Using poetry to solve children’s problems

BEIJING: A middle school student in a remote mountainous town in Yunnan province had written a poem lamenting her mother who died when she was five.

Kang Yu, the teacher who taught the girl how to write the poem, graduated from Renmin University of China in Beijing in 2015.

One month before her graduation, Kang, now 26, decided to move to Mangshui township in Yunnan’s Baoshan city and work as a teacher at a middle school.

Her decision was based on a desire to provide better educational opportunities that would allow the students to leave the township and see the outside world.

To help the less-disciplined students, Kang organised an afterschool study group to allow them to catch up with their peers. However, the students did not appreciate their “overcaring” new teacher.

One day in autumn 2015, Kang was teaching a calligraphy class when it began to rain.

All the students looked outside with great interest, so Kang decided to let them write poems about the rain and the sky.

One wrote: “When I was little, I would ask my grandma what the stars were. She would tell me that people become stars when they die. Now, my grandparents have become the brightest stars in the sky. And I often look at the starry sky, silently, waiting for the stars to talk to me.”

Kang said, “Compared with urban students, perhaps students in rural areas need a way to express their feelings and be heard more.”

Supported by the principal and other teachers, the school held eight poetry classes for students every year, two per season.

In 2017, Kang finished her twoyear teaching engagement at the school and returned to Beijing with the intention of studying overseas.

In China, Teachers Day falls on Sept 10.

On that date in 2017, Kang received a big box full of poems and letters written by students at her old school. She then abandoned her plans to study overseas.

She founded Enlighten our Future, a charity that teaches rural students how to write poems.

In less than two years, the organisation has provided poetry classes for more than 50,000 students at 609 primary and middle schools in Yunnan, Shandong and Henan provinces.