In the letter about studying in the Newspaper Youth On May 21.5, Pham Thanh Thu, 11th grader at Bao Loc High School (Bao Loc City, Lam Dong province), wrote: "I wish the class sessions, the number of tests would be reduced, limit the assessment of students by scores, and instead, organize practical experiences such as learning how to survive in danger ...".
It is clear that activities of reading books, learning to swim, watching movies, practicing life skills, preparing to start a business... are the legitimate wishes of millions of students, but they are being "overcharged" with their studies.
Recently, many parents wonder why the program reduces the load but why our children still have to study day and night. That worrying and tormenting question is our common heart when approaching the General Education program 2018 at all 3 levels.
This new program is considered to reduce the number of subjects, reduce the number of actual lessons, increase practice and applicability, and focus on critical thinking and creativity of learners.
However, after 3 years of implementation in the form of rolling slides, we realized many problems with many thoughts and sometimes sigh because of the following reasons.
Students need to be untied to relieve the pressure of studying
Setting goals too high for students
Listening to a friend tell about the journey to help her daughter revise for the final exam of 2nd grade, I wondered why it is so difficult for elementary school children to learn.
Specifically, the child struggles to distinguish between words indicating states and words indicating things. Mother and child argue and wonder about classifying words into groups of words. Then I have to "wrestle" with the types of sentences "who is how, who does what"… This story clearly shows that "the stormy weather that is not in Vietnamese grammar" is now pressing on the heads of children as young as 7 years old.
If they do not allow their children to learn more from primary school, I wonder if parents can afford to review and practice questions for their children according to the increasing level of achievement?
The scene where the older sibling tutors the youngest child's homework is almost gone, because each child is 2-3 classes apart, so the program is different. Not to mention, schools use different sets of textbooks.
As a result, many families have no choice but to send their children to her house after school. And the scene of "overeating" of learning makes children tired more and more.
The new program "increases the load" by accumulating knowledge and skills
Please temporarily ignore the confusion when "3 teachers 1 book", "2 teachers 1 book" in integrated subjects, I just want to emphasize the pressure of knowledge and skills in lower-school literature.
This is the second year we follow the series Connecting knowledge with life in 6th grade. I witnessed many times when teachers and students "were together" because they had to race with homework. Many brand new texts were introduced for the first time. A series of major works in the previous show (such as Clouds and waves in 9th grade, The Little Match Girl in grade 8) was pushed down to teach in grade 6.
Right to the text Co To Extremely delicate and skillful in using language, the author also tried to add a rather long corpus in the input, making the reading more difficult for elementary students.
The Vietnamese part is filled with knowledge to learn and skills to cultivate. In addition, there are a series of exercises on many different units of knowledge. The author explains that students have been familiar with those knowledge since elementary school, now only practice advanced applications. However, reality is not always so bright and smooth.
In the same lesson, the writing section requires students to practice three types of questions in a row: practice writing a six-eighth poem, write a paragraph expressing feelings about a six-eighth verse, and then prepare an essay expressing thoughts about people's feelings for their homeland. Teachers teach in bewilderment, students engrossed in chasing the requirements of the program.
Students face a large amount of knowledge from elementary school
“Difficult” with test and evaluation innovation
Right from the beginning of this school year, the Ministry of Education and Training innovated the assessment by requiring the writing test questions to use materials outside the curriculum. Particularly for the writing part, which accounts for most of the test scores, it is also necessary to write on new materials. This is a necessary requirement to avoid model-based teaching and learning. However, when applied in practice, many tragic and humorous stories began to emerge.
The teacher was busy looking for materials to build the topic. The game struggled to review and did not know where to start, how to orient. The long essays 2-3 pages A4 began to appear. Students in grades 6, 7, and 10 must focus on reading a new material, answer dozens of multiple-choice questions, and complete a never-before-seen text in 90 minutes.
For example, in the last 7th grade literature midterm exam, students had to write about a character outside the program. Teachers and students are eager to review, because works of the same genre outside of textbooks are vast.
The teacher is in a dilemma: "premature" giving students some "addresses", "zoning" for them some works is against the rules; but for students to "swim" among the immense literary treasure, the score is low.
The pressure of studying, reviewing, and taking exams is increasingly weighing on students' shoulders like that!
