Teachers face number of hurdles in rural areas

Chang Yan, who teaches ninth-grade 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.