Five minutes of grammar and five minutes of reading before each Romanian class. This is what awaits the 8th grade students from the Capital who study in schools where the average grade in the simulation of the National Assessment was below 7. The measures are proposed by the School Inspectorate from Bucharest.
The simulation results at the National Assessment were a disaster. Photo source: archive
In the Assessment simulation, 30% of the Romanian Language and Literature scores were below 5. The 10 minutes of grammar and reading is part of a larger plan through which Education officials hope to help students get higher grades in summer.
Elena Ștefan, the spokesperson of the School Inspectorate in Bucharest (ISMB) explained that “for the Romanian language, it is proposed to carry out some grammar activities, at least 5 minutes, exercises to identify essential information starting from shorter text fragments”.
The teachers are reluctant, however. Adina Papazi, Romanian teacher stated that “it is hard to believe that 5 minutes of constructive initiative will counter 5 hours of using phones and screens, the disease from which this generation suffers”.
Andreea Bodea, the director of the “Ion Luca Caragiale” National College, is of the opinion that “if the gaps are huge, these 5 minutes really won't make a difference… it will be, as I said, on an organism with many metastases, an algocalmin which doesn't even take the pain away”.
And Education specialists warn that it is too late now to change anything. Marian Staș, specialist in Education stated in a televised intervention that “it seems to me an act of being ticked off in a series of bureaucracies. There is no way that something like this can be assimilated consistently, deeply, from now until the summer” .
3 out of 10 students did not get grade 5 in the Romanian Language mock test, and in Bucharest 7 out of 10 could not choose the grammatically correct form of words such as “of course” or “to swim”.
