The Minister of Education, Ligia Deca, discovered the solution by which the meditation phenomenon can be stopped, a phenomenon that we can say, without exaggeration, that it has become the parallel Romanian education system. The official believes that parents, instead of running away from teachers, in private, should ask them to organize additional hours with the students in the classroom. The director of the “IL Caragiale” National College from Bucharest dismantles this idea and explains to “Adevărul” why the solution does not stand.
Ligia Deca believes that the school offers the students everything they need. Photo source: archive
Parents should ask the classroom teachers to organize additional training hours with the students and not resort to meditation from the start, said the Minister of Education, Ligia Deca, in an interview for stiripesurse.ro. The minister believes that the opportunities that the school currently offers are more than enough for the students to achieve performance. Furthermore, according to the Deca Law, not all children have a real need to be meditated upon. This phenomenon, the minister believes, is artificially supported, to a large extent, even by the parents. Overtraining kids, she added, doesn’t always help, and the pressure on students’ shoulders can become overwhelming.
“Let’s demand from the school what we want from the school”
“The fact that we have children who get high marks at National Assessment without being meditated upon is proof that we don’t always need extra training”the minister specified. “I’m not saying that sometimes customization isn’t needed, but I’d rather parents request it from the school than try to make up for it at extra cost. Let’s ask the school what we want from the school and then find out whether or not it can give us and take other measures, not automatically start looking elsewhere”she added. “It is necessary to talk with the classroom teachers to clearly understand what is the real need for additional training, because I am convinced that most children, if they come to classes, if they use the opportunities for additional training, or recapitulation, or consolidation that they the school offers and if there is a dialogue between the family and the teaching staff, they would not need this tool”.
She criticized parents who send their children to multiple meditation sessions with different teachers and raised the alarm about over-preparation for exams. “I have also seen many excesses: children who have multiple meditators. It seems to me that you are doing nothing but inducing additional insecurity and pressure. When it comes to meditations, we as parents need to be very sensitive to what our child needs. From this point of view, I would also recommend the discussion with the school counselor, because over-training does not always help”, added the minister.
Ligia Deca gave the example of schools that organize additional training classes: “Most teachers are already doing this. Schools have organized themselves to provide such reinforcement before national exams and I believe that if there is this honest dialogue between families and the school, things will improve.”
Solutions broken from reality
Andreia Bodea, director of the “IL Caragiale” National College in Bucharest, believes that the minister’s idea cannot be put into practice unless it is supported by a certain budget. “This seems a bit forced to me. To do serious remediation, as it is done, is to stay over your number of hours at school, with one student, with two, with five. Does that mean some overtime who pays for it? Nobody pays them. Just as teachers are not paid for the Saturdays and Sundays when they go to the school olympics. Starting from 2010, all these increments have been cut, there is no longer merit pay, no overtime, no 2% fund, no nothing”.
The director believes that the meditation phenomenon will not be stopped in this way. It is, rather, a friction on the wooden leg, on the principle of saying that we also said something. And that’s all “Here we are not talking about an isolated and punctual situation, where a student or two students did not understand something in class and they ask for some additional explanations. Here we are talking about a whole additional, systematic training. These things are not done that way. This is how education has been conducted in the last 35 years, with some solutions completely disconnected from reality and impossible to put into practice”. considers the teacher.
Bureaucracy buries education
Andreia Bodea is of the opinion that teachers are buried head over heels in papers, documents and reports that they have to draw up, all to the detriment of the educational act. “If teachers were teachers and were left 90% of the time to prepare, prepare their lessons, take refresher courses and so on, perhaps what he suggests could also be done now Madam Minister. But in the conditions where teachers, especially managers and principals, are buried in hundreds and hundreds of reports, you cannot ask them for this. I don’t know if this proposal comes from ignorance or simply from the desire to check that I have found a solution. It is not a viable solution. It is not a solution that will stand and produce long-term effects”.
The headmistress of the National College “IL Caragiale” emphasizes another issue: we are talking about all kinds of categories of students. “Well, if you bug me for a bunch of hours or during the lessons, when I come on time and ready for class, you stay on the phone or you come in the middle of the class or you bug and mom immediately justified your absence, you want that will i stay with you after class? Shall we make a preparation? It doesn’t seem fair to me at all.”
Easy answers to deep problems
The problem of meditations in Romania is a problem that cannot be solved so easily, the teacher believes. “It shows a pain and an inability of the entire education system. There are also many weak teachers, it is true, there are also few left in the system, school programs are outdated, students are bored. As for parents, they have very well-defined goals when it comes to their children’s meditations. There are students studying to enter college in the 5th grade, others for the National Assessment, Baccalaureate or college. How does a teacher deal with so many demands?”
Therefore, such a complex problem cannot have such a simple answer. “It seems to me an uninspired statement to say the least from a man who is out of touch with reality. In rural areas, for example, there are not enough teachers to teach classroom lessons..what about extra lessons? If we try to look for easy answers to big problems or lip-service answers to deep problems, we will only be slightly misplaced.” said teacher Andreia Bodea.
