Article 100 Zhaojiao Abacus
It wasn't dark yet.
Another day of studying has come.
After Cheng Zhao officially became the teacher of the four children, he became much more particular about his classes.
He stood, while his four sons sat, swaying their heads and reciting the Three Character Classic with him, over and over again.
Wu Huiniang didn't stay idle while lying in bed; she also read along with Cheng Zhao. Da Shan's mind was slow, so she had to help him remember some things so that she could remind him when he asked her questions at night.
Cheng Wanwan locked herself in the inner room and pulled out the thick agricultural book from under the bed.
The first half of the book is a historical introduction to locusts, from ancient times to the present, about the disasters and turmoil caused by locusts. It is not until around page 300 that it begins to formally talk about how to control locusts, but it keeps talking about how to prevent them, such as large-scale water conservancy projects, planting crops such as soybeans that locusts do not eat, and raising large numbers of chickens and ducks in advance... But it's too late for all of these.
Finally, pesticides were mentioned. Pesticides can repel locusts, but because pesticide residues remain in the fields, affecting the nutrition and taste of rice, and not in line with the concept of green environmental protection, modern agriculture generally does not use this method.
But in ancient times, as long as you had something to eat, who cared about its nutritional value?
But getting the pesticide out is also a big problem; we can't let Zhao Youjin take the blame again.
The reading outside the door stopped, so Cheng Wanwan had to put down her book for the time being, as she was preparing to teach arithmetic.
"San Niu, let me test you first: what is thirteen plus four?"
Zhao Sanniu's forehead was covered in sweat.
He calmed himself down, counted on his fingers, and realized he didn't have enough, so he borrowed Zhao Sidan's fingers as well.
Cheng Zhao asked him curiously, "San Niu, what are you doing?"
“Count!” Zhao Sanniu started to say, but then forgot where he was on the list and had to start over. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen, count four more… I know, Mother, it’s seventeen!”
Cheng Wanwan almost shed tears of emotion. San Niu had finally learned to calculate, and all her hard work teaching him for so many days had not been in vain.
Just as she was about to continue teaching, Cheng Zhao walked into the inner room without making a sound, opened a chest, and took out an abacus.
As soon as the abacus was taken out, Zhao Ergou's eyes lit up. Every time he went to town to deliver goods, he would see those shopkeepers with a small abacus hanging on their bodies. With just a few fingers, they could calculate how much goods they needed and how much money they needed. He was almost envious to death.
Cheng Zhao said, "From now on, we'll use an abacus for arithmetic; we won't need to count on our fingers anymore."
Cheng Wanwan quickly gave up her seat.
Cheng Zhao was simply her savior.
She had actually wanted to teach abacus for a long time. It is difficult for young children to learn addition and subtraction, but they can learn abacus very quickly. Once they learn how to move the abacus beads, they can get the answer to arithmetic problems of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands instantly.
However, the original owner of this body was illiterate, and her inexplicable ability to use an abacus would contradict her character, and she herself wasn't very good at it, so she was afraid of misleading others.
Cheng Zhao placed the abacus beads on the table and said calmly, "Let's take a look at the structure of the abacus first..."
The four boys were very serious, eagerly absorbing the unfamiliar knowledge. Zhao Ergou even tried it out himself, and a strange feeling spread from his fingertips to his heart. When he looked at Cheng Zhao, his previous resistance was finally gone.
Cheng Wanwan tiptoed out of the main room to the kitchen to boil water for the children to bathe later.
As soon as she stepped outside, she saw a dark figure crouching against the wall. She was startled. The figure raised its head, revealing Zhao Tiezhu's face.
"Auntie, it's me," Zhao Tiezhu said awkwardly. "I... I just wanted to hear what Cousin Cheng was saying, I'm... I'll be leaving now..."
Cheng Wanwan walked over and said softly, "If you want to learn, go in and learn together."
Zhao Tiezhu blinked and hesitated, "But...but my grandma definitely wouldn't let me bring her an egg every day..."
Cheng Wanwan chuckled: "Go in and ask Cheng Zhao if he's willing to teach you. If he is, it's okay if you don't take the eggs."
Zhao Tiezhu rushed in immediately, his eyes sparkling, and said, "Cousin Cheng, can I learn to read and use abacus with you? I... I'll try to persuade my grandma to give me tuition. I might not be able to afford eggs, but I think I can give her a bundle of firewood. I wonder if that's okay?"
Cheng Zhao said repeatedly, "No tuition fee is needed. Just grab a stool and sit down to listen together."
His second aunt had already paid him five taels of silver for his work. Whether he taught four students or five, it made little difference to him.
The boys were particularly fond of abacus beads and kept talking to Cheng Zhao for almost an hour before finally stopping.
As the night grew deeper, Cheng Wanwan woke up in the middle of the night.
She quietly left the yard, walked to the big locust tree, dug out the wires that had been buried under the tree, filled the hole, and then took the solar panels off the haystack. She took all of these things back to the yard, hiding the long wires in the front yard wall and covering them with dry grass, and placing the solar panels on the roof...
"Second Aunt, what are you doing?"
A voice rang out behind her, and Cheng Wanwan was so frightened that she almost lost her mind.
She glanced at what was in front of her; the wires were all hidden, otherwise it would have been hard to explain. The solar panels on the ground were barely visible in the pitch-black night, so Cheng Zhao shouldn't suspect anything...
She turned around with a smile: "Zhao'er, why are you awake? Go back and sleep for a while longer."
Cheng Zhao could vaguely see that Cheng Wanwan was covered in sweat and panting heavily. It was the middle of the night, and his second aunt was still up working. It was even more tiring than he had imagined.
How could he have accepted the money from his second aunt so readily before?
"Second Aunt, let me help you."
He bent down and picked up the solar panel from the ground.
He frowned: "What is this?"
It felt strange; it wasn't wood, nor was it iron, and it was hard to see clearly in the moonlight.
"Ahem, it's something to keep out the rain," Cheng Wanwan said casually. "Dashan and Ergou are tired from the day, so I'm planning to do this myself. You can help Auntie put it on the roof so it won't leak when it rains."
Cheng Zhao, unsuspecting, helped Cheng Wanwan put the things up.
After finishing her work, Cheng Wanwan calmly went back to sleep.
Cheng Zhao's sleeping mat was originally in Cheng Wanwan's room, but Zhao Sanniu's snoring was so loud that he made an excuse to move it to the main room and slept on the floor in the middle.
This was his second night at Cheng Wanwan's house. He tossed and turned, but finally fell asleep.
As soon as the rooster crowed for the first time, Cheng Zhao sat up. He tidied up the hay on the ground, rolled up his bedding and put it in the inner room, and then went to wash his clothes.
He had been teaching late yesterday and hadn't had time to wash his clothes. Si Dan told him that in this house, he had to do his own things and no one would help him.
When he was at the academy, there were hired workers there to wash his clothes. At home, his nanny would wash them for him. You could say he had never washed his own clothes. She would put the clothes in a basin, rub them a few times to remove the mud, and that was it. Then she would hang them to dry by the wall in the courtyard.
After he went to attend to other matters, Wu Huiniang silently tore off his outer garment, added some wood ash, rubbed it, and washed it until it was clean and white before hanging it up to dry again.
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