Across China: Special education teacher lights up the dark

Xinhua

11th Sept 2922

Across China: Special education teacher lights up the dark

In a special classroom of acupuncture and massage at Beijing Union University, Zhang Lin uses her clear and loud voice as she guides students to practice step by step.

The students work in pairs, one as the "doctor" and the other as the "patient" while Zhang corrects their skills patiently and individually, holding their hands to find the exact pressing point.

Zhang, 47, is a special education teacher whose students have varying degrees of visual disability. Saturday marks Zhang's 27th Teachers' Day as teacher of visually-impaired children.

"When I started my career with these special kids, the biggest obstacle was Braille," Zhang said, adding that she taught herself Braille every night, but found it difficult as the raised dots of the books were the same color as the paper background. "After studying for a long time, I would start to cry."

In the process of teaching, Zhang found that systematic medical teaching materials in Braille were relatively scarce in the market, so she made full use of the Braille she had learned, to design and develop a series of barrier-free teaching materials together with other teachers.

Besides teaching materials, Zhang and her colleagues also developed auxiliary teaching tools.

"For example, we used convex lines and points to clearly mark meridians and acupoints on the human body model, which were equipped with the point reading function, so that students could identify the name and indications of acupoints with point reading pens," Zhang said.

https://english.news.cn/20220910/f007d4e5390c4d95a0a99c5a433559bb/c.html