Entrepreneurship: Broke School Rule at Age of 8

I was eight and in the third grade in Shanghai. It was still in the middle of culture revolution in China although groups of red guards already stopped coming to our neighborhood.

One day, school principal announced to offer English lessons to the students of 3rd grade and above. My first English teacher was a nice lady. I still vividly remember her the first day she walked into the classroom. We started learning the ABCs and basic grammar. Then "Long Live Our Great Leader Chairman Mao", "Long Live Chinese Communist Party", "Down With the Capitalists", and so on. For the whole one semester, all we learned were those useless political slogans. The only useful thing we learned from those lessons was how to use the English dictionary.

Before the end of the second semester, our homework assignment was to write an English essay. After many hours of thinking, all I could come up with was those useless political slogans. It was all we were taught. But it would be so boring to write those useless slogans.

Finally, I decided that I would write an essay, a real English essay. The title was "When are we going to learn something useful in English?" After spending more then 10 months of learning English, I still could not use English to travel or describe my daily life. Because of my limited vocabulary, I had to use the English dictionary to complete my essay.

After submitting the essay to my English teacher, I began to worry that I might be sent to the concentration camp. That night, I could not sleep at all. As a matter of fact, I was in horror. I thought the school would punish me for not writing an essay with political slogans. Surely I was the only one who dared to do that.

At next English lesson, my English teacher loudly called my name and asked me to stand up in the classroom. I thought she was going to say that I wrote a terrible essay and I was anti-revolutionary. My body was shaking as I slowly stood up. To my surprise, my English teacher said that I wrote such an excellent essay that she already recommended the essay to be sent to the regional district representing our school. She also said she already convinced the principal to allow her to add supplementary teaching materials to all her English classes.

At the end of the semester, I made an English speech at the end of school year celebration. It was from then, school decided to provide supplementary teaching materials to teach students with practical English in all classes. Our elementary school won many English contests in the years to come. Students were more interested in learning English.

At age of 8, I broke the rules and changed an elementary school's English teaching system for the better.