I write this to recall the memories of my junior year of high school.

I mean, not that I really liked high school life. In contrast, my distaste for it increased dramatically in the last semester, the second semester of my high school life. I really suck at the tests and practically everybody is better than me. My two roommates are the first ten in the grade while I ranked 28 in a class of 44 students (among them only 41 took part in the test). You may say I'm not as bad as I described, but I really am. The only difference between me and the lowest one is that I get a good score in mathematics. And my mathematics is just ok, it isn't as good as I've imagined. I think my math is the best in class but in ordinary tests, I only got two third places in the rank. In one of them, I actually get the teacher to change my scores and add 5 points, which made me first. But I was still third in my records in the profile.

I studied high school mathematics in ninth grade in cram classes. Most of my classmates in my middle school started studying in seventh grade, though. I think I understand it pretty well. Yet I got many errors on the easy problems, especially those judging or logic problems. I think I am right in those problems while others found me strange. In the end, the teacher did not convince me that I was wrong for I really thought that I did it right. Math should be strict and doubtless, one should be able to get a full mark with his effort and gift. It can be designed for many to score few points, even 0 is ok, though. The second round is that kind of test. It was just that the ordinary exam always has too many traps to fall in. In China, there is the thing called out of level, meaning you can't test the knowledge you have not yet been told. Everything must be easy and attainable in tests for students or they may feel tremendous amounts of pressure. The tests go out of their way to trouble you. It always concerns something of a higher level, yet to be expressed in the same knowledge as what you have obtained in class so as to be within your current knowledge. But in fact, from what I observe, many of the students are living under great stress.

And it is not as if I hadn't paid an effort to improve my scores. I had worked hard, trying to find weaknesses in tests. But this semester's middle term examination got me completely dazed. I got a really bad score on the subjects which I had sought to improve, which I had tried to study all the winter holiday. Oh let's not talk about chemistry or biology for I just hate these subjects. Everyone is better at them than me.

Anyway, I worked hard but there weren't any improvements. Besides math and physics, studying other subjects is a waste of time for me. I'd rather say it is a complete matter of luck on the tests. And I am not kidding. People say that when you don't see an improvement, work harder. But there was just the matter with me. What if what you tried to improve keeps failing, and keeps going downwards? When I saw an improvement, it wasn't because I worked hard but because I have studied before and others hadn't. It was all from what I learned before.

I lost control over my scores after this mid-term examination.

Speaking of which, English is a subject I used to be really proud of. I passed the advanced translation test in grade eight, read over 300 books a year, finished reading Harry Potter in grade six.

But there wasn't any improvement since that. I always get the same scores when I come to a certain understanding of the knowledge.

I didn't know how I had improved my English in middle school. Going to America, reading hundreds of books perhaps? I went to Boston to study math (AMC 10) in the summer before sixth grade. Improving English at that time was but a minor thing. Problem is, I didn't know how I got to this stage and I don't know how to go to the one beyond. I don't know how to get better scores in English now I've already got about 80% score on tests. I found I got lots of grammar mistakes, especially in translation or those words and phrases tests. The phrases test is not included in College Entrance Exam, so why should they trouble me with it all the time. I could understand the phrases very well if I see them.

What really irritated me was my score was always not even above average. Others seem to have found a way for tests and always avoid the mistakes which I fell into. I'd say no one in my class read half as many English books as I did, and I am not boasting. But the test, oh it is a complicated matter. My father used to say, "high school is studying for the test and not really learning knowledge." I think it is very true. Problem is, I see no point in doing all these.

In high school every day my life was filled with many works to do. The teacher gave us endless homework. "I do not like to give out homework, for I see no meaning in only practicing for tests", said Mrs. Zhu, our English teacher who is superfine (of high level), just as she gave us tremendous amounts of homework. The reference book (or exercising books) I counted 10 just in English. In one of them, called Helbling reading or something, they extract the best of the world's classics, aiming for younger readers. I mean no offense but it really leaves out all the essence in the book and it is unreadable.

Other books are very similar to each other. One is called Tingba, or master listening in English. It is very easy and it is idiotic. The passage of the listening is no longer than about two hundred words. The listening in TOEFL is always very long and really talked about something, such as a lecture in a university, or two college students discussing some of their plans or something about the school. The Tingba exercising book has only very short listening materials and one is asked to listen several times before "filling in the blanks as you hear" (it is instructed).

Likewise, the exercising book is repetitive and one book has the same kind of test as the other. We call those books master copying.

There are also other subjects and in Chinese, I found no logic. The teacher Mrs. Luo said, "do as you are told and prepare well for the weekly test." She also said that those who do the test will be thankful for their efforts and gradually improve their skills. At first, I believed in her, and in the first semester, I always prepared much for them. I spent much of my time on those weekly tests. But in the end, I always didn't get a score as I wanted, and the teacher praised many others who got 90% or higher in the quizzes. I did spend much of my time preparing but Chinese isn't the kind of subject where you can get a good score just by reviewing. It is such a complicated subject and requires many other abilities and is of high uncertainty. I always got like two wrong in translating classical Chinese to modern Chinese. I always got wrong in the multiple-choice question. Chinese is without borders and one can not hope to study it in the same way as math. As my time in high school increased, I found more and more things out of simple logic from Mrs. Luo's mouth. She asked us to read many books and write reviews about them. Scarce was my time and there wasn't really much time to spare for the things that don't lead to obvious progress. One needs to spend his whole high school life, from what I observe of Mrs. Luo, to study Chinese, and yet one may not succeed in the end to get a good score. Mrs. Luo always taught here and there, occasionally she would write something on the blackboard, and she said it is of great use to accumulate in the study of Chinese. She talked to those that participated in competitions using a satirical tone as if we are inferior. But why couldn't she arrange knowledge in order for us and make a clear list so one knows where to look? Much of those that she emphasizes are unnecessary parts and are not included in the college entrance exam. Why couldn't she just praise me when necessary? As Chinese is such a complicated subject and scores may vary, why did she pay all the attention to scores? Worst of all, she has no feelings for the bold and unconstrained style of poems. She just turns on the PowerPoint and reads. It is to me of great confusion and I think I could have done it in a better way.

Other teachers don't like to think, too. I think I gained much more when studying on my own or in cram classes on the weekends than I ever did at school. Cram classes are 10 times more efficient than classes in school.

On a normal day this summer, I was at home, studying combinatorics and graph algorithms on an online course when suddenly I was admitted to USTC. It was so sudden that it shook me greatly. I wasn't prepared for all this. There was hope for me, they are tiny and I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't accept the fact that I was really going to college.

Looking back, I saw how lucky I really was. I got three tests just above the admission standard, the scoreline under which you will fail to continue in this whole program. I couldn't believe that my high school life ended like this and there would be no more of it.

In those few seconds of hearing the message, I went from happiness to panic and a sense of emptiness. And I asked my mother to verify it again and she said it was true, that I was going to USTC this September.

Being enrolled in university is no small thing. I lost all my confidence in high school. the tests were killing me. What can I do, I kept asking myself. I think I obtained nothing in the classes in school, except heavier is my leg and greater is my desire to go out and run freely, which is where the problem lies.

I always want to wander off alone. To me, school seems like a cage where you are bound inside and everything must be strictly done according to the schedule, or what the teacher says. As I live on campus, I couldn't even leave the school on weekdays without permission from my teacher. I had been to all places of the school in two months' time when I arrived. Nothing seemed foreign to me anymore. There is no basement in my school, no wardrobe or secret doors from which one can enter the magic world of Narnia. Nothing is down there that is interesting. Then I was reminded that it is a school, not a world in the books I had read. I had been to the construction site near the new stadium and the houses near the bicycle parking lot. I had been to the top of the experiment building, the highest points in my school, and looked all around. I had been to the east side of the campus and saw those workers' dorms and the types of sports equipment. I had been to the garden far inward, at the back of the second canteen designed for Xinjiang students who also study here. They aren't allowed outside the small school campus all year round, and except for the summer holidays, they have classes every day. Yet they do not seem to me in great despair. I wonder why.

What surprised me was that my classmates don't have the need for freedom or the heart for exploring. They are content with their lives and do not long for the things I found so inevitable. They are tamed so easily. I just couldn't adapt myself to that monotonous life. In my heart, there is always a craving for adventure, or just to see more, to see the outside world and be free. The school seems like a cage to me, under all its constraints and regulations it made for us to avoid danger. Won't life lost its value if one does not think and make his own choice?

My father said: "high school is like a great dark tunnel and those who climbed through are those who succeed, but it is a long and weary way to go and all must fight themselves through the same way, which in the end leads to the college entrance exam. You must prepare yourself for all the suffering in the way, and those that go on with hatred and deep bitterness are those who always succeed."

What I did the day I got the news I did not know, except that I threw away many of the useless books. I was studying for the High School Mathematics Olympic this September and wished to get a prize. I was studying combinatorics, the hardest of the four parts in the second round.

Mathematical competition is no piece of cake. It is really hard and challenging, especially in the second round. where there are only four problems. It is nothing like the problems you see every day in textbooks. The textbook is very easy and so is the college entrance exam, in which 95 percent of the problems only require you to calculate fast, that's all. Except that I only got 134 this time on that test. I think it is due to my lack of practice in analytic and solid geometry.

Anyway, if you do ok in the first round, solve Geometry in the second round and any other problem, there is a good chance to get first prize. This was what I had thought. My algebra was really bad, my number theory ok, but the number theory problem usually involves algebra, and they are always the hardest to solve.

The second round is something pushed to the limit. It is so hard and complicated and deep that it is as hard as climbing a steep cliff. But it is exhilarating and unlike school where you study all day and do 20000 problems for the math college entrance exam just for the last 5 or 10 points and chances are, you will not get those last points. The second round is not a matter of 90 percent or 100 percent, it is about whether you get zero or not. Twice in the mock test, I didn't even solve the geometry problem. I found geometry always the easiest and solved them pretty fast, though. But I failed to solve the geometry and I was discouraged and didn't even solve one problem out of four. I wasn't hopeless, though. But it is a really hard life, those who joined competitions. They have to spend time on school quizzes just like the other students and their lives are filled with challenges. but from my personal prospect, it is always better than spending three years doing nothing other than perfecting the ordinary tests and trying to get the last 5 or 10 points.

I am not a person who studies math just for interest. I am interested in it and it attracts me to some extent. There is strict logic in that world, and nobody judges you wrong when you really understand something. However, there are far more reasons to study math competitions. It is proof of your skills for it is challenging. It is an escape into another world. But in the end, I would say, only prize matters, for there is little application of advanced high school mathematics. Higher mathematics is useful, it is closely related to physics, computer engineering. And though I believe my math skill is worse off than some, it is better off than many.

But who wants to torture themselves with math when it doesn't count? When I am not participating in any math contests. It is not even a thing to show off as so few people are there to really understand it. Those few who really enjoy high school mathematics are those whose skills are beyond measurement, at least to me it seems.

I had my summer fully planned just the day before. Studying combinatorics, algebra, going to math camps the whole time to train me for the contest in September. But it is out of consideration now that it is all over for me. I will no longer participate in a high-school math contest.

For me, my new life isn't much of a difference. I have always been a passionate and enthusiastic person. The mental difference is that I can be freer and happier and be the way I wanted. The other difference is, I go to Pudong library daily to study Calculus and C Programming instead of doing a monotonous thing. I study these to prepare for the experimental class for advanced math and physics, which I am entering into. But I did this also to fill up all the emptiness and do what I wanted and live fully instead of not knowing what to do and wasting time at home.