I thought that once I found a new study method,
everything would fall into place.
But reality swung back
and smacked me in the head again.
The mechanics section in physics still tortured me.
How do you determine the direction of force?
The textbook spelled it out clearly,
yet the moment I faced a problem—
my mind went completely blank.
History revision was even worse.
I kept mixing up key dates:
Was the Meiji Restoration in 1868 or 1871?
What year did the French Revolution break out?
The more I thought about it, the messier it got.
And the messier it got, the less I could remember.
After several mock exams,
my score stubbornly stayed around 450.
Nailed in place.
Not a single point of improvement.
Homeroom teacher Jianguo Zhang stood at the podium,
held up my test paper, and sneered:
"No matter how much he struggles, trash is still trash."
The class erupted into laughter.
I couldn't say anything.
I just lowered my head and endured it,
my fists clenched so tightly they trembled.
That night,
I sat at my desk staring at that test paper.
Was I really hopeless?
Was even the new method useless?
I took a deep breath
and told myself:
If the normal methods aren't enough,
then I'll use extreme ones.
Starting that day, I did three things:
Staying up late searching for free course videos
Couldn't understand physics?
Fine—find online teachers.
Struggling with history dates?
Fine—someone online had already made timeline diagrams.
Keeping a "mistake notebook"
Every wrong question, I copied down.
I analyzed the reason,
then practiced similar ones relentlessly.
Nonstop. Nonstop. Nonstop.
I slept only three or four hours a day.
My eyes were bloodshot,
my head felt foggy.
But I never stopped.
One day,
I finally solved a multiple-choice math problem I could never do before.
The surge of achievement almost made me cry.
It wasn't that I couldn't learn—
I simply needed more time and more patience.
Another time, in a history quiz,
I wrote the correct answer for an event I had finally memorized.
And at that moment,
I knew my efforts were not wasted.
My score hadn't improved much yet—
but I could finally see a sliver of light.
In the next monthly exam—
I would make every one of them see exactly what I was capable of.