In the summer of 2017, at the invitation of the students, Huang Deng, who teaches at a secondary university in Guangzhou, visited the students' hometown in Tengchong, Yunnan Province, and began a five-year home visit journey. After more than a decade of teaching, Huang Deng's roster has left the names of thousands of students, and the idea that it is not enough to just observe students from the podium. In her classes, 60 to 70 percent of the students come from rural and county towns. These second-class students and their families are the silent majority who are not often noticed and understood. High-speed rail, long-distance buses, electric vehicles, motorcycles, ......Diverting from the bustling city of Guangzhou, Huang Lan travels from the mountains, fields and coasts of Guangzhou, walking through the roads and campuses where students have been studying since childhood, and talking to their parents, relatives and friends. Going deep into the specific and dense daily life, a vivid growth path can be extended in front of the yellow light. She truly saw how these families and the individuals in them rolled in the tide of the times, trying their best to break through the cracks in society. For rural children, test-oriented education is a way to maintain a semblance of fairness in a way that is extremely attritional. She was also able to re-understand education: where does the motivation and tenacity for self-growth come from outside of homogeneous schooling?
The road to breakout. At the end of 2017, my student Zhang Zhengmin and I returned to her hometown, a small town in the hilly region of southwestern Guangdong. Jeongmin once summed up his path to study in one sentence: "I climbed all the way from the most rural place to the city." At Jeongmin's house, she dragged a tattered cardboard box out of an old cabinet. I counted them carefully, and there were forty-one award certificates and forty-nine certificates. There are also nearly 200 ballpoint pens that have run out of ink - they are a testimony of Zhengmin's hard work in his third year of high school.
It was a moment that shook me. In fact, such shocks are repeated during home visits. As a teacher, I never realized what a difficult path my students had taken. In 2005, when I joined Guangdong F College as a teacher, the university had already expanded its enrollment. A chain of discrimination in higher education is clear. This discrimination gradually takes on a kind of moral criticism and arrogance. I have the illusion that it is much easier for students to get into universities than I did at that time, and it doesn't have to be hard to get into two colleges.
Stills from "The Big Exam".
Home visits have changed my perception upside down. Reading is not an easy task for my students. The hardships of the road to school are unforgettable for many children. Mo Yuansheng's home is located in Yunan County, in western Guangdong Province. In the scorching summer heat, he and I walked on a country road for more than an hour. This is the distance between the young Mo Yuansheng, who walks to school with a torch every day when the sky is just dawning. In junior high school, Mo Yuansheng went to bed at one o'clock in the morning every day, got up at half past five in the morning, ate his mother's steamed frozen buns, and pedaled a bicycle for an hour to go to school.
Zhang Zhengmin's home is at the foot of the mountain, the school is at the top of the mountain, and he has to walk up and down the mountain road for an hour to go to school every day. She is most afraid of rainy days. After walking through mud and gravel trails, I arrived at school soaked wet. Jeongmin is not tall, and she attributed it to the fact that her schoolbag was too heavy when she was a child, and her nutrition was not good. There was no cafeteria at school, and her mother's lunch was often porridge, soybeans, or self-planted peanuts. At lunchtime, the humble meals tend to become rancid and tasty, and you can only pick and eat a little bit.
After a lot of hardship, the children compete for the extremely scarce educational resources in the township. Student He Jingjun's home is in Hengshan Town, Lianjiang, Guangdong. When he was in the sixth grade of primary school, He Jingjun's mother gave him a death goal: he must be admitted to the two top classes of the school's junior high school. For this reason, his mother forced him not to watch TV after 7 p.m. The mother with a junior high school education learned the textbooks first, and accompanied her son at night, explaining the knowledge points little by little, and persisted for a whole year. During the winter vacation of the sixth grade, my uncle also took Jingjun to Nanning and started to tutor English from scratch. In the end, the general of the border army squeezed into the top class.
Many people believe that test-oriented education is relatively fair to children in rural areas, at least providing them with a path to study. But during my home visits, I had a strong feeling that for rural children, test-oriented education is maintaining a semblance of fairness in an extremely attritional way. Like urban children, the creativity of rural children is stifled in the process. My student Wei Hua mentioned to me that he was repeatedly criticized by his teachers because he loved to ask questions since he was a child. When he was in junior high school, he questioned the answer to a question, and the teacher asked him on the spot not to ask any more questions in the future, which led to the isolation of the whole class.
Stills from "Youth Pie".
More children are becoming cannon fodder in exams. At the beginning, the reason why He Jingjun's family did their best to help him be admitted to the key class of junior high school was because He Jingjun's mother judged that if he was not assigned to the key class in junior high school, there would be no possibility of entering high school. In Jingjun's hometown, I met his junior high school classmate, Brother Ming, who was studying in the ordinary class. He told me that the students in the regular class had long since given up the idea of going on to higher education. In the first year of junior high school, Brother Ming's homeroom teacher once said, "It doesn't matter if you read it or not, you have a graduation certificate anyway." In his ordinary class, there were still 60 students in the first semester of the second year of junior high school, and in the second semester, there were only 30 students left, and the number of dropouts was as high as half.
After graduating from junior high school, Brother Ming went to work in a factory in Shenzhen. Jingjun was successfully admitted to Lianjiang No. 1 Middle School. In the junior high school of Jingjun, there were only ten students who could be admitted to Lianjiang No. 1 Middle School that year. On the surface, Jingjun has obtained the best educational resources in his hometown through hard work, but in fact, in the face of the college entrance examination, this "advantage" is vulnerable in the face of regional differences. There were more than 1,600 students in 22 classes in that class, and none of the liberal arts students were able to pass the first class, and the students with the best science exams were admitted to South China Agricultural University.
Most of my students are precocious and sensible, and they are extremely sensitive to their own situation and destiny from an early age. Wei Hua's parents work in Dongguan, where he used to attend primary school. There were some well-to-do children in the school who paid Wei Hua to copy their homework for them. Although Wei Hua accumulated a small treasury without his parents' knowledge, he keenly felt the strangeness of the environment and took the initiative to propose to his parents that the school was not good and hoped to change it.
Stills from "Little Joy".
The father of the student He Jian attached great importance to his education, so he stayed in his hometown to take care of him and did not go out to work. In 2008, when the family's economy was unsustainable, it was 12-year-old He Jian who stood up and made a decision for his father. He told his father: "If the family has no money, even if I study well in the future, it will still be in vain." ”At the same time, he promised his father that he would work hard to get into the best local high school. From then on, Mom and Dad prepared the firewood for the year. He Jian grows vegetables and cooks alone. At night, he didn't dare to sleep in an empty house, even in the summer, he had to cover his eyes with a quilt.
In the midst of all the difficulties, He Jian kept his promise. In the tide of the flooding and erosion of electronic products in the countryside, this teenager resisted all kinds of **, used hobbies such as chess, table tennis, and singing to relieve loneliness and loneliness, and finally entered the best local middle school with the top three in the grade and the first place in the class.
From the countryside to the second university, my students' families have done their best to do their best. During home visits, I may not be able to meet the parents of the students, who often work outside the home all year round. Even if we were lucky enough to be able to meet us, our conversations took place in sweet potato fields, pig pens, delivery rooms, and farms, in between busy labors such as pigweed, boiling pig food, weaving fishing nets, picking couriers, and repairing bicycles. The pressure of survival makes the day-to-day work tightly scheduled.
When Mo Yuansheng was in the third grade of primary school, his parents, who were working outside the home, took him and his sister to him. At an aluminum factory in Nantou Town, Zhongshan City, his father cleared out a small wooden bed in the factory's dirty warehouse and told Mo Yuansheng: This will be our home in the future. Aluminium smelting involves pollution, and at every environmental inspection, Yuan Sheng and his mother curl up and hide in a nearby chimney.
The student's mother works more than 15 hours a day. In 1997, Zaoliang's father failed to raise oysters. In order to support the family, my mother started making tofu at 2 o'clock in the morning every day, and went to the vegetable market to sell it before 6 o'clock in the morning. At 8 a.m., my mother had to go home to take care of the housework, then fry the unsold white tofu into fried tofu, and ride a tricycle to sell it again in the afternoon. A plate of tofu sells for fifteen yuan, earning an average of more than 100 yuan a day. It was with this relatively stable cash income that the family slowly repaid the debts owed by oyster farming, and had the capital to raise pigs, and then they were able to use the income provided by selling pigs to pay for the children's increasing tuition fees, as well as large expenses such as building houses and paying family planning fines.
In addition to struggling to make a living, these parents with low education level are also influencing their children with their simple educational concepts. Student Wei Hua remembered that his father forced him to practice calligraphy since he was a child, did not allow perfunctory writing, and set a rule that he was not allowed to play and watch TV before his homework was completed. When he was a child, Wei Hua was so active that he couldn't sit still, and his father was tired and tired after work, so he would accompany his son to study for two hours every day. In junior high school, Wei Hua returned to his hometown in Xingning from Dongguan to study, and his father resolutely gave up the stall business in Dongguan and returned to his hometown to accompany Wei Hua for two years. For a family that is constantly on the move, it is clear that this requires a strong belief in education.
Stills from "Childhood in the South".
They. One of my biggest regrets in the past 5 years of home visits is that I have not been able to reach more girls' families. There are more girls than boys among my students. They work harder than the boys: in class, they sit in the front row, while the boys nest in the back. I also don't often see girls' names on the make-up list. They also tend to have stronger expectations and aspirations for the future. But in comparison, they are not as willing to show themselves as the boys. Some of the girls had invited me to visit their homes, but when I was asked to buy a ticket, they retreated.
I understand this retreat. It takes a lot of courage to show the complicated family situation and the hidden path of growing up. In the limited number of home visits I have made to girls, I have also deeply felt that they have a harder journey than boys. In villages and towns, sending boys to university is usually the central goal of the whole family, while the general attitude of girls going to university is "no objection". During the home visits, I heard about the students' upbringing, and I felt that some naughty and unmotivated boys might have turned their lives around with the support of their families, and if they had been girls, they might have been given up.
Growing up in fragile rural families, girls are often the ones who bear the most burdens. Zheng Min's father is a farmer in the mountains of western Guangdong, and his mother is a Vietnamese bride. In 1992, after my mother was deceived into selling in China, she was bought by Zhengmin's father for 2,800 yuan. The annual tuition fee of Zhengmin High School is 1,960 yuan, and the monthly living expenses need 500 yuan. These hard expenses, my father can't pay out, and my mother goes out to work. Her uncle always instilled in her that it was useless for girls to study, and hoped that she would give up her high school studies as soon as possible. The elder brother, who did not graduate from junior high school, blatantly asked his sister for money after learning that his mother was supporting his sister's study.
This burden doesn't go away just because you go to college. For a long time in college, Jeongmin was in a state of boundless fear: she was afraid that her mother would not come back from visiting relatives in Vietnam: she was afraid that her brother would ask for money endlessly; Fear that my mother will get sick and lose the most precious person in the world; Fear that college classmates will know about the situation at home hurts their fragile self-esteem; I am afraid that I will not be able to find a good job after graduating from college and will not be able to meet the expectations of my family......In addition to her fear, she also felt guilty because her relatively free college life was the result of her mother's hardships.
Please answer 1988" stills.
Jeongmin said that he was able to go to college because of his mother. All the way to study, at every point of fate, her mother carried a piece of the sky for her, so that she could continue to walk. In 2005, the family had an unexpected harvest of oranges. Ignoring her father's opposition, her mother took the only 20,000 yuan she had on her body, borrowed from all over the world, raised more than 30,000 yuan, and went to the town to buy an old tiled house, so that Zhengmin could enter the school in the town, and ended the life of walking on the mountain road for two hours every day and eating a bad meal at noon.
Zhengmin's father once said that Zhengmin's high school is equivalent to "selling his mother to get money to study". Zhengmin's mother planted oranges, went up the mountain to chop wood, chopped bamboo for the paper mill, rolled firecrackers, weaved silkworm racks, went to the black factory to work as a small worker, went to the restaurant to work as a waiter, went to the construction site to mix cement, packed waste paper and loaded it into trucks, hid in the old forests in the deep mountains of Fujian to cut bamboo, and picked tea leaves in the Zhejiang tea field under the scorching sun. As a Vietnamese bride, her mother has no identity and can only work as a high-intensity, high-uncertainty casual worker.
"Making Mom Proud" has become the most powerful motivation for Jeongmin along the way, and she reminds herself: "You must come out, you must run forward regardless of everything." ”
This close connection between mother and daughter doesn't just happen to Jeong-min. Student Xiaojing's hometown is in Raoping, Chaozhou. Xiaojing is familiar with her mother's hands, which have calluses left by embroidery beads, as well as joint deformation caused by tea picking. When I was in middle school, my mother also rode a motorcycle every week, 80 kilometers round trip, to pick up Xiaojing and her younger brother.
Xiaojing's mother worked in a factory in Shenzhen in her early years, and was once very appreciated, and had the opportunity to do management work, but because of her marriage to Xiaojing's father, her mother returned to Raoping's village and became a foreign daughter-in-law. The missed opportunities in life make the mother regret, and it also profoundly affects the mother's expectations for her daughter. Someone in the family urged her to marry 24-year-old Xiaojing, but her mother thought that her daughter had something more important than getting married. She is also not like other parents, who hope that their children will take the civil service exam or find a stable career, but advocate that children can do whatever they want, and the only requirement is to stay in Guangzhou or Shenzhen as much as possible, eat with their ability, get rid of the cobweb-like human relations in their hometown, and see more people and the world.
I was originally a mountain" stills.
Determination and a way out.
During the journey of home visits, I was amazed by the determination and tenacity of students and families to break through the cracks. I was also able to get a new understanding of the growth of students from a single perspective of school education.
In the past, I thought that the children of the "post-90s" and "post-00s" were emotionally indifferent. For nearly a decade, I felt that the students' eyes were becoming more and more nonchalant. They didn't seem to care much about what I was saying and didn't bother to tell me what was going on with them. It's like wet firewood, and you can't order it.
But when I walked into the villages and old houses where the students grew up, I really touched the soft corners of their hearts. Many of my students have been left-behind children and have grown up with the emotional nourishment of their grandparents. Parents always have requirements for their children, but grandparent love is often unconditional and especially valuable. In S County, I went with my student Liao Wenyu to visit her grandmother. I was very impressed, that day, Wen Yu naturally ran into the room, found a pair of black old scissors, and carefully cut the old man's nails.
He Jingjun has been naughty and reckless since he was a child. But when he was in college, his grandfather had a stroke, and despite the dissuasion of his family, he often took a six- or seven-hour bus ride back to visit his grandfather. During the home visit, I noticed that every once in a while, he would go to his grandfather's room and help him walk slowly so that the old man could be more active. I am ashamed of this patience.
Whether it is from parents or grandparents, these emotions support children in the midst of hardship, and at some point become an opportunity for them to grow. Jing Jun told me that on his seventeenth birthday in the second year of high school, his grandfather told him that he wanted to go back to his hometown to build a house, but his nephews refused, and they carved up his grandfather's old mansion without leaving any way out for the old man. Thinking of the result of his grandfather's hard work and dedication for half of his life, Jing Jun hid in the classroom and cried. This family dispute became a secret rite of passage for him to say goodbye to his youth. From this, he vowed to study hard and let his grandfather gain more dignity. In the third year of high school, Jing Jun increased the score of the comprehensive science test from more than 80 to 130 points. In the end, the total score was only 4 points short of the undergraduate level.
Suddenly this summer" stills.
During the summer vacation of his third year of high school, Jing Jun and his companions went to Dongguan to work. They were surprised to find that the once bustling industrial area had long since become empty. Jing Jun originally thought that it would be easy to find a job, but after shopping for a few days, he found that there was no suitable position. Standing on the streets of Dongguan, he felt lost for the first time, and he didn't know where to go on the road of life. At that time, Jing Jun had already received an acceptance letter from a vocational college, but in the end he was determined to repeat his studies. He said: "My grandparents always say that there should be a college student in the family, and my younger brother is not sensible, as the eldest brother, I am not admitted to university, how can I drive my younger brother to work hard?" After repeating his studies for a year, Jing Jun accepted the management of the school's similar Hengshui model, increased his grades by more than 80 points, and was finally admitted to the law department of Guangdong F College.
After nearly 20 years of teaching, observing and thinking about all aspects of education, I have a feeling: a major problem in today's education is that the growth of students is above schoolwork, and many children are extremely lacking in real life experience and ignorant of the truth of life. And these second-class students of mine have followed their families on the road to making a living since they were young, and accepted the real baptism of the tide of life. In the process of labor, they have experienced the pain of skin cutting, and they have also been able to taste the joy of skin cutting. These experiences tend to make them exceptionally resilient and empowered.
Among my students, Wei Hua is a very special one. The vast majority of students will experience a big "crisis" when they enter college: the beautiful expectations of college in high school will quickly be replaced by information such as the depreciation of academic qualifications and employment pressure, so that they will fall into a period of confusion and confusion. Wei Hua is different. As soon as he entered college, he didn't skip classes, didn't bring his mobile phone, didn't look at his circle of friends, didn't have a ** account, and didn't use too much social software. As soon as he entered the school, Wei Hua focused on the school's various competitions, and decided that some competitions might provide motivation for entrepreneurship after graduation. He has thoroughly studied all kinds of documents and systems, and knows the timing of important competitions well. He also realized the importance of team building early on, and firmly believed that the university was the prototype of the team: "When three people get together, they should do something to come out, not have a meal".
During his college years, Wei Hua participated in various competitions such as the Internet, climbing plan, and challenge cup. The "Challenge Cup" is held every two years, which is difficult and has high gold content, he tried to declare in his freshman year, but ended in failure, and when he declared in his junior year, because he had clear goals, in-depth thinking and the accumulation of early experience, he quickly established the project. As a law student, he was not content with mock courtroom training. When he was a sophomore, Wei Hua noticed that it was illegal for the courier company at the school gate to charge late fees. In his junior year, he gathered evidence and filed a lawsuit with the court. Later, he learned that he had completed the first case in the country to sue a courier company for illegally charging late fees. After graduating, Wei Hua quickly pulled up a team and founded his own company.
Ordinary Glory" stills.
Wei Hua's strong mobility is partly due to his restless nature. He told me that he had a strong desire to "change the world" since he was a child. But through home visits, I also clearly saw the experience of daily life for Wei Hua.
Wei Hua's parents worked as small traders in Dongguan. When his parents were too busy, Wei Hua would go to the stall, collect money or solicit customers whenever he was free. From the very beginning of learning to do arithmetic, he noticed the secrets of stall economics. He also observes all kinds of people, who mix well and who don't, and what experiences and lessons are behind them. These social experiences have made him happy to experience his ability to do things and gain insight in the connection with adults. In college, Wei Hua liked to take a taxi. He would chat with the taxi driver in the car, and before getting out of the car, he would mostly reach an agreement with the driver: "The driver does not charge the taxi fee, and I will bear all their legal advice".
Before going to college, Wei Hua had already tried all kinds of things. When he was a freshman in high school, he ran a magazine, which was "not very ideal". In his sophomore year of high school, he lent the money he had saved to his uncle to raise crocodile turtles, but failed. In his junior year of high school, he and his parents raised chicks, "more than 200, and only more than 30 survived". These attempts made him accustomed to facing setbacks head-on: "If you want to fail, you should fail quickly, and if you fail more, success will come naturally". He didn't have much anxiety and internal friction when he entered college. Wei Hua, who lived in Dongguan, formed a simple concept: many ordinary workers can gain a foothold in Dongguan through hard work, and they don't need to worry about employment after graduating from college, and there will always be food. In this way, it is better to polish your ability steadily, and "when you don't know what to do, do what you can do first."
Most of my students are not like Wei Hua to start a business, they can live a down-to-earth life, have a stable and self-consistent heart, and also benefit from the experience of life. At the student's home, his mother told me that the day after Zao Liang received the university admission letter, she asked Zao Liang to go to the field to plant seedlings. The neighbor said, "You don't need to plant a field to get admitted to university!" Mom's answer: "I still have to eat when I am admitted to university." Zao Liang's mother said that she saw a girl in the village who was more and more pampered by her parents after being admitted to a junior college, and even if the couple worked in the fields until two o'clock in the afternoon, their daughter who stayed at home did not take the initiative to cook. After graduating from university, the girl traveled to Dongguan, Zhuhai, Zhanjiang, and even to Hunan and Heilongjiang, but she never found a suitable job.
In fact, letting children take on family responsibilities is a simple concept that Zaoliang's mother has always had. As the only boy in the family, Zao Liang did not receive extra pampering. He has been learning to cook since he was seven years old, and he and his sister take turns taking care of the family's lunch and dinner. The task of herding geese and cattle at home is generally undertaken by Zao Liang alone. During the vegetable harvesting season, early dawn is responsible for shoveling grass, pulling vegetables, and taking them to the stream for cleaning. When it gets dark, the family comes home and does their part: Morning is in charge of making dinner, Dad is going to feed the pigs, and Mom is tying up the cleaned vegetables so that they can be sold the tofu when they go to town early the next morning.
Stills from Grandma's New World.
Due to their university qualifications, most of my students struggle to find a job of their choice quickly when they graduate, and often need to go around for a few years before they can settle down. Wen Yu is different. Before graduating in 2019, she already had two job offers. One is from a state-owned enterprise in Guangzhou, and the other is from a postal enterprise in Foshan. In the employment environment at that time, both options were good, but neither was Wen Yu's favorite place. Prior to this, she had applied to a company in Guangzhou's public transport department, but unfortunately did not make it to the interview. Wen Yu's final decision was to muster up the courage to call the leader of the transportation company he liked and ask if he could arrange an interview. She eventually got the job she wanted through the interview she earned.
Wen Yu's "good luck" and courage were not unexpected to me. Among her peers, her calmness, ability and responsibility in her bones are particularly eye-catching. During the home visit, I learned that Wen Yu's biological parents divorced at an early age. The stepmother raised several children like a biological mother. In fact, the most critical factor for Wen Yu to have the opportunity to go to college came from her stepmother's persistence.
On the one hand, the mother requires the children to study hard, and on the other hand, to relieve the financial pressure on the family, she has always insisted on taking several children to do odd jobs to subsidize the family. Wen Yu remembers that when she was a child, she didn't want her parents to quarrel because of financial constraints, "I knew from a young age that the status quo could only be changed by myself." ”
During the first summer vacation, my mother took Wen Yu to Shenzhen for the first time, and followed her cousin to work in a handbag factory, starting at 8 p.m. and "working until 11 p.m. the next day." During the summer vacation of the third year of junior high school, Wen Yu entered the factory again, "the salary per hour is seven yuan". A girl who traveled with me couldn't stand the labor intensity of the factory, and after working for more than ten days, she was crying and going home. Wen Yu helped her properly handle the resignation, and she worked for 60 days and saved more than 4,000 yuan. This was the first time she realized: "I am a capable person".
In college, Wen Yu still adhered to the part-time work habits of middle school. "Supporting yourself through part-time work" is Wen Yu's minimum requirement for herself. During the summer vacation of her freshman year, she went to a hundred fruit orchards to do odd jobs. Because she made an excellent impression on the boss, every time the fruit shop was short of people, the boss would ask her to help and guarantee three times the salary during the holiday. Throughout college, Wen Yu went to a bubble tea shop to work part-time, worked as a shopping guide in a supermarket, did extracurricular care, and also worked as a translator. She supported herself and did not ask for a penny from her family.
**10,000 Fans Incentive Plan