Classroom Notes II

Classroom Notes II is the sequel to poet and writer Wang Xiaoni's Classroom Notes. It collects the "classroom notes" she wrote while teaching at Hainan University in 2011 and 2012, along with selected student assignments, letters, and essays from those two years, plus an additional afterword, "Going to Bijie to See Qingshan." At the end of 2012, Wang Xiaoni resigned her teaching post and left the classroom, and this book thus also serves as a closing account of that chapter of her teaching career. In the book, Wang Xiaoni adopts the dual role of observer and listener, calmly and meticulously recording the daily lives of post-90s college students: their "foodie" youth, their Weibo lives, the care and trust they place in one another, as well as the violence, confusion, retreat, and helplessness within them. She does not stop at observation inside the classroom but also travels to students' hometowns and family homes to understand how poverty affects a young person, writing the stories of two rural teachers and the fate fragments of individual students such as Yan, Yan, Xia, Caixia, and Yanzi. Compared with the earlier Classroom Notes, with its confusion and novelty of the early teaching period, the observations in this book are more mature and restrained: "surprise gradually diminishes while compassion grows." She does not judge lightly or rush to provide answers; she simply faithfully records the beating of those young hearts, letting readers see that "in the corners of life, every child is shining." This is a book about the details of education and also a plain testimony of how a generation of young people grew up in a noisy era.