Halfway through the summer vacation, I'm already unconsciously over. Because the child is about to enter the second year of junior high school, she signed up for an English extracurricular class in elementary school, because she herself was in the first grade who shouted to learn it, so she had to insist on completing all the courses no matter what. After more than a dozen half-days of online classes, there are related homework assignments after class (in addition to the holiday tasks arranged by the middle school, every day at home is busier than the work), and finally the end of this holiday after the class ended! I won't enroll her in any classes in the future, and it's enough to read the textbook well.
One of the recent hot spots is about the state's policy of rectifying extracurricular tutoring institutions, and I write this small article without wanting to clarify the right and wrong here, but I just have the feeling to recall my own bits and pieces of my own primary and secondary school days, and make a record as a record of personal growth.
I grew up in a compound at the foot of Jingxi Mountain. Elementary school was in a school outside the courtyard for 6 years, and in addition to the children of the same hospital, there were also peers in the nearby village. At that time, there were no mobile phones and networks, and the appliances in the home were probably electric lights and radios, and the family had a black-and-white TV. In the winter and summer vacations, the school will send out a uniform printing and binding holiday homework the size of a magazine that is common now, and there will be no other tasks. I don't like to pile things up, so at the beginning of the holiday, I wrote all my holiday homework for a week or so. Then you can play with it.
When I was in elementary school, when I was in summer, I would often go with my classmates to a river about 1 km south of the compound (in fact, it was a diversion canal, ten meters wide) to catch fish and shrimp. There is a sluice in the upper reaches of the diversion canal, and as soon as the sluice falls, the water level in the canal will drop to just below the knee, and the flow rate is slow. So some people will have the courage to go to the middle of the river to catch fish. I don't know who came up with the idea, use a washbasin, fill it with a little batter and mix it with a little sesame oil, then cover it with a piece of plastic sheet, tie it tightly with rope or thin wire around it, and then dig a hole of about 2 centimeters in the middle of the plastic sheet, and then slowly sink the basin in the middle of the river. After waiting for 10 minutes, walk over and quickly pick up the pot, there will often be a few 2 or 3 cm long fish trapped in it, and if you are lucky, you will reap even more. Timid children will take a net with a broken screen window and put it in the water and grass by the river, where they can catch smaller fry or shrimp. After working for half a day, everyone will put the fish and shrimp they caught in a glass can bottle, and then grab a handful of aquatic weeds and put them in, and they will be satisfied to take them home and play.
As the saying goes, the mountain eats the mountain, because the compound is next to the mountain, so playing in the mountains is also a compulsory subject during the holidays. Going up the mountain in the summer is nothing more than two things. One is to catch the grasshoppers, and the other is to pick sour dates. Nowadays, children living in cities rarely hear cicadas, and even fewer have seen real cicadas! It's also weird and pathetic! I remember that at that time, you can hear the cicadas in June, there is a hillside on the mountain with a lot of walnut trees, and the cicadas in June and July are a small colored gray-winged opaque cicada - cockroaches. These cicadas especially like to stay on walnut trees with gray trunks, which need to be carefully searched to find. If the position of climbing is relatively low, when reaching out, it is necessary to slowly approach from the side, stretch out your hand to approach it a little bit, and then quickly start to cover the prey, and there is a special sense of achievement in the heart after catching the cicada. Now that I think about it, I felt like I was hanging gold from a tree and I was bent on catching it.
Cockroaches
Grasshoppers
In July, a particularly large black cicada began to appear, and now it is known that this cicada is called a grasshopper or "oil cicada". This kind of cicada is large, black and shiny, with transparent wings, and likes to perch in high places in the treetops; especially the willow trees planted in the courtyard are their favorite places, and sometimes a string of more than a dozen willow branches will be densely packed on the thick branches, and the loud monotonous chirping is uninterrupted. To deal with this kind of cicada, it is necessary to use some special technical means, that is, "sticky". First find the right bamboo pole for thickness, length and length, preferably with a thin head, and tie two sticks together if one is not long enough. The old bicycle rubber inner tube became a treasure, cut a small piece on the fire until it became soft and blistered, so I quickly used a bamboo pole to dip it, and the head was covered with this glue and could be used. Slowly extend the bamboo pole from below to the treetops, let the rubber head get a little closer to the wings of the oil cicada, the distance is about 3 centimeters, at a speed that is too fast to cover the ears, push the bamboo pole, press to the target, often stick to the pole head of a guy who shakes his wings and screams, the vibration is transmitted along the bamboo pole to the hand is equivalent to the feeling of the big fish hooked. And often at the same time, it will also surprise the companions of oil cicadas that inhabit the same branches. There is also a relatively small number of cicadas (songing cicadas), with a unique call, high and low and crisp, and the body is gray-green and likes to perch on the trunk of the poplar tree, which is more agile and not easy to catch.
Chirping cicadas
Speaking of grasshoppers, everyone knows the scientific name "locust". It is estimated that many children living in the city have only seen the "locust plague" on TV, and few children have personally caught it! This common insect is hard to find in the lawn trees of the city. Ordinary locusts are only two centimeters long, but the locusts in the mountains have a large head, six or seven centimeters long. In addition to the common brown, there are also green ones. Most of the first impression of locusts is the appearance of square heads and drum eyes, in fact, there are locusts with pointed heads, we had an image of the name when we were young - "flat burden", thanks to the blessing of the Internet, let me know that the original looking locust is called grasshoppers. The locusts in the mountains may not be very silly to see much, plus the number is large, so it is easy to catch a lot, and wear a bunch of dogtail grass to bring back to feed the chickens.
locust
grasshopper
Wild sour dates are a gift from the mountains. The shape of the jujube tree resembles the current jujube tree, with oily, oval leaves densely growing on the branches with hard spines. Every August, each sour date tree is covered with large and small round or oval fruits, and some are the size of blueberries sold in supermarkets, like miniature apples. Some of the fruits have begun to turn red, and the green leaves are particularly attractive. The older children in the courtyard would invariably carry a military satchel on their backs, take various homemade hooks, and go up the mountain to pick sour dates. After years of experience, we have figured out which jujube tree has a large jujube and which jujube has a good taste. When you encounter dates that are not reached at a high place, you use the hook you brought to hook the branches to pick them. When immersed in the joy of picking, if you are not careful, you will be pricked by the jujube thorn, or be paralyzed by the poisonous hair of the "yangzi" hiding in the leaves, the skin of the paralyzed skin is hot and spicy, and it is immediately red and swollen, at this time, the person with cool oil will immediately apply cool oil to the affected area to help relieve pain and detoxification, and the little partner without this will touch it with a little omnipotent saliva, and then continue to pick with discomfort. Soon everyone's school bag will become bulging. When you get home, pick out the older, delicious dates and wash them, and eat them as snacks when you watch movies at night. The rest, can not eat first spread out in the sun to soften, and then put in the bucket with water soaked for a few days, and finally the soaked dates with a washboard slightly rub, you get a clean acid date kernel, acid date core dry after collection, the school to the class when the medicinal materials sold in exchange for the money as a class fee.
Sour date tree
That's how the summer vacations of elementary school came. There is not much homework, but there are still some students who have not completed their homework after the holiday :) The above is only some interesting things in the holiday, in addition to helping parents to do housework and participate in various activities organized by the hospital for children on vacation. When the open-air movie ends, you can see a little green fluorescence flying through the air, and when you no longer need a cool mat to sleep at night, it means that the summer vacation is coming to an end. There is a trace of reluctance in my heart, and there is also a kind of expectation! Looking back at our time, the material is inferior to the current children, but I think that today's children seem to be more pitiful than us, and without the make-up classes and extracurricular classes, our generation can also be admitted to college. They are like pets in the house, far from nature, their vision imprisoned by glasses on the bridge of their noses. It seems that because of the development of material and technology, they are closer to the world, but in fact they are farther away from the world!