Poetry lights children's imagination
Yunnan-based nonprofit embraces the power of verse to nurture students' intelligence and creativity, Yang Yang reports.
Students from a primary school in Hunan province have a poetry class outdoors led by their teacher in May 2019.[Photo provided to China Daily]
It seemed like a normal day, back in October 2016. Then the rain came. Kang Yu, a 24-yearold volunteer teacher, at Mangshui Middle School in a remote town in the mountains of Yunnan province, was teaching calligraphy to the eighth graders. Suddenly, the clouds seemed to burst and her students had a new focus of attention.
The electricity also went out, so she couldn't continue the calligraphic class. Seeing that the students were staring at the rain, almost absent-mindedly, Kang suddenly got a burst of inspiration.
She told them to go outside, under a shelter, to enjoy the rain and come back to write something, short or long, or just several lines like a poem.
Kang ran back to her dormitory to fetch her portable speaker. When she walked around the classroom holding up the red speaker－with some beautiful music on－she noticed a girl crying silently.
She came over to the girl and spotted her lines of poetry: "I am a selfish child/Wishing that when the rain stops/The sun will shed warm light only on me./I am a selfish child/Expecting that when I am sad/There can be a corner of comfort emptying for me./I am a selfish child/Hoping that mom's love only belongs to me."
