Dear Flyheart: Thank you for your squeezing time to reply me. Speaking of problems of teaching system, I’d like to discuss more further with you. Hope guys here would join us. My niece, who lives with me, goes to local junior middle school. She studies very hard, but she always has a lot to complain about her teacher and school. I quite understand her and always try to encourage her to face the fact. She’s always complaining that sometimes she’s not able to hear the teacher very clearly, and her classmates are rather too naughty and noisy in the class. What can I explain? There are nearly sixty students in each class at the school, and how can the teacher have right mood to teach patiently and clearly? How can the teacher keep calm and pleasant passion when steps into the overcrowded classroom and confronts such noisy atmosphere? I have to admit that, the pressure which lays upon the junior middle school is rather suffocating, both to teachers and students. I’ve ever discussed this with one of my friends who’s in this middle school, he just shrugged: “What can we do for that? Nothing. We don’t have right to choose or reject any students. Such is compulsory education.” When my niece first came to live with me for her studies, I gladly thought I might teach her to play Pingpong and badminton, or if she like, some music knowledge, but we quickly find it really hard to carry out. Why? When she comes back from her school, she has no choice to do any amusement, “there are many, many homework to do! Ahhh!…How I hope I can play some games!” Then immediately devotes herself into those endless questions, class exercises. She always says: “every teacher thinks we have less homework, but put every subject together, we can’t at all have time to amuse ourselves, even to take a break!” I can say nothing. She is saying the truth. Maybe she could learn those skills like pingpong, painting, and music in school? Surely not, as I have ever mentioned, these “unimportant subjects” in middle school are only for show, the students would learn nothing, or very poor, about them. What a shame! She’s only grade two in junior school, but she stays up into late every night and gets up at five every morning. What makes me feel sad more, she says: I am not very clever, so I have to do very hard, or I will be fallen behind. She’s only a teenager, but she shoulders a really heavy pressure. Obviously, the most of students are like her. Can’t we come up with a real “quality education?” Do we have to train our students only by those similar but less-used and repeated exercises? Aren’t we still fostering countless book-worms? Such questions have been lingering in my mind. Best wishes. Constant Panpanpan.