How do adults determine their future careers? A vocational course teacher for a county town student | student | student

Until the countdown ended, Li Hongbao's note remained blank.

This is a tracking of a career planning course. Class teacher Wu Jinlang asked the children in the class to write down their future career aspirations and put forward the three questions they most want to know about that profession.

In the first 5 minutes, the whole class was in a frenzy, "picking up garbage" and "becoming a security guard"... Li Hongbao folded the paper given by the teacher into a plane, rolled it up into a telescope, and looked through the narrow hole to see the dreams written by his desk mate.

Until the commotion became weak, Li Hongbao finally pulled out an old fountain pen and wrote "the profession I want to pursue" on a piece of paper, seriously clicking a colon at the end. Then he began to freeze, scratching his scalp incessantly with his hand, but his pen tip hesitated.

At the end of the countdown, Li Hongbao's face turned red. He looked at Wu Jinlang and said, "Old class, what should I do? It seems like I really don't know what I can do in the future."

Students are distressed because they cannot think of what career they want to pursue in the future

With Li Hongbao's current grades, there is still a long way to go before he can be admitted to high school. But if I don't pursue further education, what is my future after graduating from junior high school? What will one make a living in the future and what kind of person will they become? 14-year-old Li Hongbao never thought about it.

According to Ginzberg's career development theory in the United States, adolescence before the age of 11 is a period of career imagination, 11-12 is a period of interest in a career, 13-14 is a period of ability in a career, and 15-16 is a period of value in a career. These periods are the foundation for the formation and development of a person's career outlook, as well as the cognitive process of a person towards a career.

After two years of teaching in Yunnan, Yang Xueqin realized that it was common for students in remote counties to overlook the significance of reading due to little consideration for the future of learning. She hopes to help children find their way in life and has initiated the establishment of a project called Tumeng, which focuses on career planning for rural youth, meaning "pursuing dreams on the road".

In 2021, Tumeng's curriculum was expanded to Longsheng County, Guangxi with the "Mountain Bridge Plan" launched by the Youcheng Entrepreneur Poverty Alleviation Foundation, and a three-year "Longsheng County Middle School Student Career Education Project" was launched. The first year students of Experimental High School in Longsheng Autonomous County have started a new lesson - Career Planning.

2 years have passed, has the choice of rural youth changed due to this course? Has the course met expectations? Coinciding with the high school entrance examination, the reporter arrived in Longsheng County to listen to the answers of the students from Dashan.

Limitations: Copying Life

Longsheng Ethnic Autonomous County is located in the northwest of Guilin City. Starting from Guilin Airport, drive along the winding mountain road and drill through multiple mountain tunnels. It takes about 1.5 hours to reach the center of the county town.

There is a typical hollowing out of county towns in the central and western regions here. In 2019, Longsheng County got rid of poverty, and there were few enterprises and factories in the county. Most residents chose to go out to work, and those who stayed in the local area either grew siraitia grosvenorii for a living or worked as blasting workers on the mountain site. Their education level was generally low.

Standing in the teaching building, you can overlook the entire Longsheng County town

The backwardness and isolation of small towns sometimes hinder children's imagination of life's possibilities.

The dream of Shi Jie, a sophomore student at Longsheng Experimental High School, is to go to a bar and play DVDs after graduation. "My friend said that I can earn 40000 yuan per month in this industry." Shi Jie is a left behind child. Her parents work as construction workers on construction sites in Guilin, and her older brothers and sisters also attend vocational high school in Guilin, studying electronics and preschool education. All the professions she knows are based on this, plus teachers, doctors, and police officers.

During the summer vacation, Shi Jie went to Guilin to reunite with her parents. She remembers the scorching noon sun that day shining on the gray cement of the construction site. Her father was shirtless, carrying bricks one by one, sweating profusely. "It's very hard," Shi Jie sighed, "so my parents always tell me to study hard and find a good job when I grow up. Don't be like them."

But what is a good job? My parents have never told Shi Jie, and she doesn't understand either. "Is it the kind that can make a lot of money? At least it needs air conditioning," she tried to answer herself.

Wu Jinlang's student Luo Bingbing couldn't explain it clearly, but she was convinced that a good profession is definitely not a farmer. Her parents grow momordica grosvenorii in the village for a living. They go out at noon every day and return with the moon. But the economic conditions at home are still very poor, often relying on borrowing money to make a living. Luo Bingbing doesn't like reading. She thinks reading is "boring and can't be learned". The senior sister who went to vocational high school told her that if she couldn't get into high school, she could come and study nursing without worrying about having no way out.

Luo Bingbing doesn't know much about professions other than nurses, teachers, police officers, and farmers. It's hard for her to say anything else. She thinks it's good to be a nurse. At least according to the news posted on the sister's Kwai account, it's "very easy" to study in a vocational school.

Chen Yinghui, who has just started her first year of junior high school, said that her parents expect her to study hard and find a class in a big city in the future. "Can work be considered a career?" Her dream is to study medicine, because her father once said that if she can't get into college, she can just go and study medicine. "If you want to study medicine, you must learn Chinese well," Chen Yinghui guessed. After all, in the recent stage exam, she barely passed Chinese out of 8 subjects.

When exactly did it start? The teacher's lectures began to turn into heavenly books, and Yu Jiajia couldn't remember clearly. Jiajia's father is a construction worker who runs with the construction site all year round. Jiajia was born in Wenzhou and attended fifth grade there. Later, he returned to Longsheng with his father and studied sixth grade at the village primary school in Sishui. It was not until last year that he was promoted to the first year of Longsheng Experimental Middle School. "After transferring to Longsheng, I couldn't understand." Jiajia also felt distressed. "I can't do anything. My parents said I'm going to sweep the streets in the future."

Starting from March last year, every Sunday evening, Wu Jinlang would accompany the children to listen to Tumeng's career planning class. He noticed that the children's faces often showed surprise when they saw the profession they had never heard of on screen live streaming. After the middle school entrance examination, this group of children is about to enter the third year of junior high school. According to the current grades, there may be less than ten students in the parallel class led by Wu Jinlang who can successfully enter the county high school. The remaining three-quarters of students may be transferred to vocational schools, or even stopped attending school and entered society early. This means that they may not have had the career that they envy in the video for the rest of their lives.

Before the summer vacation, Wu Jinlang asked the children to write down their dreams, hoping to turn their career dreams into learning motivation, inspiring them to complete the most crucial academic year ahead.

On the notes collected by Wu Jinlang, the children's answers were largely convergent. Girls often write about teachers, nurses, or preschool teachers, while boys usually write about athletes or open barbecue shops. Teachers come into contact with them every day at school, and nursing and preschool education are the two most common majors in vocational high schools. As for the barbecue restaurant, if you take a walk in Longsheng County at night, you will pass by many barbecue stalls.

Longsheng Experimental High School has two class systems, which are divided into ethnic classes and parallel classes based on their academic performance. The same tracking results in greater diversity of feedback from ethnic class students.

Career planning tracking for students in parallel classes

Tracking the Career Planning of Ethnic Class Students

Lin Chenhua's math grades are very good, with a score rate of over 95% in every exam. When he grows up, he wants to become a mathematician.

But he occasionally gets annoyed because he can't figure out the true meaning of the job as a mathematician. Lin Chenhua believes that mathematics can definitely make a huge contribution to social development, but he cannot say specifically what it is except for taking exams.

Regarding everything about confusion, Lin Chenhua would not tell his parents who are farmers that "what kind of mathematician to become in the future" is not worth mentioning compared to achieving full marks in math exams. Parents only hope that Lin Chenhua can find a well paying job when he grows up, and they don't care about what it is.

Su Yuanli's dream is to study public utility management. The reason why she can be precise to a certain major is because her sister is currently studying in the Department of Public Utility Management at Guangxi University. As the former president of the school's student union, she feels that this is very suitable for herself.

However, in recent years, the results of the "Record and Approval Results for Undergraduate Majors in Ordinary Higher Education Institutions" released by the Ministry of Education show that the number of universities that have abolished public utility management majors ranks first and is increasing year by year. According to statistics, over 100 universities revoked this major from 2016 to 2022. Obviously, no one has told Su Yuanli these things. "All industries need management talents, right?" She was full of confidence.

"The channels for children in county towns to obtain information are limited, and their understanding of occupational types is mostly limited to what people around them are doing," said Wu Jinlang.

Breaking the game: carrying dreams on the screen

In 2012, after graduating from the School of History at Nankai University, Yang Xueqin became a volunteer teacher at a township high school on the banks of the Lancang River under the "Beautiful China" project, teaching geography to four classes.

When I first took over, the average geography score of the students in the class was less than 40 points, ranking last in the county. After teaching for a year, Yang Xueqin's class won the first place in the county in the final exam results; In the second year, her two classes had an average geography score of 84.

But the improvement in scores did not satisfy Yang Xueqin. Because she realized that the number of students in one of her classes had decreased from 68 to 30. Some went out to work, while others hastily got married and had children, living aimlessly at home.

Yang Xueqin felt heartbroken. She found that those who walked out of the mountains rarely returned, and many students lacked good role models around them, not knowing which kind of life they wanted. Without career goals, students cannot find their own position in the coordinate system of life, and therefore disappear on the road to school.

"Regret" is the first sentence spoken by some middle school dropouts who contacted Yang Xueqin through WeChat after two years of teaching support.

This made Yang Xueqin start to reflect, "What is the most important thing for students?" She realized that improving grades can only solve the urgent need for exams, but for children to complete a longer life, it is not enough to simply read knowledge from books. They need to learn to become the masters of their own lives.

"If there is another opportunity to teach as a volunteer, I hope to teach a subject related to the students' future direction, rather than specific knowledge," Yang Xueqin admitted.

So in 2015, she initiated the establishment of a project called Tumeng, which focuses on the career planning of rural youth, meaning "pursuing dreams on the road".

Tumeng invites representatives from various industries to share their growth experiences and struggle stories with students, especially impoverished students in remote areas, through online live streaming and real-time interaction. We hope to use the power of role models to give children the motivation to move forward.

Since its establishment, "Tumeng" has brought more than 3000 career sharing experiences to students in 30 provinces, cities, and more than 800 schools in China, affecting over 1.3 million students.

In 2019, the Youcheng Entrepreneurship Development Foundation launched a comprehensive improvement project for county-level education in underdeveloped areas - the "Mountain Bridge Plan". In 2021, with the support of the Shenzhen Guangxi Guangdong Cooperation Work Team, Youcheng and Tumeng collaborated to expand the "Mountain Bridge Plan" to Longsheng County, Guangxi, and launched career education courses for four high schools in Longsheng County, covering more than 3500 students in over 70 classes.

The career planning course of Tumeng Education aims to fill this gap in the lives of rural children in the county with a single screen.

Every Sunday evening, in the class of Grade 1 at Longsheng Experimental High School, outstanding professionals from various industries from society appear on the other end of the classroom TV screen, sharing their careers through live streaming and interacting with students to answer their questions about their careers and future plans.

Students watch live courses on career planning

Tumeng's career education courses allow children to see more possibilities in their careers.

The two most memorable career cases in Jianing are horticulturists and firefighters. She loves flowers and plants very much, but she never thought that taking care of them could become a profession to make a living. In Jianing's imagination, firefighters are invincible retrograde heroes. But Tumeng's class brought her a new understanding of this profession. "It turns out that firefighting is a sacrifice, and I used to think they could all come back safely," she said

Before the class on Tumeng, Su Yuanli's dream was to become an accountant, as her parents said, "more money, less work.". Until she saw the dark circles under the eyes of a professional sharing guest on the screen and listened to him explain how to process complex and detailed data in dozens or hundreds of Excel spreadsheets, Su Yuanli decisively gave up her thoughts. "It's completely different from what my parents said. I'm not good at math at all, I can't do it."

Lin Chenhua admitted that he had many ideal careers before, and he felt that as long as he was good at something, he could become a practitioner in this field. For example, if you have a smooth tongue, you may become a debater, a lawyer, or a judge. But after taking the career planning course, the teacher said that when choosing a career, one should delve deeper into one aspect. He realized that what he knew was only superficial, and that becoming a practitioner in this field was far from enough. After deeply analyzing himself according to the standards provided by the teacher, Lin Chenhua wrote his own career plan, with the ideal of becoming a researcher in mathematics. Going around, he still wants to root himself in mathematics.

Dilemma: Lost and helpless

However, the journey of searching for dreams on this "screen" is not always so smooth.

Yan Jingyu remembers that Tumeng once launched a career sharing about "makeup artists". After class, a teacher took the initiative to complain to Yan Jingyu that it was inappropriate to introduce children to this non mainstream evaluation system of professions.

She knows that the evaluation system for success in county-level rural areas is still relatively single, and there are also stereotypes about career choices.

In county towns and rural areas, taking exams is seen as the only way to succeed. Even young teachers still regard exam taking as the ultimate goal of learning, repeatedly emphasizing to their students that "studying hard will lead to success when they grow up". As for career planning, it usually appears in criticism and education of students after poor exam results - "If you don't study, do you want to shoulder the burden of cement in the future?" Schools are negatively perceived as "closed" and learning is "oppressive.

In Tumeng's course, there was a case of striving to change one's life. The sharer came from a vocational high school and relied on their own efforts to pass the college entrance examination. After joining a large company, they achieved a leap in both position and income. Student Yang Kuisheng excitedly shared with his mother when he returned home, only to be greeted by a basin of cold water. "Mom said, 'These are very few people. Most of those who go to vocational high school have no future and can only rot and smell there.'"

Remote communication also inevitably brings about barriers. During a teacher-student interaction session, Lin Chenhua raised his hand and asked the successful senior on the screen whether he had also questioned the reality of his dreams at every stage of his life. Unfortunately, at that time, the network signal was interrupted, and Lin Chenhua was ultimately unable to wait for the answer.

Students are also not very interested in the interactive part of the course. Wu Jiyu, a sophomore in junior high school, remembers that few classmates ask questions in class. He always feels embarrassed to stand in front of the TV screen and speak out his childish confusion in front of the cold camera. But compared to this, the teasing and ridicule of his classmates when asking questions made him feel even more fearful.

The screen recording of the live class recorded many scenes of such silence - after the guest sharing, the online host invited classmates to ask questions, but due to no one raising their hands for a long time, the teacher in the offline classroom could only assign one student. He walked to the screen in front of the classmates' laughter and noise, but still remained silent.

Even at times, vocational courses fail to reach their audience. In the class where student Huang Shunyun is located, there are increasingly more empty desks. The middle school entrance examination is approaching, and the teacher is lecturing to less than half of the students, leaving the vast classroom empty. Some have already infiltrated vocational schools in advance, while others have skipped school. The discipline management within the Experimental High School is not loose, and in addition to the class teacher and teachers, the school also has instructors patrolling the campus. However, even so, there are still students drilling "dog holes" and climbing over walls. "Some students only come to school to report and don't attend classes. Some skip classes and go to bars to work. They feel that studying is useless and it's better for them to 'socialize' early to make money." When Huang Shunyun said these things, his expression was indifferent. "There are many students like this, it's not surprising."

Only half of the students are left in the parallel classes of Longsheng Experimental High School

Class teacher Wu Xianquan realized that due to a lack of information, hearsay, and conflicting beliefs, it is easy for students to get lost in earlier learning and life.

For example, pyrene Weihan from the parallel class has always doubted whether reading is really the only way out? "Why do so many college students in Kwai say they can't find a job after graduation?"

Yang Suhan's mother was one of the few college students in Longsheng County during that era. After graduation, she returned to the county town to work and received a relatively meager monthly salary. Every time she thinks about her mother's life trajectory, Yang Suhan is very confused. "They say that you can find a good job by going to college, but even though my mother is also a college graduate, why is her current job still average?"

Liang Junyun, the assistant teacher of the career planning course at Longsheng Experimental High School, once encouraged a mischievous boy to study hard and get into college. The other party said, "What's good about getting into college? Is it even better to be a teacher like you?" She was speechless.

The high school entrance exam was right in front of her, and Liao Yingfu had already predicted the result: "I definitely won't pass." She joked, holding a lollipop in her mouth, standing in the hallway chatting, and didn't want to return to the classroom after the class bell rang. "Actually, I don't understand why teachers always emphasize that we should get into high school. I think going to high school is similar to vocational school, except that one is for studying and the other is for studying a major. But vocational school is more free and can hold mobile phones. Looking at it this way, vocational school feels more like college," said Liao Yingfu.

Breaking through: More Choices

To what extent can a screen and an internet cable change children's future? Yan Jingyu, a career planning lecturer at Tumeng Education, was not in a hurry to answer. "This is not something that will take immediate effect." She believed that career planning education is destined to be a long-term job, just like planting a seed in the hearts of children, sprouting and growing as they grow.

Six years ago, during a class, Tumeng received a question from Xiaorui, a sophomore girl from Nanjian County, Dali, Yunnan: "Teacher, I admire special police officers very much, but my parents think it's not good for girls to be special police officers. What should I do?" To answer her confusion, Tumeng invited Ms. Zhou, a female special police officer who worked in the "Cloud Leopard Special Police Team" in Kunming, Yunnan and was awarded the title of "Chinese God Gunman", to share.

In the live classroom, when faced with Xiaorui's question, Teacher Zhou said, "There is no difference in the professional requirements of special police officers for men and women. As long as you really want to, you can achieve the requirements through your own efforts. The teacher cheers for you."

Afterwards, Xiaorui decided to stick to her choice. One year later, Tumeng received a reply letter containing the admission notice for Xiaorui to be admitted to the police academy.

The echo began to resound. After encountering the career education of Tumeng, the homeroom teacher of Longsheng Experimental High School, Zeng Xiaotao, once made a plan for a student in his class, Qin, who had poor grades: should he go to high school or choose to attend a vocational school?

After reading the promotional brochure of the vocational school, Qin looked embarrassed and said, "I don't even want to study vocational school majors." Zeng Xiaotao asked again, "What do you want to do? Do you want to go straight to work?" He replied, "What kind of job can I do?". He began to realize that his abilities were lacking.

In the university major directory displayed by Zeng Xiaotao, Qin found his own interests and realized that only by working hard to get into high school can he choose his favorite major in college. Tracking shows that in the later stages of learning, Qin worked hard and his grades improved from over 1000 in grade to 792.

Faced with the diversion brought by the high school entrance examination, Wu Jinlang felt worried for three-quarters of those who couldn't get into high school. "They are too young, so small that they haven't even established the embryonic form of their career philosophy."

After the integration of Tumeng's career planning course into the classroom, Wu Jinlang also began to allocate 10 minutes in his Chinese language class to tell his classmates his stories while studying.

He was born in a small county in southeastern Guizhou, and his goal for the first 18 years of his life was to achieve good results in exams. On the day he finished filling out his college application form, he felt lost for the first time. In the end, he copied his good friend's application form and was admitted to the "Chinese Language and Literature" major.

It wasn't until his senior year that Wu Jinlang realized, through the guidance of his school's career planning teacher, that the vast majority of students majoring in Chinese language and literature had no choice but to become Chinese language teachers or civil servants in government agencies - careers that he was not interested in.

He tried to intern at the factory, but the assembly line work was really boring; I went to the highway engineering project department to do odd jobs, coordinate bidding sections, and supervise workers... but I couldn't find a sense of achievement. Finally, I will return to being a Chinese teacher. Looking back now, he felt that he might be more suitable for a job in science.

If time could turn back, Wu Jinlang hoped that on the afternoon of filling out his preferences, someone could tell him how to choose. If not, he is willing to be their guide when these children face important life choices. "I want to avoid this regret as much as possible on them."

In the note collected by Wu Jinlang, Liu Yuanhui wrote down the dream of "going to high school". She still really wants to know what high school is like? Are you happy going to high school?

A girl's dream is to "go to high school"

Wu Jinlang hopes that next year at this time, he can also wait for this young man to freely imagine his future after the colon of Li Hongbao's "career I want to pursue".