Notes from Class

This book collects the poet Wang Xiaoni's "post-teaching reflections." She began teaching at the School of Humanities and Communication at Hainan University in 2005, and from 2006 to 2010 she taught a film and television writing course to undergraduates for five consecutive years; the book gathers her teaching notes from those five years, along with some student assignments and emails. Arranged by year, from "What can I give them so that I can feel at ease" to "In the corners of life, every child is shining," it records the bewilderment, restlessness, weariness, and defiance of "post-90s" college students who came from cities and, more often, from rural areas, as well as their innocence, diligence, and questioning of the world. As a poet, Wang Xiaoni has a natural sensitivity to details in the classroom: she notices who habitually sits in which corner, whose dialect holds the most beautiful mother tongue, who has written in an essay a fine sentence that should not be corrected away. She opposes students' reliance on rigid "good words and good sentences," encouraging them to read poetry aloud in dialect and to write about their real lives; she believes a person's origins and rural experience are precious wealth, not "rusticity" to be washed away. The book also confronts the difficulties of education head-on: roll call and cheating, the distress of impoverished students, the anxiety that "studying is useless," and how much a teacher can actually change a student. The writing is plain and restrained, without condescending judgment, letting readers see anew the weight of the word "idealism" in the trivia of daily life.