Vocational Skills Training, Day Two

This article was extracted from my early NetEase blog. NetEase Blog is no longer operating, but looking back, these words are still quite interesting, so I decided to move them over as intact as possible. Mainly as a record; after all, it was a long time ago, so the quality of the writing, images, and links may all be affected.

This article was originally published on July 28, 2009. I was about 20 years old then and was in university.

After a full day of study yesterday, everyone became much more familiar with each other, but there were also quite a few new classmates (probably because everyone thought it was good and recommended their friends or classmates to come). Even more exaggerated, in this gradually expanding group I actually saw two classmates from junior high, and there was another one who seemed to have been my primary school classmate too. Because he was the kind of person who only studied together with me for less than one or two years and then transferred away, I could only judge from the faint impression in my mind and his name.

The morning classes were all theory, with nothing especially unusual, but there were three sentences the teacher insisted we write down. Although they were a little philosophical and not exactly that wonderful, a teacher's order is hard to disobey, so I wrote them down. The three sentences were:

• How much you put in is how much you gain; how deeply you participate is how deeply you understand. This sentence seems like something anyone who has gone to school has more or less experienced. Saying it here was probably laying the groundwork for getting students more active in later classes (I did not think that at first, but then all afternoon, every time she asked someone to answer a question, she brought up this sentence… hehe, being a teacher these days is not that easy either).
• Learning a little more every day is the beginning of success.
• Doing a little more every day is the beginning of excellence. The last two can only count as one item, I guess. They do make some sense, but it seems like I saw them somewhere at school, and it was the kind I had been looking at for years…

The afternoon class was much more interesting than the morning one. Among many little stories, the teacher also introduced tomorrow's scheduled class in advance: etiquette. It sounds like an interesting class, but very often seeing the scenery is not as good as hearing about it…
In the middle, the teacher asked us to do an interesting "experiment": leave our seats and shake hands with every classmate. This move really worked wonders, immediately breaking the dull atmosphere. After a lively activity, everyone seemed to become much more familiar, but I could not understand what the teacher's purpose was. Then one sentence from the teacher shocked everyone: "I see that not a single person here shook hands correctly…" And she even left a suspense, saying that the specific etiquette for shaking hands would be revealed tomorrow (so dizzy). After that, she briefly introduced some other etiquette. Suddenly I discovered that many kinds of etiquette we usually encounter, such as smiling, shaking hands, answering the phone, and so on, all have a lot behind them. After being stirred up by her like this, Premier Zhou's image suddenly appeared in my mind, and I remembered a pile of wonderful stories about him. Respect!