The poor results obtained by students during the simulation of the National Assessment exam require urgent remedial measures, and the Bucharest School Inspectorate presented the intervention plan requested by the ministry. Education officials propose, among other things, 5 minutes of grammar and 5 minutes of reading at the beginning of each Romanian language lesson in schools where the average grade was below 7. Could this be the recipe for success for the 30% of students who do not have got a passing grade? No way, say education specialists, teachers, but also many parents. Even the students are of the opinion that it is quite difficult to fatten the pig on Eve..especially in 10 minutes.
During the evaluation simulation, 30% of the students failed to get a passing grade in Romanian. Source: archive
Five minutes of grammar and five minutes of reading at the beginning of each Romanian language lesson. This is what awaits the 8th grade students in Bucharest who obtained poor results in the simulation of the National Assessment. Specifically, averages below 7. The proposals are part of a wider intervention plan, through which the authorities try to help children catch up on unlearned material and get higher grades in the national exam in the summer.
The Ministry of Education asked for solutions, the inspectorate thought of them, put them on paper and said “this is what we have to do!” However, we are talking about desperate measures, taken at the last hour and which do not make sense. They are, rather, declarative and that's all, say the teachers in unison who demonstrated that the recipe for success presented by the inspectorate was taken to say that we also did something.
4 years of study recovered in 10 minutes
“Students check grammar and reading during the actual lesson anyway. So what exactly is the purpose of these ten minutes?”, Alexandra Achim, a Romanian language teacher at the “IL Caragiale” National College, commented for “Adevărul”. “Grammar and reading are done anyway. If you have to deal with a text in class, reading it is mandatory. Then follows the discussion based on this text, reporting certain lexical issues, pointing out certain grammatical aspects. So, what is proposed as a remedial measure is done in the classroom anyway”, the teacher explains.
“You can't fragment the class just so you can mark the time for grammar and reading”the teacher also pointed out.
This combats the 10-minute intervention plan from another point of view as well. “Many children enter the 8th grade with some deep educational gaps. It is not possible, no matter how much we would like it, to recover four years of study in 10 minutes. Or even eight, because they come with deficiencies even from the benches of primary school. That is not a solution that will bear fruit. It is very difficult to correct a child who does not know how to write from the 3rd grade, to read, to understand a trivial text. If he doesn't come with a knowledge base from elementary school, the effort is pointless“, said the teacher.
The statement is reinforced by other teachers. Andreea Bodea, director of the “Ion Luca Caragiale” National College, is of the opinion that these minutes will not make a difference if the gaps, from the point of view of knowledge, are huge.
“It will be like this… on an organism with many metastases, an algocalmin that doesn't even take away the pain“.
Marian Staș, specialist in education, stated, for his part, that these measures put forward by the Bucharest School Inspectorate are only a “act ticked off in a series of bureaucracies. There's no way something like that can be assimilated consistently, deeply, between now and summer“.
Even the parents, many of them, do not believe in such fireworks.
“First of all, it should be read every hour, not only in Romanian. Students should be made to read history, geography…reading should become mandatory for the whole class. On the other hand, to recover now, in 10 minutes, knowledge that you should have acquired in four years or even eight, there is no way! It's a proposal on paper and that's it. It cannot be put into practice“, Dan Tita, the president of the Parents' Federation, sector 1, commented for “Adevărul”.
“Studying for a national exam is a long process, it takes time to deepen your knowledge. Those from the inspectorate probably came up with such a measure to reconcile both the goat and the cabbage: because the subject is not taught in its entirety, there is no time, at least now, for recapitulations and training tests. Therefore, if at least 10 minutes per hour were worked on grammar and reading, it would still be a plus, they thought, probably“, the father told us.
We also wanted to find out the opinion of the students regarding the School Inspectorate's proposals. After all, it's about their future. Alexandru Pau, executive secretary within the National Council of Students, told us that time is, at this moment, the biggest enemy, and the intervention plan thought up by the authorities should be as concrete, as efficient and as possible well targeted at the real problems children face.
“The 5 minutes for grammar and reading is not enough for a low-performing student to catch up by summer. It is not an efficient method. There is no time to cover exam-like topics“, he specified.
“Measures, necessary but insufficient”
And yet, something must be done, is the opinion of Corina Popa, PhD in linguistics and founder of the “Grammar School”. “The proposed measures are necessary, but not sufficient. You can explain to a student in 5 minutes that “our” and “your” are always written with an “i”. But 5 minutes is not enough to make sure that every student has understood what a plural ending is, what it is used for, why in “our dear friends” we write “dear” with two “i”,” she explained.
What should be done? How should it be done? “I think it is essential that students are supported to integrate the correct forms into coherent texts, which they build themselves in a creative and reasoned way, not with templates “served” at school or in meditations“, continues the education specialist. It is important, in other words, that students are allowed to think and taught how to do it. To be explained to them, not to be given ready-made information, with which, further, they do not know what to do.
Alexandru Pau, the student representative, also came up with solutions. “We would recommend dividing the hours in such a way that in one hour only aspects related to literature are worked on, in one hour only grammar exercises are addressed. The students should have time to deepen the subject, and the teacher should have time to explain additionally to those who, perhaps, did not fully understand certain things“. It is fixed what the linguist Corina Popa also says.
“How would it be if every teacher would allocate at least one hour every month to working with the specialized texts of their own discipline, be it history, biology, physics, Romanian, etc. To give time to each paragraph and weight to each word, following the classic steps: from surface reading to explanatory reading, with stops, questions, connections constantly built between each statement and previous knowledge, concrete life experiences and children's curiosities. It would basically be the text comprehension class in each subject”, he also specified this.
It would be, she also says, an exercise through which the ability to filter information in a critical way, the ability to approach the text, would be based easily, easilyto its deepest layers. Even if the texts will be different, the systematic repetition of this method would lay the foundations for a habit of reflexive and critical reporting to the texts and to the world”.
On the other hand, says Corina Popa, “just as comprehension of the text should be a priority in every discipline, and correct expression must be practiced hour after hour. Otherwise, if the students' texts are checked and improved from an orthographic aspect only in the Romanian language, and in other subjects they will go according to the principle “we write anyway, the idea matters”, we give the students the false impression that correct writing is only a “tick” criterion “to the Romanian language and literature evaluations and not a competence of and for life”.
Children need integrated help: school, family, society
Obviously, when we ask ourselves what needs to be done, what solutions exist to save the future of these children, we think of parents, family and the environment from which the students come. School is done at school, indeed, but education begins in the family, Prof. Alexandra Achim believes.
“The child should also be encouraged to read by the parents, not only by the classroom teacher. For better results in general, the family must also be involved. Let's not forget that we are all pulling the same wagon called the future of our children. The discussion every parent needs to have with their child at home is a necessity in today's educational landscape. But today, people are oriented towards work and earning, and they lose sight of this very important aspect of communicating with their own child.”
The school inspectorate of the city of Bucharest has published the remedial intervention plan for the Romanian language, which will be adopted in schools with poor results in the simulation of the National Assessment. Among the proposals are the achievement of a 5-minute “reading moment” at the beginning of each lesson, a 5-minute grammar activity, exercises to identify essential information, starting from shorter text fragments.
Education officials propose the diversification of texts given to students for reading, their selection so that the thematic areas studied in gymnasium are covered, accessible to the age of the students, exercises in writing a text, being specifically aimed at the elements of spelling, practicing self-evaluation and inter-evaluation, organizing workshops for evaluator teachers, the organization of lectures attended by students, teachers of Romanian language and literature, directors, school counselors, in which the issue of managing working time and emotions will be addressed, the organization of simulations at school level or at the level of the municipality of Bucharest, with the use of exam-type subjects.
