Lines of communication

To date, Yuan has attracted more than 280,000 fans and received almost 4 million likes for his posts.

"I sense that many members of my audience are older than me, and they often urge me to post, which is quite motivating," Yuan says.

He has become widely known among students at the school as an internet celebrity, and they now involve him in their activities, like basketball games and debates.

Yuan says it has given him more incentive to prepare for teaching.

He ingeniously uses short videos from Douyin that he finds relevant as teaching tools.

For example, he has played a video showing elderly people sitting alone at the entrance of their village, and working in fields, to help students raised in urban areas gain a better understanding of cultural geography through the plight of the rural elderly.

In order to explain lunar phases, Yuan once drove to the outskirts of his town and endured freezing temperatures for several hours to photograph the moon as a reference for his students.

As the intensity of his teaching schedule has increased, time for these kinds of outings has become limited. That's why he has turned to Douyin to find videos that contribute to classroom explanations.

Yuan has been able to find videos even for rare geographical phenomena such as bioluminescence on beaches, sun pillars, and circumhorizontal arcs (fire rainbows).

"Playing them in the classroom has never failed to elicit astonishment from my students, and has made the lessons more vivid, engaging and clear," Yuan says.

Yuan graduated from a teacher education program in college, and during postgraduate studies, he participated in a provincial teaching competition for teacher candidates, which inspired him to design a teaching method that combines multimedia assistance with traditional blackboard use.

"Since then, I have been practicing drawing, such as the map of China, and I often use these drawings in my lesson preparations," Yuan says.

In the classroom, Yuan regularly engages students in blackboard drawing exercises to train their sense of logic and visualize geography.

"I try not to simply deliver knowledge to the students; instead, I encourage differences in thinking," he says.

"When discussing a particular topic, I interweave it with points of previously discussed geographical knowledge or intriguing facts, and the students really enjoy it," Yuan says.

He says he has continued to explore and improve his teaching methods, especially since starting to teach senior high school students, and has spared no effort to ensure his classes are thorough.

For example, when he was teaching about rock weathering, a topic that involves physics, chemistry and biology, he did extensive searches, reading research papers and watching animated simulations, absorbing knowledge and translating it into his own words.

"When I step onto the podium, I sense the students are attentive as they nod in agreement," Yuan says.

He says that being a teacher grants a sense of accomplishment and happiness.

"It is enough to excite me all day if I can help my students understand a particular concept that they have found difficult," he adds.

Yuan says he plans to develop a systematic online geography curriculum and share it with the public for free.

"I was born in a small village, and it was geography that exposed me to different natural landscapes, human culture and traditions," Yuan says.

"The subject gave me a longing to see the wider world, and I'd like to help more people experience that."