My first “student”

 Haze

(In my home city, there are high demands and too much homework offering to students. So they usually need extra tutorials for their studies. As the fee to pay for the teachers is always high, many of them ask some older students for help. I have taught some of these younger people, and who I want to describe is the first one. So I call her as my first “student”.)

It was a rainy frozen morning in January, 2003. A little girl came to my house and knocked at the door lightly, and the sound was almost submerged by the heavy rain. When I opened the door, I just saw her carrying a drenched long-barreled umbrella and a half-wet bag. She said in a soft voice: “I am Lucy. Eh, I am your student.” She was kind Lucy, my first “student”.

It would have been a young look for a child of ten, and Lucy was already fourteen while I was just seventeen. She was not tall but very slim in a loose red cotton fabric. She had an intense and attractive face. Her hair was heavy and curled at the tips; her eyes were big with long, black lashes, and the color of her lips was just like that of fresh cherries. Suffering from the heavy rain, she was almost wet through. And the very first thing she did was to put on two plastic bags to wrap her soaked shoes so as not to smudge the floors with her grimy soles. What a tender and considerate girl!

At the very beginning, I found it difficult to communicate with her. When I asked her questions, she always lowered her head with her fingers wiggled and her face flushing red. Then I coaxed her to tell me what she most adored, and her eyes gradually became brighter and her voices louder. Although she was very shy at first not dare to see my eyes, when I got close to her, I saw her friendly smile and found what she said was very fascinating with a lot of fun, especially when she talked about her lovely dog pet “Charles”. I could really feel her kindness and frankness among those vivid stories.

In the “lessons”, I felt that she had made strenuous efforts to learn math. She was concentrated herself on every exercise I offered and listened carefully when I corrected her answers. She never asked whether it was proper to have a rest.  She never forgot doing the supplementary assignments after class. We occasionally chatted with each other, but only in the breaks.

Sometimes I might ask her to do some difficult questions. But she could answer most of them, which made me a little bit surprised. I had a sense that she was absolutely clever in memory and logic, because she always remembered what I had taught to her previously and her reaction to the questions about logic such as factorization was usually swift. However, her lack of self-confidence was frequently puzzled her. Many times she wrote down the right answer but just erased it at the next second. When she did the exercise, her habit, which she pulled her pencil against her lips with those two lips linked together, also showed that she was nervous and doubtful. Besides that, the moment she didn’t know how to answer, she would casually murmur to herself and her eyebrows were tightly closed to each other. I wondered if she was very nervous in her tests also. If so, I was afraid that it would be a big problem somehow. But it was a really interesting thing to see her unconscious “bad habits”. Now they are the most memorable thing every time I think about Lucy.

There are so many things to describe the little kind Lucy. In a word, I feel really lucky and pleased to make such lovely, kindhearted, thoughtful and diligent person as my good friend. Thus I would never forget my first “student”.

(02/10/2005)