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Teacher makes map for home visit in villages

Lan Songlin, a science teacher for 16 years in Tashi junior high school, looks at his hand-drawn map for home visit in villages, Quzhou city, Zhejiang province, July 4, 2017.[Photo/VCG]

Lan Songlin, a science teacher for 16 years in Tashi junior high school, solved the problem of finding homes of students in villages by drawing a handy map that works better than navigation apps in June 2017.

The families of the school's 583 students are mostly scattered in 130 villages in a mountainous town of Quzhou city, Zhejiang province. Some are remote and some lack transportation.

The village names are constantly changing due to merger of villages. Many names of roads have yet to be uploaded on the digital map. All these add difficulties to the teachers' home visit, especially for a dozen or so non-local teachers who do not work long there.

A new teacher was led to a cemetery by the navigation app during a home visit. While others took it as a joke, Lan decided to create a map after hearing the story.

Having been to each and every village where the students live in, Lan was able to dot the lines to show the villages' locations based on his memory formed through years of experience. Phone calls were also made to village committees to confirm the names.

At the teachers' meeting before last year's home visit, Lan showed the map and received praise from his colleagues and leaders. Since then, a copy of the hand-drawn map has become a must for teachers paying home visits.

Li Xiaowen, former director of Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of Chinese Academy, passed away in 2015. A photo of him dressed in simple clothes while teaching a class once went viral.

Though he was famous in remote sensing field both at home and abroad, he still led a simple life and always wore simple clothes.

Students familiar with Li said he had a chivalrous spirit, and enjoyed drinking. He never said no to his students' opinions, and always encouraged them to try new ideas.

He Xinpu, a geography teacher at Lushan International Experimental School, Changsha, Hunan province, has hand-written lesson plans for 36 years and every page embodies her hard work and dedication.

He not only writes words in her lesson plans but draws a large number of detailed illustrations, many of which are not simply copied from textbook but created with her ideas. All her lesson plans are presented on A4 paper instead of the notebook provided by the school as she thought the latter one was too small.