Great Song Dynasty Writer

Chapter 12 Lu Beigu's Future Plan
"In short, Magistrate Li has given me a fair chance to compete. For the next two months, I need to fully prepare for the county exam, including poetry, calligraphy, and calligraphy."

"Just focus on your studies. I'll always be at home."

Pei Yan's voice was soft, but like a thin thread, firmly tied to Lu Beigu's heart.

"correct."

She suddenly remembered something: "Is the injury on your forehead really just a bump?"

Aunt Wang was there just now, so she didn't dare to ask in detail, fearing that Lu Beigu was being bullied by his classmates in the county school.

"Of course, I was just engrossed in reading while walking, and it was just an accident."

After finishing his meal, Lu Beigu sat down at the gate of the courtyard and thought quietly for a moment.

The reason he came here was because the room was too dark, but at least there was moonlight here, which allowed him to see clearly when he scratched the ground with stones.

Lu Beigu took a stone and wrote down three things he needed to face on the sand according to the urgency of time.

1. One week later, go with Li Pan to meet that "very important person".

2. Earn enough money within a month to buy books and rent a house in Hejiang County.

3. Make up for other very weak subjects within two months, pass the county examination, and successfully enter the provincial school.

In terms of time, it seems that the least urgent thing is to prepare for the county examination, but in fact, Lu Beigu is the most anxious about this.

Because the county exam determines whether he can be promoted from the county school to the provincial school!

In the Song Dynasty, the status of scholars and officials was indeed high.

But the problem is that most people "only see people eating meat but not people getting beaten", and no one will mention how shockingly low the admission rate is after passing the county exam, state exam, and provincial exam step by step!
Take the county examination, which was not yet a formal imperial examination, for example.

In the past few years, the average number of students who have passed the county examination in Hejiang County School every year is 5!
——This is equivalent to an admission rate of about 2% in the county exam!

The last ten-day test did not test poetry and policy essays, but calligraphy and calligraphy interpretation. His score was C-medium for calligraphy and C-low for calligraphy interpretation, ranking 198th in the county school.

I am basically at the bottom among the 220 students in Hejiang County. How easy is it to make up for the missed lessons in poetry, calligraphy, and calligraphy interpretation in a short period of time and reach the top 2%?

What's more, on the surface there are still more than two months to prepare for the county examination, but there is an information gap here, that is, you must never use modern transportation speed to measure ancient times.

Taking the water route from Chengdu to Hejiang down the Yangtze River is slightly faster, but the return trip still takes six or seven days. If you are in a hurry, you cannot take the water route from Hejiang to Chengdu, but must take the official land road paved along the river.

Although the official roads of the Song Dynasty were well-built, with a post station every 20 miles and a post station every 40 miles, it would still take about ten days to travel between two places by land, even on horseback, unless you ran for your life.

Besides, it’s impossible to stay in Chengdu for just one day and then come back, right?
Therefore, although the county examination was apparently still more than two months away, Lu Beigu actually only had a little over a month to prepare.

Improving grades is not only time-sensitive, but also a heavy task.

Because he has to catch up on everything except policy essays.

Among the three subjects in the exam, poetry, calligraphy and calligraphy, the easiest to improve is calligraphy, which only requires rote memorization.

As long as ordinary scholars are willing to work hard to memorize the "Analects of Confucius", they can answer six or seven out of ten questions correctly.

The reason I say this is that besides not being able to remember clearly during the exam, the person who sets the questions may also be very abnormal.

How perverted is it?

It would be fine if they just cut out the content before and after, or even just leave one or two words for the candidates, and these one or two words often appear repeatedly in "The Analects of Confucius".

Let's take the most extreme example: the title contains only two words: "Zi Yue". Of course, the actual situation is definitely not that extreme, but it will give some clues.

As for how to determine which sentence the original text is, it depends on the punctuation.

Well, fortunately, punctuation marks had already appeared in the Song Dynasty.

If you travel back to before the Song Dynasty, you will have to study punctuation yourself.

But no matter what, the entire Analects of Confucius only has about 10,000 words. Although this body's memory ability is not very good, Lu Beigu has his own method of memory.

Therefore, he believed that it would not be a problem to improve his skills to the point where he could answer eight or nine questions correctly in a short period of time, or even all ten questions correctly if he was lucky.

As for poetry and prose, one needs to be more familiar with rhyme, format, and subject matter, and then do a lot of training to prepare some fixed templates.

Therefore, it is not particularly difficult to improve your poetry and prose, it just takes more time.

For Lu Beigu, the most difficult thing is actually Mo Yi.

Although Mo Yi's questions are taken from the two books "Spring and Autumn Annals" and "Book of Rites", these two books are not simple, especially "Spring and Autumn Annals", which is famous for its "subtle words with profound meanings".

From the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, Confucian classics have always been the foundation of the family tradition of aristocratic families. Because of this, in the long process of inheritance, many schools of thought with different understandings of the same classics were born.

Different schools of thought gave different interpretations for the same sentence or even the same word. Even the Song Dynasty court could not provide a question bank with standard answers.

In addition, after the "Qingli Education Promotion", the imperial court encouraged the setting of questions on the meaning of Mo Yi to focus on the personal understanding of the candidates.

So, while some questions have universally accepted standard answers, many questions don't have any at all.

However, there is always a way out, because Song Confucian scholars abandoned commentaries and went straight to the meaning of the classics. In fact, they focused more on exploring the historical characteristics of "Spring and Autumn Annals". Many questions on the meaning of the classics tested the understanding of historical events in "Spring and Autumn Annals".

Even for questions about commentaries and commentaries, there are traces to follow. In addition to studying the relevant content in the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals or the "Five Classics Commentary", you can also directly study the writings of the "Three Masters of the Early Song Dynasty", namely Hu Yuan, Sun Fu and Shi Jie, on the "Spring and Autumn Annals" and "Book of Rites".

Among them, Sun Fu was the most important Spring and Autumn scholar in the early Northern Song Dynasty. He took "respecting the king" as the main theme of the Spring and Autumn Annals. His interpretation of the scriptures was different from the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals. He wrote "Explanation of Respecting the King in the Spring and Autumn Annals" in twelve volumes and "General Theory of the Spring and Autumn Annals" in three volumes.

The book "The Spring and Autumn Annals: A Study of Respecting the King" has a particularly profound influence on the Confucian academic circles of the Song Dynasty today, and this book is also one of the reference books for the Mo Yi examination.

Therefore, when Lu Beigu studies Mo Yi, he needs to pick out the key points and spend the least amount of time to achieve the greatest improvement.

"In the ten-day test after Qingming Festival, at least the test scores for Tiejing and Moyi must be among the top 20 in the county school!"

"Within two months, while maintaining a level of above A-medium in policy essays, you must improve your calligraphy skills to above A-lower, your poetry and prose skills to above B-upper, and your calligraphy skills to above B-medium, and get into the top five in the county!"

"Only in this way can you have a chance to enter the state school!"

Lu Beigu rubbed off the charcoal marks with the sole of his shoe and stomped his feet.

Besides this, he had something else on his mind, which was that after the Cold Food Festival, he would have to go with Li Pan to meet that "important person", and he had to think about what to say in advance.

After all, his plan was a bit shocking.
As for the money, Lu Beigu was just a little worried.

Although money is needed for purchasing a large number of books or renting a house to transfer one's hometown, it does require money.

But Lu Beigu believed that with his talent, he could definitely solve this problem without having to worry about his sister-in-law.

Even so, when he stood up and saw the stone table in the yard without the account book, he sighed sincerely.

"A penny can make a hero fall!"

(End of this chapter)