Henry Wang Hengle, 7Ca BASIS International School Shenzhen Instructed by Dina Schwartz

The last year in BASIS, I always struggled with Chinese poem memorization. We had to memorize three or four poems in just two days and we had to get every word written correctly to get full marks.

I always hated this part of studying: memorization. It’s boring, useless, and difficult! My average Chinese memorization test score is about 60 percent, worse than all my other subjects. And there was a particularly bad test that I would probably remember for my entire career at middle school and high school.

One time, the teacher told us to memorize a poem for homework. I thought that if I didn’t do it, it would be OK because there wouldn’t be any consequences. So for that night, I didn’t even look at the poem for one glance. The next morning, during Chinese class, the teacher announced that we would have a Chinese memorization test in just 15 minutes. I was so annoyed that although I tried to remember the poem in the remainder of that time, I totally lost my thoughts when the test was handed out. The poem seemed to have a billion words to me. I just sat there nervously and awkwardly with my pen poised atop of the paper thinking desperately whilst listening to the scratching of papers by pens all around the classroom.

And sure enough, when I received my test score, it was a “0”. I was so ashamed of myself that I nearly started to cry, but I forced myself not to until reaching my bedroom at my apartment and collapsing onto my bed, covering my face in my blankets. My mom seemed to have noticed something was wrong and called me out of my bedroom to have a talk. I told her the reason why I got a “0” score in my test.

Instead of getting angry, my mother said, “Everybody has his or her talents and weaknesses, and Chinese poem memorization is your weakness. I don’t care about what you score on your tests, but I care about your efforts and work trying to reach a high score in tests. If you tried and failed, it’s OK. But if you didn’t try at all, it’s not OK. Care about effort, not result. Just work harder the next time, and don’t make assumptions about homework. What is homework must be done, not matter if it does not affect your grade.”

Her advice is like gold to me. After hearing these words, I finally understood the concept of attempt and result. The result isn’t that important, but the effort you’ve put into your attempt to achieve a good result is very important. This piece of advice is important not only for my years at school, but also for my later life. It will always be a guideline for me on how to act in all kinds of situations, and sure enough, after that test, I tried every time with great effort to memorize the poems even if they are not for tests, and for every memorization test after that, I’ve never got a score that low again. But all these are due to the hard work that I’ve put up with through the years. Without effort and work, nothing will ever be achieved.