Chapter 24: Teaching Her to Learn

“So Teacher Zhou is telling me that I need to study hard from now on, right?” Sang Fuying asked, only half understanding.

“That is more or less what I mean. But you have seemed to be in very poor shape during class these past few days. You are often asleep. And in my class, although you do not sleep, your eyes tell me that you do not understand a word.”

In his calm, easygoing manner, Zhou Ying pointed out the fact that Sang Fuying had been slacking off in class.

Sang Fuying lowered her head awkwardly and guiltily. “I understand. I will study seriously from now on.”

She had known that being summoned to the teachers’ office for tea could not possibly be a good thing.

Even if the teacher in question was exceptionally handsome.

Zhou Ying did not fit her stereotypical image of a mathematics teacher at all. He was nothing like a refined, bookish science-and-engineering type. He looked as though he had stepped straight out of a comic, his face handsome enough to seem computer-generated and brought to life. His mint-blue hair was cool and dreamlike, and combined with his identity as a professor of advanced mathematics, he was practically the ideal man for anyone attracted to intelligence.

“Do not imitate your deskmate. He never comes to class, but in the last assessment he crushed the entire school by an overwhelming margin and came in first. He was also admitted with the highest science score in the Ninth Star. The assessment is supervised by professors from the whole school. I cannot help you cheat.”

What Zhou Ying meant was that Moer had the capital to give up and coast, but Sang Fuying did not.

“I will do my best to study hard and pass the assessment.” Sang Fuying’s attitude was sincere. When faced with questions from an adult, she was already well practiced at answering.

Her uncle often told her that, with grades this poor, what would she do if she failed to get into university? Or perhaps she would have to make a living selling roasted sweet potatoes. With mathematics like hers, he even doubted whether she could calculate the change correctly.

Every time, she promised that she would study hard.

“Before the assessment, I will help you make up everything you have missed. I will use some of your lunch break and teach you as best I can. You must do your best to learn as well. Do not disappoint your uncle, who has such high hopes for you.”

Zhou Ying’s tone remained as calm and unconcerned as ever.

He had yet to realize how difficult teaching Sang Fuying would be.

At the desk, he sat beside the girl, leaving a polite distance between them, and patiently began explaining functions to her.

She had learned a little about functions in high school mathematics, so Sang Fuying could still understand some of it. Unfortunately, Zhou Ying explained everything so quickly that before she had recovered from functions, he had already moved on to derivatives and limits.

As she listened, the girl held her pen in her right hand and supported her slender, fair neck with her left. She sat upright, her black hair spilling across the desk and hiding the side of her face.

Zhou Ying glanced at her several times to see whether she was concentrating, but all he saw was the dazzling whiteness of her wrist.

The girl was delicately slight, and the fragile bones of her wrist gave her an almost helpless air, as though she could be held in one hand.

Amid the fragrance of tea filling the air, a scent somehow slipped in at some point—clearer and purer than jasmine tea.

If snow had a fragrance, it would smell like this.

He had not wanted to pay attention to that faint aroma, yet the soft, delicate scent clung to him like a thread of silk.

“I have finished explaining the first chapter. Try these problems. I want to see whether you understood.”

Zhou Ying took up his fountain pen, wrote several problems on a sheet of paper, and slid it in front of Sang Fuying.

His handwriting was neat and clean. Even the numbers he wrote in his fine, slender script were pleasing to the eye.

Holding her pen, Sang Fuying began solving the problems hesitantly.

The moment she put down her first stroke, Zhou Ying’s sharply defined brows twitched.

What was she writing? Why could he not understand a single thing?

Zhou Ying politely maintained his silence and watched as Sang Fuying finished three problems that, to him, were so elementary they could not possibly be simpler.

Her solutions had nothing whatsoever to do with the questions.

With the girl keeping her head lowered and not daring to meet his gaze, he said, politely but helplessly, “Fuying, you are making me seriously question my teaching ability.”

“Did I get every single one wrong?” Sang Fuying asked, embarrassed.

Zhou Ying wanted to say, You did far more than get them wrong...

He could not even tell what she had written. There was not the slightest trace of logic to it, as though she had simply written down whatever she had dreamed.

“We still have an hour. Let us take it slowly. I will start by explaining these three problems properly.”

He had finally realized that she had no foundation at all.

Besides, he was not exactly a seasoned professor himself.

An hour later, Zhou Ying’s initial easygoing composure had completely fallen apart.

The gap between their abilities was simply too vast. The little girl could not understand what he was saying at all. Even after he slowed his pace as much as possible, she still could not keep up.

Sang Fuying noticed Zhou Ying’s expression gradually worsening and buried her head even lower.

At that moment, his expression looked exactly like her uncle’s when he had tutored her through her homework as a child.

“Teacher Zhou, am I making this very difficult for you?”

Zhou Ying rubbed the space between his brows. “This is only my second year as a teacher, so I am not very experienced either. Usually, I teach and they learn. I suppose this is not your fault; it is a problem with my own abilities.”

“Were you not a teacher before?” Sang Fuying asked, apparently trying to change the subject and ease the oppressive awkwardness.

“I became a teacher here right after graduating from university. Before that, I was a student too. Your lunch break is almost over. Rest for a while, then get ready for class. I will think carefully about how to help you learn more easily.”

Sang Fuying returned to the classroom carrying the several problems Zhou Ying had painstakingly taught her to solve, stroke by stroke, over the course of several pages. She spread her notebook open on the desk.

Moer saw the dense mass of formulas and was somewhat astonished. “How did such a simple problem end up with such a huge pile of working? Who taught you that idiot’s method?”

The words idiot’s method struck Sang Fuying even harder.

She lay listlessly across the desk. “Teacher Zhou taught me the first chapter of advanced mathematics all through lunch. I think I made it very difficult for him to teach me.”

“At lunch? Zhou Ying was tutoring you? That connected professor, Zhou Ying? Can he even explain things clearly? Still, teaching you to write out this kind of useless formula is perfectly in keeping with his abilities.”

Moer’s every word dripped with disdain for Zhou Ying.

“How is Teacher Zhou a connected professor?” Sang Fuying asked. Moer sounded as though he had something against people who got ahead through connections.

After all, she herself had gotten into this place through connections.

“He came here to teach at Saint Nia Federal University straight after graduating from the Imperial Military Academy. A few months later, he was promoted to professor at the Aerospace Academy. He is only twenty-three, and quite a few students at the school are older than he is. The reason he came here was that his family did not want him going to war.”

Sang Fuying seized upon the most important detail in Moer’s words: Zhou Ying was only twenty-three.

She had assumed he merely looked young, like Uncle and Brother Yuan. But Zhou Ying was genuinely young.

When Zhou Ying said he had become a teacher here after graduating from university, she had assumed he was some kind of postdoctoral researcher—at least someone in his late twenties, nearly thirty.