Between the Classroom and the Rift in Reality

Between the Classroom and the Cracks of the World tells the story of Lin Luo, a graduate with a music degree and a major in dance, as she struggles to break through the gap between her ideals and reality. After failing the public teacher recruitment exam seven times, she finally enters a branch of a key municipal primary school as a contract teacher, only to discover that the three-foot podium is far from the secure “iron rice bowl” people imagine. Faced with a last-in, first-out system for new teachers and parents who look down on “minor” subjects like music, PE, and art, she has to put away her pointe shoes for Swan Lake and break the lyrics of Treading Through Snow to Seek Plum Blossoms into standardized lesson plans.

When the “teacher exit mechanism” policy officially takes effect, Lin Luo discovers that her dance background has become an unexpected asset in the struggle to survive. She turns the steel podium in the music classroom into a makeshift stage and uses steps from The Nutcracker to tackle her students’ pitch problems, only to have all her performance pay deducted at the end-of-term evaluation for “nonstandard teaching methods.” Through the plight of young teachers forced to become “educational tailors,” the story exposes the perennial struggle between idealism and pragmatism in today’s education system. As standardized grading sheets collide with unorthodox dance steps, it asks whether teachers are burning candles or sparks that keep moving and spreading.

Set against a wave of education-system reform, this work records the pain young teachers endure as they stuff their souls into quantitative forms just to make a living, while also capturing the stars shining in children’s eyes as they follow an improvised dance. When Lin Luo finally understands that true education should be born in the cracks between the classroom and the world, her teaching certificate is lying quietly in the education bureau’s electronic archive of “non-staff personnel slated for reassignment.”