Mianzhu Hanwang: July 2nd, Renai School Chronicle (Detective’s Notes)

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It rained at 5 this morn­ing, but the sun came out at 7, and the chil­dren fol­lowed it to school. To com­ple­ment today’s mil­i­tary train­ing and instruc­tion, the morn­ing read­ing ses­sion was led by the inspec­tor, who taught us to sing the “Tar­get Prac­tice Song” as a march­ing song for for­ma­tion train­ing. After a few rep­e­ti­tions, we were already singing along, and we thought we were good enough…

2. The first peri­od was still a mil­i­tary train­ing class. Instruc­tor Dai, a senior, con­duct­ed drills on for­ma­tions. The group was small, just a por­tion of the senior class, and the stu­dents wel­comed this for­mal yet rig­or­ous train­ing. Dur­ing extend­ed peri­ods of stand­ing, Instruc­tor Dai would occa­sion­al­ly spray mos­qui­to repel­lent on stu­dents wear­ing shorts. Instruc­tor Zhang man­aged a larg­er group, with a mixed group of sizes, tall and short. The drills were fine. There were also some tasks today, includ­ing march­ing and singing the tar­get prac­tice song. The cho­rus was fine, but once the sep­a­rate groups start­ed singing, sev­er­al groups of stu­dents broke into a Sichuanese ver­sion of the song, which was not only heav­i­ly Sichuanese but also ridicu­lous­ly off-key. The teach­ers stand­ing by tried hard to sup­press their stom­achaches and not laugh. If musi­cian Chen Chao were here, he would def­i­nite­ly faint on the spot…

3. Xue Shan­bing took the ini­tia­tive to request addi­tion­al class time. He took over the sec­ond and third peri­ods of the morn­ing’s senior class­es and led the entire senior class in col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly cre­at­ing a large paint­ing titled “Our New Home.” Each child con­tributed at least one stroke and signed their name. Tomor­row, the plan is to have the younger class­es col­lab­o­rate as well.

4. In the after­noon, the senior class con­tin­ued to com­plete the large paint­ing they had­n’t fin­ished in the morn­ing. In addi­tion, the five actors rehears­ing for the Chang­ban­po per­for­mance began rehearsals in the after­noon. The Peking Opera cat masks the inspec­tor brought from Bei­jing came in handy. A sim­ple script was also writ­ten based on the indi­vid­ual actors’ char­ac­ter­is­tics. The junior class’s fairy tale rehearsal split into two parts this after­noon: one group rehears­ing Afan­ti sell­ing shade, and the oth­er rehears­ing the Gruffa­lo. Because the mice had so many lines, they were divid­ed into two groups, A and B. Led by Qin Ming, they are cur­rent­ly rehears­ing their lines. The rest of the class’s book bor­row­ing activ­i­ties con­tin­ued as usu­al.

5. In the after­noon, Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Lin and Wang Lu from the Ren Ai Foun­da­tion also vis­it­ed the school. The inspec­tor briefed them on recent progress and showed them the site we had lev­eled with Teacher Xiong and her fam­i­ly. The Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al expressed strong sup­port for the pub­lic read­ing room plan and said he would try to see how many tents and book­shelves could be reserved for it tomor­row. We also agreed that if it did­n’t rain on July 5th, we would all come togeth­er to watch the chil­dren’s per­for­mance, which would serve as a sum­ma­ry of our work over the past month.
Car­rot Inspec­tor com­plet­ed on July 3rd at 9:00