TEACHERS FACE NUMBER OF HURDLES IN RURAL AREAS
Online education highlights plight of pupils in countryside
Shu Hang, a mathematics teacher at a village primary school in Xiangyang, Hubei province, has remained largely alone on the school’s grounds since the end of January.
During holidays, the small group of teachers at the school take turns as campus caretakers.
Shu, 32, who teaches secondgrade students at Erwang Primary School and was due to take care of the campus during Spring Festival, drove to the school on Jan 28.
He decided to remain after roads were closed due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, making it difficult for colleagues to reach the school, which is located in Juwan in the countryside.
A lockdown was enforced in Xiangyang on Jan 27.
During the outbreak, Shu has acted as a cleaner, spraying disinfectant in classrooms, dormitories and toilets. As a gardener, he weeds and trims trees on the campus, and as a guard he wears a uniform and operates from a small gatehouse.
Since Feb 10, Shu and 17 colleagues have been giving lectures online for the first time in their careers.
On school day afternoons, Shu gives three math lessons, while in the mornings, a colleague gives three lessons in Chinese-language studies.
The school has 18 teachers for its 172 students, who come from four nearby villages.
The school, set in the midst of golden rapeseed flowers and verdant crops, is some distance from locals’ homes and is connected by road to the nearest village about 1 kilometer away.
Shu has been home only twice to collect fresh clothing — in January and early February — spending the remainder of his time on campus. He has taught at the school since the fall semester in 2017, after being transferred from another rural elementary school in Juwan.
He became a village teacher in Juwan in 2013, after graduating from college and serving in the army for two years.
“As a young single man, there is not much to do at home under the lockdown, so I would rather stay here and work. I don’t feel scared or lonely — I have a full day’s work and time flies,” he said.
Every few days, Shu holds video chats with parents who live in the nearby county seat. The headmaster often visits the school and leaves food at the gate. Sometimes, the pair talk on either side of the gate, observing social distancing.
Shu is keeping busy with his teaching job and his other roles. He and other teachers at rural schools spend a great deal of time adapting to online education, which is especially challenging for older members of staff.
Since the start of the outbreak, Cheng Kaixiu, 55, head teacher at Juwan Central Primary School in Xiangyang, has learned to teach by using video apps. However, she finds it hard to spend several hours a day staring at a small screen when she teaches and corrects students’ homework, which is submitted online.
She wears reading glasses, but the light from her cellphone is hard on her eyes, making them water. To cope with this problem, she projects images from her phone onto the wall with a light-emitting diode lamp.
Shu, who has found it easier to adapt to online education, has downloaded teaching videos to make his lessons more lifelike and help students better understand the outbreak. But one or two students are always missing in his class during online sessions.
In recent years, the central government and local authorities have placed increased emphasis on the quality of basic education in rural areas. They have invested a significant amount to enhance infrastructure construction and the quality of teachers.
At Shu’s school, a new three-story dormitory accommodates students who live far from the campus. Computer and PowerPoint presentations are commonly used in classes, and more than half the teachers are relatively young.
However, with the nation turning to online education during the viral outbreak, the plight of rural pupils has been highlighted.
Despite the fact that 854 million Chinese were using the internet by June last year, as of 2018, only 38.4 percent of rural areas had access to cyberspace, far lower than the national average, according to the 43rd China Statistical Report on Internet Development released last year.
Education in remote areas saw smartphones suddenly become daily necessities. Some rural pupils have missed virtual classes, as they do not have a phone or access to the internet.
Chang Yan, who teaches ninthgrade students at Juwan Second Junior High School in Xiangyang, said a poverty-stricken student of hers had cried during a phone call to her, as she was afraid of missing an online class.
There is just one phone at the student’s home, where there is no internet access. Due to its small memory, the phone usually jams when used to surf the internet. Without an internet subscription, the girl was also unable to attend classes.
Some of Shu’s students have missed online sessions because they only have one phone to share with siblings, and when lessons overlap, someone has to give way.
Some rural families cannot afford to install broadband at home, or to buy several phones — or even just one — for their children. Parents are also worried that frequent access to a mobile could lead to an addiction to video games or harm their children’s eyesight.
Education authorities and rural teachers are trying hard to bridge the digital divide.
In Juwan, schools have collected the cellphone numbers of students from families in financial difficulties and have supplied them to telecom companies, which provide 20 gigabytes of digital service free of charge for each person per month for online education.
At night, Shu phones students who have missed online classes to give them details of the lessons. Chang said she paid for a cable television subscription for the student who cried, enabling her to watch state-approved lessons.
Rural teachers are examining every possible way to help vulnerable students.
Some have loaned their cellphones to poor pupils. With shops closed due to the outbreak, Zhang Xiaohong, a teacher at Mingde Primary School in Xiangyang, received a request from one mother to help buy a smartphone for her child. Zhang asked a friend, who owns a phone store, to open the shop. Because the roads were closed, Zhang walked to the family’s home to deliver the phone.
At two middle schools in Juwan, teachers of ninth-grade pupils arrived on campus to pack textbooks and other materials the students had not taken home for the winter vacation, and had them delivered to their homes.
The impact of online classes is often limited as students do not have their textbooks at home.
Teachers have also asked Party secretaries attending meetings in the town about the outbreak to take textbooks to students, and have been helped with such deliveries by drivers obtaining necessities for villagers. Xiangyang made it a rule that textbooks had to be delivered to students by March 18.
Compared with other teachers, ninth-grade educators such as Chang are under greater pressure.
Along with the gaokao (national college entrance examination), the zhongkao (senior high school entrance exam) offers a chance for rural students to shake off poverty and change their future. The zhongkao is usually held in Hubei in June, and time is running out.
Chang, who is anxious about one of her students taking this exam amid the disruption caused by the virus, said, “I’m afraid that I will fail to meet my responsibilities.”
During a visit to the boy’s home last year, she found there was only one cellphone in the house, which could not be linked to the internet. The student felt too embarrassed to ask for help.
She phoned the boy and also contacted the village council through the town government for help. The student finally attended online classes at a village official’s home.
Ma Quanmin, a teacher at Juwan First Junior High School, said: “The delay in starting the new school term caused by the COVID-19 outbreak has significantly increased the psychological pressure on ninthgrade students.”
The virus has disrupted the pace of learning, affecting in particular children whose parents have left rural areas for work in large cities, those from single-parent homes and those with disabilities.
It took more than 10 phone calls from teachers to persuade one student to take part in online classes.
Li Liangying, a colleague of Ma’s and head teacher in the ninth grade, has a girl in her class who comes from a poverty-stricken family. The girl’s father has died and her mother has a mental illness. The student failed to submit homework and repeatedly withdrew from online study groups.
After Li made a number of calls to the girl to boost her confidence, she finally returned to the class.
To celebrate Spring Festival, most migrant workers returned to their families and became stranded in their hometown due to the pandemic.
Ma Shuangwei, head of Fanwan Primary School in Juwan, said: “As students have not been at school, I am worried whether parents are supervising their children’s studies at home.”
Compared with their city counterparts, rural parents are at a disadvantage when it comes to finances, ability and time to guide their children in remote learning.
Two young parents in Juwan quarreled with each other as both were unwilling to lend their child their mobile phone for online classes, as they wanted to play with the devices.
Liu Changbin, head of the town’s education authority, said, “It’s difficult for many to imagine that such a thing can happen nowadays, but it’s a true grassroots story.”
When classes restart at schools, Juwan intends to use weekends to allow pupils who have fallen behind in their studies to catch up.
Given the disparity between rural and urban areas, students from the countryside may not perform as well as they should do if they cannot attend physical classes.
“This gap certainly exists,” Liu said. “The point is not to make it too huge.”
Online education has meant that Shu has had to slow the pace of his lessons to allow his students sufficient time to review them every other day.
He hopes the outbreak will end soon, as he fears his 27 pupils are falling behind due to the disruption. In a unified final test last semester, his class ranked second in the town for math, and he is eyeing first place.
“They have a strong desire for knowledge,” Shu said.