When I heard him say that, I felt really embarrassed: "I'm sorry, teacher, we are causing you so much trouble."
"It's none of your business. I just suffer from insomnia."
"How can someone so young suffer from insomnia?" I always thought that insomnia was a symptom only experienced by people my mother was her age, and was a complication of menopausal syndrome.
He put his glasses back on and said, "It's an old problem."
After recalling that I felt that he seemed to have some hidden illness in the car, I also wanted to care about him. After all, he did such a big favor for me and Bai Lin. I walked around to the sofa and sat down next to him: "Teacher, let me tell you, my mother has a folk remedy that is very effective in treating insomnia. It is said that mash an onion, put it in a bottle and seal it, and put it next to your pillow and smell it before going to bed every night." As I told him, I took a deep breath and sniffed the smell hard, and synchronized the picture and sound, "I guarantee that your illness will be cured!"
He looked at me, suddenly shook his head and smiled, "Xue Tong, you are really interesting."
I was stunned.
This was the first time I heard Mu Chenghe call me that, except for the time when he gave me the nickname Astro Boy as a prank.
At that moment, Mu Chenghe suddenly pronounced the name "Xue Tong" in a clear and loud voice, just like the pronunciation of other people, but it seemed different. It didn't sound like Bai Lin, Song Qiqi, a certain teacher, or my mother. In short, it was very strange, and it felt different from the feeling when anyone in the world called my name.
I coughed deliberately and turned my face away.
"If you have any other places..." I paused, "If there are any other places that are not good, you can also tell me. My mother has a lot of folk remedies and is famous far and wide."
He actually answered seriously: "Okay, I'll tell you when I think of it."
I frowned, and was about to take another look at this man whose appearance was so different from mine, when he suddenly said, "Oh, there's something I forgot to tell you."
"What's the matter?" My heart skipped a beat. Based on my assessment of his character, it was definitely not a good thing.
"Send me a trill."
Hey, just for this, I feel relieved.
"Hasn't it been sent?" I asked.
"Send it again," he said.
Now this matter is as simple as a chick learning to eat rice. So I did it again.
He then ordered: "Add it to the word."
"What word?"
"Anything that can play will do."
I picked the one I was most familiar with, "Russia". As soon as I said "Россия", I saw an expression of satisfaction on his face.
A long-lost smile appeared on Mu Chenghe's lips again, and even his glasses couldn't hide his annoying look.
He said: "That's the problem. You can't add a note to a word just because you know how to pronounce it. Instead, you should weaken it."
I am confused.
When I don't know how to do it, you ask me to push hard, and when I do know how to do it, you ask me to push gently. What do you want me to do
He continued, "So no matter what pronunciation, we must pay attention to the moderation. For example, in Chinese, there are retroflex consonants. If a person's retroflex consonant is particularly strong when speaking, what would we say to him?"
"Big tongue." I answered without hesitation.
"By the way, that's how your Russian accent sounds now."
“…” I have a thick tongue
Mu Chenghe said earnestly: "Pride is the enemy of progress. My friend, you still have a long way to go. Work hard."
At this moment, I finally understood why I felt that he was calling my name differently just now, because is there any other creature on this earth who has such a grudge against me as Mu Chenghe
While I was getting angry, he said, "Go to bed quickly. It's almost dawn. I'll call you when the time comes."
In the morning, Mu Chenghe fulfilled his promise and personally drove Bai Lin and me back to school.
When I got off the car, I turned around to close the door, and Bai Lin bowed and thanked him. He was smiling and energetic, and you couldn't tell that he hadn't slept all night. The only thing that could reveal the secret was the light blue dark circles under his eyes.
Bai Lin looked at Mu Chenghe's car going away and sighed, "How handsome! An ordinary SUV seems to be of a higher class when he drives it."
"What SUV?" I wondered.
"It's the SUV he drives. It was originally a common model, but it becomes low-key, practical and classic with him. It's nothing like the cars my dad likes. The only purpose of driving them is to show that he is a newly rich nouveau riche."
Bai Lin’s dad is really cute.
On the day of freshman registration, Bai Lin's father drove a Hummer to pick her up. I didn't know what a Hummer was before that. I saw an armored off-road vehicle from a distance, parked at the gate of the girls' dormitory, forcing everyone entering and leaving to walk sideways like a crab. It also attracted many people's attention. So on the first day, Bai Lin made the headlines of the Foreign Languages College and became the rich girl that all the students in the department talked about.
But this was not the only reason that made Bai Lin depressed. She later complained, "If the Hummer was really his, I would have accepted it. He rented it from a car dealership before he drove it."
"No way." The three of us exclaimed in unison.
"My dad said that city people like to discriminate against country people. If we country people drive a Hummer to study, you won't dare to bully me. So he pretended to be rich and went to rent a car. Do you think I am wronged?"
After hearing this, Song Qiqi, Zhao Xiaotang and I looked at each other and remained silent.
It is indeed a bit unfair. But it is unfair to us, who are described as bullies who bully the weak.
In fact, Bai Lin is not a rich girl, but she is definitely not a country girl. Her hometown is a county town near City B, and her father is a well-known township entrepreneur in the local area. He is not as rich as the rich, but he is better than the poor.
Apart from the pocket money he gets every month, which is many times more than ours, there is nothing special about Bai Lin.
But the more this happened, the more mysterious she became to others.
These rumors aroused the curiosity of many people of the opposite sex, so many boys from the dormitory took the initiative to find us for socializing during my freshman year. At the end of the first semester before Christmas, at least five or six boys called her to ask her out.
Later, a girl who had contacts with Bai Lin's family suddenly jumped out to reveal the secret, saying that her father borrowed a Hummer to come to the college to show off his wealth.
Bai Lin, who is usually very aggressive, did not argue with the girl this time.
Bai Lin sighed and said, "Oh, I should have told that old man to stop doing this. Now he has ruined my reputation. I'm so sad." But there was no trace of sadness in her tone.
No matter how many boys followed the rumors, there was one person who was as attentive to Bai Lin as ever. This person was Senior Brother Li from the Physics Department. So even though Bai Lin was not interested in him at all, we still had a good impression of him.
Bai Lin and I ran back to the dormitory to get books and then rushed to the classroom. When we walked downstairs to the dormitory, we saw the remains of thermos and mineral water bottles on the ground, and then we realized that what we did yesterday was quite intense. Fortunately, the girls' dormitory had a curfew, and no one dared to hang around outside, so no one was hurt.
Later I learned from others that our girls' dormitory was relatively good. Some of the boys' dormitories on the other side of the river even took down their windows and threw them away, so the school urgently dealt with a group of people.
When I was a freshman, I had all kinds of orientation. It was nothing more than saying that if I violated something, I would not be able to graduate, I would not be able to get my degree certificate, etc. Those cumbersome rules were printed into a booklet by the school and distributed to all freshmen. It looked much thicker than Premier Wen’s annual government work report, which made me wonder if I could really graduate successfully
So, I imagined college life to be a journey to the West to obtain Buddhist scriptures, and everything would be fine once I could get through those 81 tribulations.
With the help of Mu Chenghe, we escaped again.
Today happens to be the day with the heaviest learning workload.
The classes in the morning and afternoon are full. After the intensive reading in the first and second periods, there is the audio-visual and listening class.
Because we had been working hard all night, Bai Lin and I could no longer bear to put on our headphones and sat in the cubicle, one in front of the other, to avoid the teacher who was dozing off.
Teacher Wu, who taught us audio-visual, was a beautiful lady who had studied abroad a few years ago. Her favorite thing to do when teaching audio-visual was to take an unpopular British or American movie and project it. She would often press pause without warning, and then randomly call someone up to ask what the character in the movie said last. If someone stuttered and couldn't say anything, Teacher Wu would make a cold mark on the grade book and then say, "Deduct five points from your usual grades."
At first we thought it was fresh and exciting, but after a while it became boring and made people panic.
Bai Lin is even more amazing.
Usually, a movie plus the time to answer questions would take up four or five classes for Teacher Wu. Bai Lin would simply download the movie from the Internet, watch it with gusto, and then download the script and read it in class.
Although Song Qiqi always ranks first in her grades, her listening is her weak point.
She also read those scripts, but unlike us, she memorized them in her spare time after reading them. Their motivations were similar, but their diligence was truly astonishing.
This is the difference between good students and bad students.
I have always aspired to be a good student, but my perseverance is lacking.
Despite this, I think I can be a good teacher.
The sign of the Foreign Languages Department of University A is very popular, so as long as a small advertisement is posted outside, many parents will call to look for English tutors.
Song Qiqi and I are also working together as part-time tutors.
Basically, there are two peak periods in the tutoring market: one is before the start of primary and secondary school; the other is when the end of the semester is approaching. The market price is generally 25 yuan per hour, and the fee increases or decreases with the grade of the child.
The child I tutored was called Peng Yu. He had just passed the junior high school entrance exam and was in the first year of high school. During the summer vacation, his mother was worried that his English would lag behind in the high school with many strong competitors. She said that his grammar knowledge was particularly poor, so she asked me to tutor him for two months, three times a week, about three hours each time.
The university is relatively encouraging for students to work as part-time tutors, but it emphasizes safety issues and warns students not to go to each other's homes casually. But Peng Yu was introduced by a colleague of my mother, so I didn't have any concerns.
After school started in September, Peng Yu’s mother said that their new first-year high school class teacher was also an English teacher, and asked the children to go to her home for extra lessons, so she tactfully ended the cooperation.
I quite understand that teachers in school are of utmost importance, especially the class teacher.
Later, I was single for two months and still couldn't find a suitable one.
It was not until Friday that Peng Yu called me himself and said that he was not used to having too many people taking tutoring classes at his teacher's place and still hoped that I would take lessons with him.
I thought about it and agreed to his request. The only requirement was that I could only take a class with him once a week. This way, it was easier than working in a fast food restaurant like Xiao Bai and his friends, and it could at least ease the financial pressure on the family.
Peng Yu is a very smart child, white and chubby. He is at the age of growing up, and sometimes it seems that he has grown several centimeters taller in a week.
The first time I saw him, I felt that he was only a little taller than me. Now, less than half a year has passed, and he has grown a lot taller.
He often looked down on me: "Teacher Xue, have you ever practiced bone shrinking skills?"
"Go, go, go." I said, "Don't be disrespectful, I am your teacher."
I have always been small, and I would describe myself in some wicked words, that is, I seem to have never grown after my teenage years. But Bai Lin and the others laughed at me, and even this little brat came to join in the fun.