In a letter about studying in Thanh Nien Newspaper on May 21, Pham Thanh Thu, an 11th grade student at Bao Loc High School (Bao Loc City, Lam Dong Province), wrote: "I wish that class sessions and the number of tests would be reduced, limiting the evaluation of students by scores, instead, organizing real-life experiences such as learning how to survive in danger...".
Obviously, reading books, learning to swim, watching movies, practicing life skills, preparing to start a business... are legitimate desires of millions of students, but they are being "overfed" with learning.
Recently, many parents have wondered why our children still have to study day and night despite the reduced curriculum. This troubling and haunting question is our common concern when approaching the 2018 General Education Program at all three levels.
This new program is considered to reduce the number of subjects, reduce the number of actual study periods, increase practice and application, and focus on critical thinking and creativity of learners.
However, after 3 years of implementing it in a rolling manner, we realized many problems with many thoughts and sometimes sighed deeply for the following reasons.
Students need to be relieved of the pressure of studying.
Setting goals too high for students
Listening to a friend talk about her journey of helping her daughter review for her second grade final exam, I wondered why elementary school knowledge is so difficult.
Specifically, the child struggled to distinguish between words indicating states and words indicating things. Mother and child argued and hesitated to classify the words into groups of word classes. Then the child had to "wrestle" with sentence types such as "who is how, who does what"... This story clearly shows that "storms are not as bad as Vietnamese grammar" is now being forced into the heads of 7-year-old children.
If I don't let my children take extra classes from primary school, I wonder if parents can handle the task of reviewing and practicing test questions for their children at the increasing level of achievement?
The scene of older siblings tutoring younger siblings in their studies is almost gone, because each child is 2-3 grades apart and has a different curriculum. Not to mention, schools use different sets of textbooks.
Therefore, many families have no choice but to send their children to her house after school. And the scene of "overwhelming" study makes children tired is becoming more and more common.
The new program "increases the load" by forcing knowledge and skills.
Please ignore the confusion of "3 teachers 1 book", "2 teachers 1 book" in integrated subjects, I just want to emphasize the pressure of knowledge and skills in literature subject at secondary school level.
This is the second year we have followed the Connecting Knowledge with Life series in grade 6. I have witnessed many times when teachers and students were "drowned out" because of the race to keep up with the lessons. Many brand new texts were taught for the first time. A series of major works in the previous program (such as Clouds and Waves in grade 9, The Little Match Girl in grade 8) were pushed down to teach in grade 6.
Even in the extremely sophisticated and skillful use of language in the Co To text, the author still tried to add a rather long passage of language at the beginning, making the reading more difficult for first-grade students.
The Vietnamese section is filled with knowledge to learn and skills to cultivate. In addition, there are a series of exercises on many different knowledge units. The author of the book explains that students have been familiar with that knowledge since elementary school, now they just practice advanced applications. However, the reality is not always as bright and smooth as that.
In the same lesson, the writing section requires students to practice three types of questions in a row: practice writing a six-eight poem, write a paragraph expressing feelings about a six-eight poem, and then prepare an essay expressing thoughts about people's feelings for their homeland. Teachers teach in confusion, students are busy chasing after the requirements of the program.
Students are faced with a large amount of knowledge from primary school.
"Difficult" with innovation in testing and evaluation
Right from the beginning of this school year, the Ministry of Education and Training innovated assessment by requiring literature tests to use materials outside the curriculum. The writing section, which accounts for the majority of the test score, must also be written on new materials. This is a necessary requirement to avoid teaching and learning based on model texts. However, when applied in practice, many tragic and humorous stories begin to emerge.
Teachers were busy looking for materials to build questions. Students were struggling to review and did not know where to start or what direction to take. Long essays of 2-3 A4 pages began to appear. Students in grades 6, 7 and 10 had to focus on reading and understanding a new text, answering dozens of multiple choice questions and completing an essay that had never been practiced before in 90 minutes.
For example, in the recent midterm exam for 7th grade literature, students had to write their thoughts about a character outside the curriculum. Teachers and students were busy reviewing, because there were countless works of the same genre outside the textbooks.
Teachers are in a dilemma: "feeding" students some "addresses" in advance, "circling" them some works is against the rules; but letting students "swim" on their own among the vast literary treasures will result in low scores.
The pressure of studying, reviewing, and taking exams is weighing more and more heavily on students' shoulders!
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