Chapter 2: The So-Called Stratification

When I was in my first year of high school, our class was assigned a math teacher in his thirties. He wore his hair parted to the side, had small eyes, and usually wore a cheerful smile. Yet, every time he smiled, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awkwardness and disharmony, for reasons I could never quite pinpoint. His surname was Fan, so behind his back, everyone called him “Old Fan.”

Old Fan was the head of the mathematics department. In class, he gave off an air of profound mystery, as though shrouded in mist and clouds. He rarely explained problems in detail; instead, as he liked to say, “I’m not teaching you how to solve the problems, but why you should solve them this way.”

To put it plainly, he would only outline a general approach to solving a problem, almost never breaking things down step by step. Most of the time, he devoted himself to extolling his educational philosophies.

Of all his ideas, the one he championed most passionately was differentiated instruction.

His persistence eventually paid off. After much effort, the school leadership agreed to his proposal for educational reform, and the system of differentiated instruction was implemented. In our second year, we became the very first group of students to experience this experiment.

Perhaps I should explain what differentiated instruction means. Essentially, students are divided into four levels—A, B, C, and D—according to their grades in each subject. For example, in a class of forty, the top ten students in a subject are in Level A, those ranked eleventh to twentieth in Level B, twenty-first to thirtieth in Level C, and the last ten in Level D.

There were eight classes in our grade. Classes 1 through 6 were science tracks, while 7 and 8 were arts tracks. The first four and the latter four classes each formed a group. During differentiated instruction, each group’s four classes became the A, B, C, and D classes, and students attended the class level corresponding to their own ranking.

Differentiation was applied to math, physics, chemistry, and English, while Chinese and other subjects were taught in our regular classes.

Does it all sound confusing? I felt the same—I was utterly overwhelmed, scrambling from one classroom to another with my books in hand.

The first time they divided us into levels, it was based on our overall class rankings. As I was in the top ten, I was temporarily assigned to the A class for each subject. After the monthly exams, the levels would be re-evaluated based on individual subject grades.

In other words, if I didn’t perform well on the monthly exam, I could easily be moved down to a lower-level class. Of course, if I did well, I could be promoted from a lower level to a higher one.

However, reality proved that moving up was as difficult as reaching the sky. Even if your grades improved, you needed the consent of the higher-level teachers, who were often reluctant to accept such transfers.

Why? Because the content taught in each level was different. Higher-level classes covered more advanced material and more knowledge points. Students transferring up from lower levels, having missed this content, found it extremely difficult to keep pace.

So, in addition to the intense academic pressure, we also faced the distress of being reclassified after every monthly exam. For teenagers, perhaps the most unbearable thing was the sense of failure that came with being demoted.

In such an environment, I truly felt as though I could hardly breathe…