Three minutes before class, the preparation bell rang.
Huang Xiaolin, with gray hair and a strong physique, walked into the classroom and sat in the student seat.
This is a Chinese class. The Chinese teacher walked into the classroom slowly after the bell rang for 5 minutes.
The Chinese teacher didn't notice the abnormality. As soon as he entered the classroom, he picked up the book and read it word by word, pacing in the aisle while reading it.
As he read, he suddenly noticed Huang Xiaolin sitting among the students. He was obviously taken aback, and he continued to read the answer casually from the text.
Huang Xiaolin was the executive principal of Nayong No. 5 Middle School in Guizhou Province at the time. 2019 was his first year of retirement.
This Chinese class was a random class he listened to in Nayong Fifth Middle School.
Before coming to the No. 5 Middle School in Nayong, Guizhou Province, Huang Xiaolin worked as the principal for more than 30 years. He started from a township central school in his hometown of Jiangxi. Because of his excellent teaching results, he was later introduced to Guangzhou as a special talent.
However, this teaching support was only a short year, how much effect can he play?
"Isn't it a mistake to go to class like this?"
As soon as the get out of class bell rang, the Chinese teacher announced the end of get out of class and walked out of the classroom quickly.
Huang Xiaolin immediately chased him out, but the Chinese teacher continued to walk forward quickly. Huang Xiaolin had been chasing three or four classrooms before calling him.
"Are you preparing for your lesson?" Huang Xiaolin went straight to the subject.
The Chinese teacher said that he had prepared lessons.
Huang Xiaolin had taken the teaching materials of the Chinese teacher, and the whole book was clean and clear from beginning to end.
Huang Xiaolin's tone became severe: "You are in class like this, didn't you misunderstand others?"
On October 10, 2019, Huang Xiaolin stepped into the gate of Nayong No. 5 Middle School. What he saw was an old school.
This school was built in the 1980s. It is a small school with no canteen or dormitory. It is one of the few high schools that does not admit boarding students.
Many students rent houses nearby.
This is not Huang Xiaolin's first visit to Nayong County.
Two or three years ago, when he was the party secretary of Tianhe Middle School in Guangzhou, he led the team to Nayong Fourth Middle School several times.
What he learned at the time made him worry about local education.
Huang Xiaolin had listened to a local teacher's lecture: the teacher followed the text and the students were drowsy.
Huang Xiaolin used the local teacher's courseware to give the students two demonstration lessons. After the lecture, the students clapped excitedly and their eyes flashed.
Huang Xiaolin's class was in the cold winter. There were no heating facilities in the classroom. Many children in the class only wore school uniforms with a sweater inside. A boy was shaking with cold.
Seeing these thinly dressed children in front of him, Huang Xiaolin remembered his childhood.
He was born in a rural village in Xiushui County, Jiangxi Province, from a cold family background.
Huang Xiaolin felt uneasy every time he returned from Nayong, Guizhou.
He knows how important reading is to rural children, and he hopes to help Nayong's children.
At that time, Huang Xiaolin was two years away from retirement. He wanted to teach in Nayong, but both applications were rejected.
After he took up his post at Tianhe Middle School, this high school with mediocre grades became a star school with outstanding college entrance examination results.
Once Huang Xiaolin retired, he submitted an application for teaching support for the third time. This time, his new platform was in Nayong No. 5 Middle School.
Huang Xiaolin soon discovered that the situation in Nayong No. 5 Middle School was also not optimistic.
He described that "the local educational philosophy is still in the 1970s and 1980s."
The way for school leaders to understand teachers’ teaching abilities and work attitudes is mainly listening to reports and watching the teaching plans written by teachers. Huang Xiaolin explained: “In the past, the Internet was underdeveloped. If teachers didn’t write teaching plans, it meant they didn’t prepare for lessons. But now there is too much information on the Internet. You can write a good lesson plan by just copying it, but the school leaders don’t understand what the teacher’s actual teaching level is."
The only criterion for schools to evaluate teachers’ teaching performance is test scores, and they don’t care about teaching efficiency.
"In order to produce grades, some teachers may disregard the life and death of other subjects and desperately bet on questions." Huang Xiaolin believes that to understand these problems, you must go deep into the classroom.
Huang Xiaolin's first job after taking office was to check the teaching plans of each grade, but these plans are mostly empty. It has been October, and there is no review plan for the third grade.
According to Huang Xiaolin's experience, before the beginning of the third grade of the new senior high school, teachers should formulate a weekly and daily review plan.
This is probably not the worst.
After the high school entrance examination, most of the high-quality students in Nayong County flooded into private middle schools or Nayong No. 1 middle schools in neighboring provinces and cities.
In previous years, Nayong Fifth Middle School was able to recruit hundreds of junior high school graduates with a score of 500 or more.
However, Huang Xiaolin is facing this year's senior three students, only a dozen students have scores above 500 in the high school entrance examination, and no school leader is even willing to take charge of this grade.
With such a source of students and such a teaching management style, how can Huang Xiaolin fight a turnaround?
Start with the rectification of the teaching style
Huang Xiaolin was even more worried about the first class that was audited in Nayong No. 5 Middle School.
One minute after the class bell rang, a young female teacher walked into the experimental classroom. This physics class was about Newton's second law.
Huang Xiaolin is a Chinese major, but he has been teaching for more than 30 years. He claimed that he "has taught him in other subjects except English". In the end, he was awarded a senior teacher for his excellent teaching results in physics.
He quickly noticed that there was an error in the teacher's teaching materials, but the physics teacher did not notice this subtle but serious error, and copied it when writing the blackboard.
Huang Xiaolin saw that the student sitting next to him kept frowning and calculating, but he couldn't figure out the correct result.
Before get out of class ended, the physics teacher kindly asked Huang Xiaolin to speak for the students.
Huang Xiaolin strode up to the stage, pointed out the errors in the teaching materials, and spent more than a minute to derive the formula just now, by the way, remind students that there is a common knowledge point here.
After Huang Xiaolin finished speaking, the students applauded excitedly. He felt that the students understood this time.
Half a month after taking office, Huang Xiaolin held a school-wide teacher conference.
In the past half month, he has listened to dozens of classes and has a basic understanding of the level of teachers in various subjects.
Huang Xiaolin also found that the teachers in this school are habitually late, ranging from 1 minute late to five or six minutes late.
He decided to rectify his teaching style.
At that conference, Huang Xiaolin said that he came to support the teaching to help the children in the mountains study hard, let them get out of the mountains and give back to the mountains.
Because whenever he sees these children, he thinks of his childhood.
After Huang Xiaolin retired, an education and counseling agency offered him an annual salary of one million yuan, but Huang Xiaolin did not agree.
"My retirement salary is enough for me to live an ordinary life, and I should do something useful to society."
Then Huang Xiaolin asked sternly: "Then what was your original intention as a teacher? Why did you teach?"
Huang Xiaolin announced that he would randomly attend classes next.
Later, at a school-wide teacher meeting in January, Huang Xiaolin criticized what he had seen in class without naming names.
The long-lasting habit of being late and not preparing for class finally "extinct".
At the end of November that year, Bijie City held a mock exam for the third grade.
Huang Xiaolin notified the senior high school teacher to take the exam simultaneously with the students, and he would personally invigorate the exam. Those with excellent grades were commended, and those who failed were reviewed.
The news exploded among teachers.
When he was first transferred to Tianhe Middle School in Guangzhou, Huang Xiaolin had implemented a similar policy. The teachers strongly opposed: "Teacher and students take the exam, what is it like!" Huang Xiaolin announced to take the exam with everyone. He took the physics test. Huang Xiaolin, secretary of the school's party committee, was 57 years old that year.
The full score of the physics test paper is 110. Huang Xiaolin scored 108. The second place is a young teacher who graduated from a prestigious university with more than 90 points.
This result left other teachers speechless.
Huang Xiaolin “repeat the old skills” in Nayong Fifth Middle School this time. After the results came out, only a few teachers got “excellent”, and most of the teachers only got “good” results.
The teachers finally started to face up to the exam and teaching.
"Without the education of love, one cultivates exquisite egoists"
One day after school, Huang Xiaolin saw a student standing in front of the school waiting for someone.
The third-year high school girl walked towards him: "Principal Huang, can I talk to you? I want to know, what strength supports you to keep studying in the cat ears? I feel almost unable to keep going."
After mobilizing teachers' enthusiasm for work, Huang Xiaolin's next target for mobilization is students.
Among the more than 4,000 students in Nayong No. 5 Middle School, nearly 3,000 students come from poor families who have established files.
In the keynote speech "Happiness is the result of struggling", Huang Xiaolin told the students about his bumpy experience: After finishing high school, he was going to the mountains and going to the countryside, and he was a farmer for two years. Reform and continue to be an ordinary soldier; I wanted to enter the military academy, but I didn’t get my wish.
During the self-defense counterattack against Vietnam, Huang Xiaolin was a 20-year-old young soldier. After a battle, he hid in a tunnel, loaded his submachine gun and picked up a book.
Huang Xiaolin’s goal is clear: “As long as you don’t die, you have to go back to college.” In February 1981, 22-year-old Huang Xiaolin retired from the military. In July of the same year, he took the college entrance examination and was admitted to a college and university. .
He told these children from poor families: For those with aspirations, poverty and setbacks are a valuable asset.
This high school girl usually studies very hard, but her grades are not ideal.
Hearing the question of this senior high school girl, Huang Xiaolin joked: "I will look at you. It shouldn't be the result, unless there is something wrong with your body."
Huang Xiaolin's words came to the heart of this girl.
She told Huang Xiaolin that she had good grades in junior high school, but after she was in high school, she found epilepsy. She had to take medicine. After taking medicine, she became groggy and couldn't enter the school.
She was ashamed of her illness and never dared to let her teachers and classmates know.
This girl’s parents work outside the home. Every time her parents go home, she sees the rough and cracked hands of her parents and feels particularly ashamed when she thinks of her grades.
Huang Xiaolin relieved her not to have too much psychological pressure, because the greater the psychological burden, the more frequent the disease.
Huang Xiaolin vowed to say: "Trust me, you will definitely be able to go to undergraduate."
After talking with the girl, Huang Xiaolin called the girl's father and told him not to put pressure on the child. The health of the child is most important.
After the college entrance examination results came out, the girl's score improved by more than 100 points, just reaching the undergraduate level.
Until now, she still calls Huang Xiaolin to report the situation.
"Without the education of love, what is cultivated is an exquisite egoist." Huang Xiaolin said.
Normally after class, Huang Xiaolin likes to chat with students to understand their demands.
In the summer of 2020, Nayong Fifth Middle School graduates of this year’s high school achieved their best results since the establishment of the school: more than 50 students were admitted to key universities, and the undergraduate acceptance rate jumped from more than 10% in previous years to 48%. .
After the beginning of the new semester, a vice principal in charge of teaching passed by the teacher's office and heard a teacher say: If the on-line rate of this senior year does not reach more than 50%, we are sorry for the yellow school.
Another teacher said: We should start from the first year of high school.
During this year of teaching support, Huang Xiaolin watched morning reading at 7:20 in the morning, and watched evening study at 8:30 in the evening, working more than ten hours a day.
He hopes to lead by example and let the teachers in this school realize the proper working attitude.
The support education has been over for a while, and Huang Xiaolin is taking care of his elderly parents in his hometown in Jiangxi, while also worrying about the children he has taught.
He found a letter from a student to the reporter. The child in Tianhe Middle School called him "Brother Xiaolin" or "Papa Xiaolin" in the letter, while the child from Nayong No. 5 Middle School called him "Yellow School" somewhat cautiously.
No matter what you call it, Huang Xiaolin said: "The words of the children make me feel the happiness of teachers' work and the great responsibility of teachers!"
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Li Yajuan Source: China Youth Daily