Online classes are real home work

"Since Xiaobao (Jinhao's nickname) has started online classes, we have transformed the living room into his study room and adjusted our bedrooms to be working places," says Yang Yan, Jinhao's mother.

A 37-year-old manager of a local furniture shopping mall, Yang, alongside her husband and their son, visited her parents on Jan 24, Lunar New Year's Eve. But the abrupt lockdown of Shiyan, 450 kilometers from Wuhan, kept her with her parents, unable to return home to another neighborhood in Shiyan.

On Feb 10, the local government announced that the Zhangwan district in Shiyan, which has a population of more than 410,000 residents, would launch China's first wartime control order for better containing the spread of the outbreak.

"There are seven apartment buildings in my mother's community, and each has volunteers on supervising duty to guarantee residents do not venture outside. We purchase our daily necessities online and will be notified when to fetch them at the scheduled time," says Yang.

When the new semester kicked off digitally, Yang soon realized that the biggest problem was that she couldn't go out to get to a printer.

"My son's teachers are strict and demanding. They assign a lot of homework every day. Without a printer, adults, including my father, spend a lot of time noting down the homework requirements," she says.

After getting permission to leave the building, Yang finally brought a printer home in late February.

"It makes me feel much better. All the teachers are very responsible. Even in quarantine, they want the children to get the best education," she says.