with female teachers; otherwise, we would report on them," says Liang Wei-hsiung. Remembering the scene of that year, he can't help exuding an air of mischief.
This group of Mingchuan Middle School students may become little School brothers of City High alumni in the future, because the government intends to revive the system in which counties and cities run high schools. Keelung City High will have a chance to be reborn.
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