"My Second-tier Students" Author: Huang Deng Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House

Introduction
The author Huang Deng teaches at a second-tier college. Her long-term classroom teaching and after-class communication with teachers and students have made her a witness to the growth and changes of these students. My Second-tier Students is equivalent to her teaching notes. It contains her sharing of 15 years of front-line teaching experience, long-term observation of 4,500 students and 10 years of follow-up visits, as well as the summary and reflection of the work of two classes of class teachers, and the personal experiences of nearly 100 students. It is Huang Deng's attempt to depict the life silhouettes of a group of young people to readers.
As of June 2020, there are 3,005 institutions of higher learning in China, including 1,258 undergraduate institutions. The well-known 985 and 211 institutions only account for more than 100 seats, and the faces of second-tier and below students are a bit vague. In order to let readers truly understand the social reality of this group of second-tier students, Huang Deng made a cross-temporal, spatial, and regional cultural comparison in the book to examine the impact of changes in the times, the origin of students, and family mobility on students' employment destinations and life goal setting.
The most touching part of the book is the interview logs of specific students. In these chapters named after students, the interviewees tell readers about their retrospection of the college entrance examination, their unfamiliarity with city life, their confusion about graduation, and their panic about finding a job. In these confessions, you will understand their social distance from each other, their understanding process of this society; the obstacles to their communication with their parents and siblings, and their closeness to their hometown; their understanding of online literature and games, their adaptation and loss in the new media era; their trade-offs between taking the civil service exam and the postgraduate entrance exam, and their choice between stability and wandering. There are also their responsibilities and journeys for their own lives, parents, and even the country. Each story told by the parties is accompanied by visible breathing, dust, footsteps, and gazes. In these extremely detailed and specific slices of life, we no longer see second-tier students, but a group of young people born in the 1980s and 1990s, all of them. The confusion and problems they encountered did not distinguish them from each other, but instead became a topic they shared.