In the past few days, Zhao Zhen and his men only went to the back garden occasionally. Because they stayed there for a long time, a lot of government affairs had been piled up.

During the Jingyou period, the Song Dynasty had good weather and no major disturbances. However, there were floods in Jianghuai in the previous two years, which caused serious consequences. Last year, Jianghuai did not pay any taxes, and Zhao Zhen used the treasury to help the Jianghuai region pay the taxes. Even now, the local people still have a hard time living.

In addition, there were some internal unrest in various places. For example, at the beginning of this year, farmers in Liangzhe Road rebelled because of the high salt and tea taxes.

In the Song Dynasty, salt and tea were not produced by the government, but were distributed to the people. The salt and tea farmers maintained the production by drying sea salt and growing tea. The government controlled the salt fields and tea plantations.

These farmers are the so-called "official-supervised salt households" and "official-supervised tea households."

After the salt and tea are made, the government will purchase them in bulk, taking away more than 99% of the salt and tea at extremely low prices, almost like robbery.

For example, the price of sea salt from salt merchants is about two or three cents per catty, while the government dares to sell it for twenty or thirty cents.

This is when it is relatively cheap. When it is expensive, it can reach 50-70 wen, or even 100-300 wen. The cost of reselling it in the middle can actually increase by dozens or even hundreds of times.

The same goes for tea. Inferior tea costs a few cents, better tea costs more than ten cents, and no more than thirty cents at most. When sold, it costs one hundred to three hundred cents per catty. The first-grade and wax-faced tea can even cost four or five hundred cents per catty.

Therefore, most salt and tea merchants preferred to sell their high-quality salt and tea to private vendors, and the people were more willing to buy salt and tea from private vendors because private tea and private salt were of better quality and cheaper than official salt and tea, without middlemen making a profit from the price difference.

When the local government saw this, they thought, "How can this be allowed? Isn't this just stealing our money?" So they cracked down on this behavior.

They cracked down on salt and tea dealers, as well as private salt traders without tea permits and non-official salt merchants, and arrested people everywhere. As a result, salt and tea dealers in the southeast region often rebelled.

Zhao Zhen has been extremely busy these days, dealing with all these government affairs. He still follows the old rules: if a small-scale uprising can be suppressed, then it will be suppressed. If it cannot be suppressed, local troops will be sent to suppress it. This is considered to have barely solved these troublesome issues.

It was already around 10 o'clock in the morning. The ancients got up early and went to bed early. The emperor and officials got up at 3 o'clock in the morning to go to work. It was actually afternoon now. In another seven or eight hours, it would be time to go to bed in the evening.

Zhao Jun was in class at this time.

His current daily routine is to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, wash up and have breakfast, then have an acupuncture treatment by the imperial physician, prepare for today's lessons, and finally teach a few classes to students at 5 o'clock, mainly math and Chinese.

He has now taught the multiplication table in math class, and after students have memorized most of it, they will start learning division. In Chinese class, he will teach pinyin.

I don’t know why, but these kids’ foundation is really poor.

Logically speaking, pinyin lessons should be learned in grades one and two, but the children had almost no basic knowledge of it, which made Zhao Jun wonder what the volunteer teachers were doing.

After finishing Chinese and math classes, it was usually 10 o'clock in the morning. After lunch, Fan Zhongyan would help him go to the yard to bask in the sun, or go to the village entrance to chat with Lu Yijian and the old men and women. They would have dinner at 3-4 o'clock in the afternoon, and it would be time to go to bed around 6-7 o'clock when it got dark.

This is his day's schedule.

After being able to go out and move around, Zhao Jun preferred to join in the fun with the elderly. He planned to make friends and establish his reputation and prestige in the village so that he could get along well in the village in the future.

But these days, Lu Yijian and others had their own government affairs to deal with, so Fan Zhongyan made the excuse that they had gone to work in the fields, so there was no one to gossip with him now.

After all, Fan Zhongyan was a mostly taciturn person. Apart from occasionally asking about the New Policies of the Qingli Period, he never asked about anything else.

Therefore, when there was no one to chat with him, he could only torture the students and delay the class to talk about something else.

After listening to Chinese and math for the whole morning, everyone certainly couldn't learn anything, so Zhao Jun talked about some basic physics.

"Do you know why humans can see?"

"Eyes!"

The following are all the same answers.

Zhao Jun was used to this kind of clear childish voice, so he said, "It's not the eyes."

"What is that?"

"It's light!"

Zhao Jun raised his voice and said, "It is light that allows us to see, so everyone must believe in the power of light!"

"teacher."

Yaya stood up and asked, "Why is it light that allows us to see?"

"Because there are photoreceptor cells in the neural retina of our eyes, it is through the sensing of these cells that we can distinguish the color and intensity of light."

Zhao Jun pointed to his blindfolded eyes and explained, "Light is a form of energy that propagates in the form of electromagnetic waves. Luminous bodies convert other energy into light energy, emitting light waves. When light waves hit the photoreceptor cells in the eye, the eye can see the luminous body. So if we are in a completely dark environment without any light source, our eyes will not be able to see anything."

"I don't understand!"

The students answered in unison.

"It doesn't matter if you don't understand. Just know that you can only see with light."

Zhao Jun smiled. He didn't expect the students to understand since this was the optics content of the first-year physics course. He was just sharing it as some interesting physics knowledge.

When they leave this mountain village primary school and enter the junior high school in the town or county in the future, they will understand the role of light.

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