Students who will enter the 9th grade starting with the 2025-2026 school year will take the Baccalaureate in Mathematics or Science, regardless of the chosen profile, according to the new pre-university education law. With one difference: those who do not study Intensive Mathematics during high school, will take a simpler test, a written test to check their basic notions.
All high school students will take the Baccalaureate in Mathematics. Archive
Mathematics teacher Denisa Tănăsescu stated for “Adevărul” that this change is more than welcome because it helps children develop their logical and critical thinking. “A student who studies Mathematics trains his concrete thinking, trains his brain and easily manages to make all kinds of connections. He basically keeps his mind “plugged in”. It is a very good and necessary measure, because Mathematics keeps their minds awake, brings them out of hibernation”, the teacher told us.
She believes that over the years the Mathematics taught to students at school has become increasingly easier. “We need to be more serious. The admission that I gave cannot be compared with the admission that is being given now. Before, a book was actually made. Now, at least from the point of view of knowledge in Mathematics, the students have dropped a lot. I know 12th graders who don’t know how to do 5th grade exercises. But there are also full grown adults who don’t know how to add and subtract, they don’t know how to complete a coherent sentence.” the teacher also stated.
Prof. Denisa Tănăsescu is of the opinion that you don’t have to have a particular inclination towards the exact sciences to know basic things in Mathematics, Biology, Physics or Chemistry: “No talent needed here. Because students are taught very easy notions today”. The teacher told us that the students who will enter the 9th grade and who are waiting for the Baccalaureate, including Mathematics or Science, will have to seriously put their stomachs to the book and their bones to work: “And in the classroom, in lessons, teachers should put more emphasis on applied mathematics. Students are bombarded with too much theory. We don’t have anything tangible to offer. And that’s why they alienate themselves from this matter”.
Denisa Tănăsescu told us that Mathematics does not attract children and because of the functional illiteracy they suffer from: “They read the requirement of an exercise but don’t understand it. And then how to solve something I don’t understand?”
And teachers will have to put in more effort
I asked the teacher if this regulation would put not only the students in difficulty, but also the teachers. “Mathematics teachers with classes in the human profile will also have to make great efforts. Because they will have to raise the level of the students in such a way that they take the Baccalaureate. The responsibility of teachers will increase. On the other hand, it is not mandatory for everyone to take the Baccalaureate. The ball is in the kids’ court, so to speak. Study, pass the exam. You don’t learn, you don’t get it. It’s simple,” was her reply.
The teacher told us that once they reach high school, many students don’t learn anything anymore. But when they have the exam in front of them, then their appetite for learning and their minds will be opened. They will tighten the ranks. They will mobilize.
With the increase in the number of students who will have to take the exam in Mathematics, the demand for meditations will also increase. “Meditations, in the first place, flourish from the laziness of children to learn what they are taught at school and to deepen at home, alone, without help. Then, it is also about the disinterest of some professors who have nothing to look for in the department. You can’t have a forest without drylands”, the teacher also declared. However, she believes that the meditation phenomenon will explode in the coming years: “The demand will increase with the number of children who will take the exam.”
Teachers demand urgent changes in the education system: “It can’t be like this anymore”
Discussing in the current Romanian context, the generalized phenomenon of meditations is harmful, also believes professor Marius Perianu, coordinator of the junior Olympic team in Mathematics. A few years ago, he told us, the meditations were aimed at preparing for a certain type of exam, with a specific format, usually for college admission. “Which was kind of understandable, given that the school can’t cover every type of exam. Today, parents send their children to meditation at ever younger ages and immediately after the first difficulty encountered in school. They forget that the transition to another education cycle brings with it new challenges, which, at least initially, require additional time dedicated to learning. In other words, the student facing a new subject does not need a recipe, a universal panacea, as meditations are considered today, but he needs to spend some extra hours, with notebooks and books in front of him, in order to settle down”, specified prof. Marius Perianu.
Of course, as a parent you can quickly panic when your own child has difficulties at school, but the solution is not to “give him a quick pill to make the pain go away” – which meditations do today, but to make sure, through communication with the school, with the principals, that in the learning process all the steps have been followed properly. “To think that a two-hour meditation can cover what is taught at school in four or five hours, plus the time devoted to homework and learning at home, is wrong.” the teacher also told us.
Denisa Tănăsescu raises a big alarm signal: students study only for national exams, but the accumulated information is wasted. “It has to be changed programwe have to turn to the education system from outside, which works very well, adapt the Romanian school, reinvent it, because it can’t be done that way anymore”, it concludes.
