Photo: Cai Xingzhuo
Xiong Guochao still remembers that in 1991, his first job was to be the person in charge of the Middle School in Jietou Township, Tengchong, Yunnan. Of the 420 yuan of tuition and miscellaneous fees received from the children, 360 were used by Xiong Guochao to purchase a card holder tape recorder. This helped four male teachers who could not sing a lot. "Singing from the East Mountain to the West Mountain, I am not afraid to sing out of tune." But without singing, a school is dead, like a person without a soul. ”
Almost at the same time, less than two hundred kilometers away, Less than two hundred kilometers away, Shuichang Township, Wang Guoguang also graduated from the normal school, from the most remote in Shuichang Township, the school results ranked first in the township, began a long teaching career. Starting with the students to build basketball hoops, raise money to buy wood, dig their own basketball court..... Physical education and music classes that children had never heard of appeared in Bingdou Elementary School.
In the past thirty years, the two have had a lot of intersections, and they also visit each other from time to time in today's convenient transportation. However, at the beginning of the work, in the 90s, when quality education had just been implemented, they invariably became the first batch of experimental quality education people.
Such a sprout came from my own personal experience. What impressed Xiong Guochao to this day was a physical education class he took in the second grade of teacher training. The teacher assigned the task, saying that the next morning, "boys should practice 'vaulting horses' and girls should practice 'jumping goats'". Xiong Guochao pondered all night: even if a girl could jump over the back of a goat, she would never be able to cross a horse. It wasn't until the next day that he learned about vaulting as a sport.
Looking back today, from Zhongpai Primary School, he has begun to try to find some new tricks outside the traditional way of education, although the initial attempt seems to be less mature, more like an after-school activity - taking students to the mountains to find wild fruits, or continuing the "survival skills" of chopping firewood. Later, with the card holder tape recorder, there was a singing voice in the school. Singing, in Xiong Guochao's relatively naïve idea at the time, was one of the ways to make a person confident, which was also related to his own experience. At that time, the song he taught to the students, "Let's Swing the Double Oar", Xiong Guochao still remembers that he did not learn how to sing it until the second year of junior high school. When he went to normal school, many of his classmates "could sing a song and dance." Compared with his own self hiding in the corner at that time, Xiong Guochao hopes that "my children are at least a little stronger than themselves."
However, the contradiction between the pursuit of scores and the cultivation of interest has always existed. In Xiong Guochao's introduction, for nearly half of the rural children who cannot enter ordinary high schools, the middle school entrance examination is now "a thousand troops and horses crossing a single wooden bridge". "The score is still important, it can take you to a certain platform." Wang Guoguang also thinks so.
The concept of quality education was proposed in the 1980s and implemented in the 1990s, but in Wang Guoguang's memory, 2004, after his successful bid for the principal of Shuichangxiang Central Primary School, was still an "era of pursuing scores". Under such a background, Xiong Guochao faced many obstacles when promoting his own education methods. Doubts come from all sides – not every child likes this way of teaching, and at the same time, obstacles come from leaders and parents, as well as teachers who suddenly become multi-tasking. Faced with such a situation, the two principals gradually have their own countermeasures.
Xiong Guochao thought of the four-year Olympic Games, and his solution was to introduce the model of competitive sports into "regular cultural and sports activities with a certain degree of competitiveness". Up to now, these competition-type literary and art evenings have become a big thing in the hearts of parents in Jietou Town, and these evenings have also been made live by Xiong Guochao, with the highest number of hits approaching one million. Seeing their children standing on the stage and performing, with another side that they can't see in ordinary days, the parents of students have become the first group of people to support.
Similarly, since more than a decade ago, the way of the party has also been used by Wang Guoguang to cultivate children's interest. In 2004, after Wang Guoguang became the principal of Shuichangxiang Central Primary School, he began to hold the first June 1st Children's Literary and Art Evening, which also introduced a competition mechanism. Later, two guitar-loving volunteer teachers formed the school's first country rock band, and the drum kit that had been shelved was also used, and the band went all the way out of the mountain to participate in the performance, giving the children a chance to see the outside world.
It can be understood that it is precisely because no one denies the importance of cultural classes, and when the quality education explored by Xiong Guochao also indirectly had a positive impact on the performance of cultural classes, the opposition gradually weakened. Xiong Guochao believes that "human differences exist objectively", and the cultivation of interest in other fields also provides students with more possibilities than cultural talents from a practical point of view.
In their thirty years of teaching, the two principals have never given up the opportunity to go out to see the mountains. Like Xiong Guochao's own initial experience, he hopes to transform the information from the outside world into the self-confidence of students through the quality education he has explored. In 2017 and 2018, Xiong Guochao and Wang Guoguang were successively selected for the Ma Yun Rural Principal Program, and in addition to receiving development funds, they also went to the United States and Israel to exchange and study. It was one of the few opportunities for them to go abroad to communicate, and it could be the farthest they could travel. A few years ago, Wang Guoguang was also invited by the "Harvard China Education Forum" to share his rural education experience on the other side of the ocean. "I'm like a child being carried by an adult, afraid of losing myself."
Contrary to what you might think, Boston looks more like a small town to Kingdom Light. He didn't speak English and felt like an illiterate man who was carried away by literate people. Shuichangxiang Central Primary School already has more than two dozen extracurricular activity courses, and perhaps in the near future, the sound of English reading will also appear on campus.
