Evaluate a significant experience and its impact on you.
Challenging the Impossible
"I made it this time!After seven rounds of competition,from my hometown SuiZhou to Hubei province,to the National Final and then to the the stage of CCTV 10 to be broadcast nation-wide.I have learnt so much and made so many friends from across the whole China!"I was meditating in ecstasy after boarding the train at the end of this great journey to go home.All the efforts finally paid out.
Being one of the top 20 to appear on CCTV is the dream I promised myself 3 years ago.On hearing this huge ambition,some close friends encouraged me but most kids sneered at it."Dump idiot,he ain't even know who he is,living in such a small town like SuiZhou,how are you gonna compete with all the other kids from Beijing or Shanghai plus many other metropolitan cities?","hell yeah,most of them have even been abroad for several years,not a good idea to compete with them in speaking English".True indeed,when I first started to learn English,there were no big English-teaching Institudes like the New Oriental(even if there is one,we couldn't afford it anyway),my parents couldn't utter more than a few sentences and I don't even have relatives out of this city.But my father was a man of vision to encouraged his son to learn by himself,and,soon enough,he bought some English books and CDs from Wuhan,the capital city of Hubei Province.Confronted with such a huge task,a mammoth task indeed,and I was fortunate to be only 9,too small to be frightened,what I still recall is the repeated words of my father,"English is a crucial language tool to help you make a qualified international talent,go for it,son!"And I started,every day I would study 1 hour,half in the morning and half in the evening.Flipping the pages of the dictionary I would try to divine every word and how they unify to convey a meaning.For eight years I've beening doing just like this.It's simple,just read and guess,as many have put it,but I have persisted.
Although most people regard my achievement as solely mastering another language but I gained definitely more than that:the new angle to look at this world and to understand what life truly means,the methods I invented for self learning,and,most importantly,the pleasure and passion of striving for the best,all the things derived from this self-learning process!
I've learned that there are discrepancies in values held by the two cultures but none could provide the principle you should completely stick to thus turning to a insular,self-righteous bigot.We should,however,be clear that the values act only as guidance and are only right under certain circumstances.
I've learned that when a theorem is explained in a particular language,it doesn't always convey its content perfectly accurate because every word represents many meanings so one may interpret it in different ways.I could gain a more profound understanding by finding the intersection of different languages.
I've learned that there could be a variety of approaches to address a problem,how to organise the knowledge,how to create rules of your own instead of just reciting the book,how to change the angle you look at a problem in order to find new approaches.All the experience I have accumulated could be applied to academic studies or even improving my skateboarding skills!I love to apply rules of my own to every part of my life!
Throughout the years I have formed the belief that I can work anything out if I just do it,which makes me intrigued by the problems that others had never attempted or have tried but failed.Confronted with the hard math problem,I rarely admitted defeat.After having failed to solve it with an equation,I would draw its graph on a coordinate system to find some clue and then generalize the conclusion.Be there some phenomena that don't seem to make sense unless you use the Newton's Laws or other theories,I would try to reconstruct the scene when the scientist first discovered the law and all the general background behind so as to truly understand it and also learn the method he used to explore the world.
Several months ago,after I had finished the 1500m long run as the representative of my class in the school sports meeting,many classmates gathered round me:"Hey,Zhao,you were amazing,you rank 5th out of the 37 contestants!Most of us wouldn't even be able to finish this long distance,and your left arm isn't fully recovered from the injury that had broken it.You are crazy!"I,exhausted and giddy,was happy to tell them:"Perhaps that's just me,perhaps I just love to challenge and I made it!"
Challenging the Impossible
"I made it this time!After seven rounds of competition,from my hometown SuiZhou to Hubei province,to the National Final and then to the the stage of CCTV 10 to be broadcast nation-wide.I have learnt so much and made so many friends from across the whole China!"I was meditating in ecstasy after boarding the train at the end of this great journey to go home.All the efforts finally paid out.
Being one of the top 20 to appear on CCTV is the dream I promised myself 3 years ago.On hearing this huge ambition,some close friends encouraged me but most kids sneered at it."Dump idiot,he ain't even know who he is,living in such a small town like SuiZhou,how are you gonna compete with all the other kids from Beijing or Shanghai plus many other metropolitan cities?","hell yeah,most of them have even been abroad for several years,not a good idea to compete with them in speaking English".True indeed,when I first started to learn English,there were no big English-teaching Institudes like the New Oriental(even if there is one,we couldn't afford it anyway),my parents couldn't utter more than a few sentences and I don't even have relatives out of this city.But my father was a man of vision to encouraged his son to learn by himself,and,soon enough,he bought some English books and CDs from Wuhan,the capital city of Hubei Province.Confronted with such a huge task,a mammoth task indeed,and I was fortunate to be only 9,too small to be frightened,what I still recall is the repeated words of my father,"English is a crucial language tool to help you make a qualified international talent,go for it,son!"And I started,every day I would study 1 hour,half in the morning and half in the evening.Flipping the pages of the dictionary I would try to divine every word and how they unify to convey a meaning.For eight years I've beening doing just like this.It's simple,just read and guess,as many have put it,but I have persisted.
Although most people regard my achievement as solely mastering another language but I gained definitely more than that:the new angle to look at this world and to understand what life truly means,the methods I invented for self learning,and,most importantly,the pleasure and passion of striving for the best,all the things derived from this self-learning process!
I've learned that there are discrepancies in values held by the two cultures but none could provide the principle you should completely stick to thus turning to a insular,self-righteous bigot.We should,however,be clear that the values act only as guidance and are only right under certain circumstances.
I've learned that when a theorem is explained in a particular language,it doesn't always convey its content perfectly accurate because every word represents many meanings so one may interpret it in different ways.I could gain a more profound understanding by finding the intersection of different languages.
I've learned that there could be a variety of approaches to address a problem,how to organise the knowledge,how to create rules of your own instead of just reciting the book,how to change the angle you look at a problem in order to find new approaches.All the experience I have accumulated could be applied to academic studies or even improving my skateboarding skills!I love to apply rules of my own to every part of my life!
Throughout the years I have formed the belief that I can work anything out if I just do it,which makes me intrigued by the problems that others had never attempted or have tried but failed.Confronted with the hard math problem,I rarely admitted defeat.After having failed to solve it with an equation,I would draw its graph on a coordinate system to find some clue and then generalize the conclusion.Be there some phenomena that don't seem to make sense unless you use the Newton's Laws or other theories,I would try to reconstruct the scene when the scientist first discovered the law and all the general background behind so as to truly understand it and also learn the method he used to explore the world.
Several months ago,after I had finished the 1500m long run as the representative of my class in the school sports meeting,many classmates gathered round me:"Hey,Zhao,you were amazing,you rank 5th out of the 37 contestants!Most of us wouldn't even be able to finish this long distance,and your left arm isn't fully recovered from the injury that had broken it.You are crazy!"I,exhausted and giddy,was happy to tell them:"Perhaps that's just me,perhaps I just love to challenge and I made it!"