Variations of extra classes

The essay was copied almost "from the ground up"

With the topic of analyzing the poem " You come to play at home" by author Nguyen Khuyen, the teacher hopes to see students' pen strokes that feel the beauty of language and poetry.

The sentences are certainly clumsy, the ideas are naive, the expressions are forced, but I appreciate every real piece of writing from my students. Because they are practicing writing, practicing feeling poetry, practicing writing literary analysis... Then the red pen marking the paper suddenly stops, wondering "I just read this essay a while ago", "why does it look so familiar", "or is it...". Turning over the pile of papers, I came across two essays that were copied almost "stereotypically".

I was disappointed because in every class, the teacher guided the students on how to write an essay analyzing poetry, practiced it regularly with similar essays, and always encouraged them to write on their own. Yet the students returned the essay to the teacher with an exact copy…

Two stereotyped essays

It was even more heartbreaking because these were two students with good study habits and quite good writing skills. Yet the two essays presented before my eyes were copied from a template somewhere and then copied to change their scores. After asking around, I found out that they were both attending the same "furnace". It is extremely worrying that there are extra classes for students to "copy" their writing in such a dangerous way!

Lessons learned in class were learned in advance in extra classes, test questions were solved in advance in extra classes, students just remember, solve the questions, and rewrite the essays. If we do not correct this distorted and negative situation of extra classes, we will create learning machines to achieve sky-high scores, achieve top results, and compete for excellent titles. Critical thinking, creativity, and self-study skills are eroded and eliminated right from the childhood days of going to extra classes.

The issue of extra teaching and learning has attracted public attention again after the proposal to include extra teaching in the list of conditional business lines.

ILLUSTRATION: NHAT THINH

Students lose creative thinking because of mechanical learning

The two "stereotypical" essays above make us worried about the widespread and negative situation of extra classes leading to the consequence of students losing creative thinking and eroding their critical thinking ability.

Recently, the issue of extra teaching and learning has attracted public attention again after the proposal to add extra teaching to the list of conditional business lines at the National Assembly discussion session on November 20.

If extra teaching and learning were only pure and clean according to the market's supply and demand laws, then perhaps the bad reputation would not have piled up and the public's complaints and indignation would not have "stormed" as it has for so long.

Public opinion reacted because a group of teachers had gone astray from extra classes. In order to maintain overtime pay that far exceeded their regular salary, some teachers used all kinds of tricks to entice and force students to attend extra classes. The situation of "hiding lessons", "asking for questions" or discriminating between students who have and do not take extra classes is a painful reality. "One bad apple spoils the barrel" - the accumulation of bad reputations makes the hearts of honest teachers extremely painful.

Previously, in 2019 and 2020, the proposal to include tutoring in the list of conditional businesses was rejected for a number of reasons such as:

• Education cannot be viewed as a business (buying and selling words)
• The product of education is a person, not a commodity.
• If education is seen as a store where money is the only way to enter and customers are seen as "gods", the tradition of respecting teachers will be seriously damaged and many negative factors will occur when many teachers run after the power of money, leading to inequality in education.
• Abusing extra classes will cause students to gradually lose critical thinking, independent thinking, self-study and creativity.

However, extra classes are now a need of students when the curriculum is still quite heavy, although the Ministry of Education and Training in 2011 issued guidelines to reduce the load. Students who are really weak in learning can register for extra classes to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

Therefore, instead of banning it completely, tutoring should be included in the list of conditional business sectors. However, the education sector must have specific and strict regulations to avoid the situation where teachers force students to take extra classes.

Dao Dinh Tuan

Source link: https://thanhnien.vn/hai-bai-van-duc-khuon-bien-tuong-cua-hoc-them-185231127092421944.htm