Primary school text: Yang Zhenning’s award-winning lesson plan design

Yang Zhenning: My father never really forgave me because I "abandoned" my homeland (Yang Zhenning's father, Yang Wuzhi, was an early scholar in my country who was engaged in the teaching and research of modern number theory and algebra. As early as the early 1920s, He was the first to introduce modern number theory to China. As a famous figure of the generation, Yang Wuzhi provided a comprehensive and systematic education to his son. Yang Zhenning said that his father had indeed implemented the two words of "loyalty" and "thickness" throughout his life, which was in line with the family and country of that generation. The feeling of melancholy also deeply affected Yang Zhenning.) When I was a child, my father taught me to sing "Chinese Boy..." When I was born in Hefei, Anhui in 1922, my father was a teacher in a middle school in Anqing. Anqing was also called Huaining at that time. My father named me "Zhen Ning". The word "Zhen" is the name of the Yang family, and the word "Ning" means Huai Ning. When I was less than one year old, my father was admitted to Anhui University as a government-funded student studying in the United States. Before going abroad, our family of three took a photo in a corner of the yard of our old house in Hefei. My father was wearing a robe and mandarin jacket and stood upright. I don't think he had ever worn a suit before that. A photo he sent to his mother from the United States two years later was taken at the University of Chicago. His clothes and expression had entered the 20th century. In the summer of 1928, my father returned to China by ship after receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago. My mother and I went to Shanghai to pick him up. When I saw him this time, I was actually seeing a complete stranger. A few days later, the three of us and Sister Wang, a servant from Hefei, took a boat to Xiamen, because my father would be appointed as a professor in the Department of Mathematics of Xiamen University. I remember my life in Xiamen that year as very happy, and it was also a year in which I learned a lot from my father. Before that year, my mother had taught me about 3,000 Chinese characters in Hefei, and I had learned to recite "Long Wen Whip Shadow" in a private school, but I had no chance to come into contact with new education. My father loved singing Peking Opera when he was a boy. That year in Xiamen, he sometimes sang "I'm like a bird in a cage, I can't spread my wings..." However, he didn't teach me to sing Peking Opera. He only taught me to sing some songs from the early years of the Republic of China, such as "Up and down for thousands of years, the same vein continues." "Chinese man, Chinese man..." My father played Go very well. That year he taught me how to play Go. I remember that at the beginning he gave me sixteen sons, and after many years he gradually reduced it to nine sons, but I never got the "true inheritance" from my father. Until 1962, when we reunited in Geneva to play Go, he still wanted to give me seven pieces. After teaching at Xiamen University for a year, my father was appointed professor at Tsinghua University in Peking. In the autumn of 1929, my family of three moved into No. 19, West Courtyard, Tsinghua Garden, which was a courtyard house in the northeast corner of the West Courtyard. When I was eight or nine years old, my father already knew that I had a strong ability in mathematics. When I entered junior high school at the age of eleven, my ability in this area was more fully demonstrated. Looking back, if he had taught me analytic geometry and calculus at that time, I would have learned very quickly, which would have made him very happy. But he didn't do this: during the summer vacation between my first and second grade in junior high school, my father asked Professor Lei Haizong to introduce a history student to teach me "Mencius". Mr. Lei introduced his favorite student Ding Zeliang. Mr. Ding is very knowledgeable. He not only taught me Mencius, but also told me a lot of ancient historical knowledge. The next summer, he taught my other half Mencius, so I could recite the full text of Mencius in middle school. Leaving home for the United States, my father's anxiety made me burst into tears. When the Anti-Japanese War began in 1937, our family first moved to our hometown in Hubei. Later, after the Japanese army entered Nanjing, we passed through Hankou, Hong Kong, Haiphong, and Hanoi, and arrived in Kunming in March 1938. I attended Kunming Kunhua Middle School for half a year as a second-year high school student instead of a senior high school student. In the autumn of 1938, I was admitted to Southwest Associated University with the qualification of "equivalent academic ability". From 1938 to 1939, my father introduced me to the spirit of modern mathematics. In the autumn of 1941, in order to write my bachelor's thesis, I went to see Professor Wu Dayou. He gave me a copy of Reviews of Modern Physics. Because it is very concise and contains no nonsense, it beautifully and completely explains the "representation theory" in group theory in just 20 pages. I learned the beauty of group theory and its in-depth application in physics, which had a decisive impact on my later work. This area is called the principle of symmetry. I still remember the details of the day I left home on August 28, 1945, about to fly to India and transfer to the United States: Early in the morning, my father accompanied me alone by taking a rickshaw from the northwest corner of Kunming to Tuodong Road in the southeastern suburbs to wait for the bus to Wujiaba Airport. *car. When leaving home, the four younger siblings were reluctant to leave, but my mother was very calm and remembered that she did not shed any tears. When they arrived at Tuodong Road, their father said some words of encouragement and both of them were very calm. After saying goodbye, I got into a very crowded bus. At first, I could see my father waving to me from the window. After a few minutes, he was squeezed into the distance by the crowd. There were many classmates in the car who were traveling to the United States. As we started talking, my attention immediately shifted to issues such as flight routes and climate change. After waiting for more than an hour, the car never started. Suddenly, an American next to me gestured to me and asked me to look out the window: I suddenly discovered that my father was still waiting there! He was thin, wearing a robe, and his hair on his forehead was already graying. Seeing the anxious look on his face, I burst into tears that I had endured all morning and couldn't help myself. After three trips to Geneva, my father had a mission and persuaded me to return to China. At the beginning of 1946, I registered as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I chose the University of Chicago not because it was my father’s alma mater, but because Professor Fermi, whom I had admired for a long time, went to the University of Chicago. At that time, the physics, chemistry, and mathematics departments of the University of Chicago were all top-notch.

I attended the school for three and a half years, the first two and a half years as a graduate student. After I received my doctorate, I stayed at the school for one year as a faculty member. In the summer of 1949, I transferred to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. My father was of course very happy that I had excellent grades at the University of Chicago. What was even more exciting was that I was going to the famous Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, but what he was most concerned about at that time was not that, but my marriage. On August 26, 1950, Du Zhili and I were married in Princeton. In 1957, Du Zhili, I and our only child Guangnuo (who was six years old at the time) went to Geneva. I wrote to ask my father to come to Geneva and meet us. With permission from the United Front Work Department, he traveled through Beijing, Moscow, and Prague despite being ill, staying in hospitals all the way, and flew to Geneva in early July. The doctor checked him for several days and thought he could be discharged from the hospital, but he had to check his blood sugar and inject insulin every day. We rented an apartment that summer, and Guangnuo always watched with great interest every morning as his grandfather used an alcohol lamp to check his blood sugar. After I woke up, he would come and say: "It's not good today, it's brown." (It's not good today, it's brown.) or "It's very good today, it's blue." Going for a walk in the park with my grandson. They found a "secretpath" in the trees on the side of the park. Every time I see them, one old and one young, getting ready to go out, I feel infinitely satisfied. My father introduced many new things about New China to Zhili and me. He greatly admired Chairman Mao, and especially liked Mao Zedong's poems such as "Pointing to the country/Inspiring words/The dirt was like ten thousand princes", and "Qin Emperor Hanwu/Slightly less literary talent/Tang Zong Song Zu/Slightly less coquettish/A generation of genius/Genghis Khan/Only knowledge Bending the bow and shooting the big eagle/It’s all gone/Counting the famous people/It still depends on the present day” and so on. My father came to Geneva three times, especially the last two times, with a sense of mission and felt that he should persuade me to return to my country. This was of course an overt or covert suggestion from the United Front, but on the one hand it was also the deepest wish of my father’s soul. But he was very conflicted: on the one hand, he had this desire, but on the other hand, he felt that I should stay in the United States and strive to advance academically. Meeting my father and mother three times in Geneva had a great impact on me. In those days, little was known about the actual situation in China in the United States. The three meetings allowed me to understand my father and mother's views on New China. I remember one night in 1962, my father said that the New China had made the Chinese people really stand up: they could not make a needle before, but today they can make cars and airplanes (the atomic bomb had not yet been made at that time, and my father did not know that China was already developing one) atomic bomb). In the past, there were frequent floods and droughts, and millions of people died. Today, there are no such events. In the past, illiteracy was widespread, but today at least all children in cities can go to school. Once upon a time...today...when he was talking happily, his mother interrupted him and said, "Don't focus on these things. I got up in the dark to buy tofu, and stood in line for three hours, but I could only buy two pieces that were not neat. , what’s the good thing?” The father was very angry, saying that she was specifically trying to hold him back and gave his son a wrong impression. He walked into the bedroom angrily and closed the door with a bang. What circulates in my body is the blood of Chinese culture. In the summer of 1971, I returned to my motherland after an absence of 26 years. That day, when I flew east from Myanmar on Air France and entered the sky over Yunnan, the pilot said: "We have entered Chinese airspace!" My excitement at that time was indescribable. In the evening, arrive in Shanghai. My mother and siblings picked me up at the airport. We went to Huashan Hospital to visit my father together. My father has been hospitalized for half a year. The last time we met was in Hong Kong at the end of 1964, when he was sixty-eight years old and still very healthy. During the past six and a half years, I suffered some hardships from isolation and inspection. I became old and lost a lot of weight, and I could no longer stand and walk on my own. Of course he was very excited to see me. In the summer of 1972, I returned to China to visit relatives for the second time. My father is still in the hospital and his health is getting weaker. My father passed away in the early morning of May 12th of the following year at the age of seventy-seven. At the memorial service held for my father in Shanghai on May 15, my eulogy included the following two paragraphs: My father’s health has been declining in the past two years. He himself realizes this and thinks a lot about all our thoughts and actions. I came to Shanghai to visit him in 1971 and 1972. He and I talked a lot. In the final analysis, he repeatedly asked me to take a longer view and see clearly the trend of historical evolution. This lesson had a great impact on me in the past two years. . My father passed away on May 12, 1973. During his 77 years of life, history has undergone earth-shaking changes. After my father passed away, my elementary school classmate and close friend Xiong Bingming wrote to me to comfort me, saying that although my father had passed away, his blood was still circulating in my body. Yes, my father’s blood is circulating in my body, and it is the blood of Chinese culture. I became a naturalized citizen of the United States in the spring of 1964. Almost 20 years later, I wrote this in my collection of essays: From 1945 to 1964, I have lived in the United States for 19 years, including most of my adult life. However, deciding to apply for U.S. citizenship is not easy. I suspect that many immigrants from most countries have the same problem. But for a person who grew up in traditional Chinese culture, it is especially difficult to make such a decision. On the one hand, traditional Chinese culture simply does not have the concept of leaving China and emigrating to other countries for a long time. Moving to another country was once considered a complete betrayal. On the other hand, China has had a glorious and splendid culture. The humiliation and exploitation she suffered for more than a hundred years have left a deep imprint on the hearts and minds of every Chinese person.

It is difficult for any Chinese to forget this history of more than one hundred years. My father worked as a mathematics professor in Beijing and Shanghai until his death in 1973. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He traveled widely. But I know that until his death, a corner of his heart had never forgiven me for giving up my motherland. At midnight on July 1, 1997, I had the honor to attend the handover ceremony at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. I think that if my father could witness this historic ceremony that symbolizes the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, he would definitely be more excited than me. My father was always optimistic that this day would eventually come. But until his death in 1973, he never imagined that his son would attend this historic ceremony. Otherwise, he might recite Lu Fangweng's famous saying instead: When the national humiliation is over, celebrate the day, and don't forget to tell Naiweng when offering family sacrifices.