Should the burden be reduced?

China should learn from the United States to reduce its burden, and the United States should "increase its burden" by learning from China

A recent domestic article "Ministry of Education, Please Don't Reduce the Burden for My Children" hit the screens. This article reflects the resistance of many domestic parents to reducing the burden on the Ministry of Education. At the same time, some representatives from the National Congress said that children now have to do homework every day and have no time to play at all.

Because I am relatively familiar with basic education between China and the United States, I discovered a funny situation, that is, China and the United States seem to have picked up the wrong script.

China’s Ministry of Education’s views on teaching time

Today, the China Education Newspaper published an article in response to articles opposing burden reduction:

The article stated:

In such a new positioning of the educational function that needs to highlight the public welfare of education, demonstrate that education promotes all-round development of people, and lays the foundation for everyone's happy life, the problem of "overweight academic burden" that is considered to be hindering the development of education in our country has become a problem that affects everyone. Every child's happy experience, every family's happy life, and every school's teachers' biggest obstacles to educational happiness need to be systematically managed first.

From the perspective of the Ministry of Education, burden reduction is an unswerving and important task that affects happiness and must be done.

The views of some schools in the United States on teaching time

In the United States, CNN published a study in 2010 saying that students can benefit from longer teaching time.

This is a large-scale research report on KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program).

What is more darkly humorous is that in this article, the positive example is. . . China, they want to learn from China.

“For example, in China, their schools provide an average of 300 hours more teaching time than American schools, and each school year is also 41 days longer. This means that our students end up learning more than us. Chinese students compete for thousands of study hours"

For more about KIPP, I introduced it in my series of articles "Observation on American Education Reform (1): Why can't a poor family in the United States produce a good son? 》

About KIPP’s teaching time:

What does set KIPP apart is the amount of time students are in school.A regular school day is from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., plus extra weeks in the summer. Some schools even offer Saturday programs. That's up to 600 more hours a year in school than children who attend traditional public middle schools. The extra hours, said KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini, "allow us to turn 'or ' into 'and,'" since a common complaint of teachers is not having time to cover the curriculum and deal with individual student needs. The extra time also allows more planning and collaboration among teachers.

KIPP is usually Every day from 7:30 in the morning to 5 in the evening, I will take classes for a few more weeks during the summer vacation. Some schools also have classes on Saturdays. (Each region is different)

This is the KIPP 2017~2018 calendar for the Houston area in the United States.

Teaching hours are from 7:25 am to 4:15 pm, Friday to 3:00

The results of KIPP schools are very good, whether it is high school graduation rate, college enrollment rate, The college graduation rate is much higher than that of ordinary high schools in several indicators.

Former U.S. President Obama also publicly asked to consider increasing teaching hours in schools

Obama’s original text is:

I know that extending teaching hours and the school year is not a good idea. Very popular idea. At least my two daughters are not willing to do it, my family is not willing to do it, and maybe your family is not willing to do it either. But facing the challenges of the new century, we need more teaching time. If South Korea can do it, I think we in the United States can do it too!

Excerpted from Obama's speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Volume 5 of the Selected Works of Obama

However, because the power of the American teachers union was too strong, the backlash was severe, and in the end the matter was dropped. Extended instructional hours are now available only in some charter schools.

China envies America’s happy education and wants to reduce its burden and then reduce its burden. The United States is envious of China's excellent academic performance and wants to extend teaching hours and academic years. And they all use the other person as a positive example.

How to reduce the burden?

Looking back, we see that there are really so many knowledge points in elementary school and junior high school. Is it so difficult? Not necessarily. Nowadays, many parents and children complain about endless classes and homework. Some parents have to sign up for various tutoring classes on weekends. Parents and children are miserable, and their academic performance remains at the same level.

I wonder if anyone has ever thought about how many of these assignments and homework are necessary, and how much of them are just a waste of time, busy for the sake of being busy?

Let me first talk about my personal experience. When we were in junior high school, we were very lucky to meet a very unique mathematics teacher. It is no exaggeration to say that this teacher has influenced my life, from my learning methods to my outlook on life.

Let’s talk about the teaching results first: There are 57 people in our class, and the full score in mathematics is 100 points. The average mathematics score of our class is 98 points. The average math score of our class was first in the city, and it was also among the top in the city for the next two years.

Learning intensity:

We all learn very easily. We have never done any additional set of exercise books in three years (we did two sets of simulation questions before the high school entrance examination)< /p>

Teaching tips:

You need to preview before class and go to class with questions. You must listen carefully during class and are not allowed to take notes. After class, carefully read the exercise book that comes with the textbook. If you get the wrong questions, make a wrong question set.

It's very simple, right, but here's the key. All the questions in the exercise book must be done one after another without missing a beat. There must be steps, and the result is not correct. And he will carefully check each student's homework. If he makes a mistake, he must correct it and submit it to the teacher for review. Work on the same day, correct on the same day. No matter how many times you revise it, it must be correct before it counts. My record is that I revised a question 5 times, and in the end I felt embarrassed. (Why is it so similar to code review?)

This method, on the one hand, cultivates students' self-learning ability. On the other hand, the amount of exercises is reduced, but each question is explained clearly. The set of wrong questions is specifically aimed at blind spots in one's own knowledge system. We never feel that there is too much homework to finish.

Some teachers I met later asked you to do one set of papers after another, and make a pile of papers from Xicheng District, Haidian District, and Chaoyang District. However, you will find that 80% of the questions or knowledge points in a set of papers have been done before and learned. It is a complete waste of time to do it again. When encountering complex questions, if you are not determined to get it right no matter how many times you revise it, you will still be wrong, wrong, wrong next time you encounter it.

So I will see that some people are very busy, making set after set of papers, changing exercise books one after another, doing it until midnight every night, but in the end the results are still not good. .

So the real burden reduction is to study how to improve teaching methods and teaching content, rather than simply cutting teaching time and pushing students out of school.

Simply cutting teaching time will only push the problem to society. If students don’t understand, they still don’t understand. And social teaching institutions are profitable. They will teach you routines, teach you how to behave like a chicken and a rabbit in the same cage, and teach you how to solve problems. But few people will teach you systematically how to study correctly and efficiently.

If you can do it all by yourself, then aren't they cutting off their own money and digging their own graves? !

In addition, this math teacher told us:

I will not tear out the answers at the back of the exercise book, but I know that there are errors in the answers to the exercises, and I will correct them. Homework depends on the steps. If I find someone copying the answers directly, once I find out, I will get 0 points for the final math.

The result is that no one dares to copy homework or answers, and they will do the process carefully for every question. If we find that the answer is wrong, we will check it again. If it is still wrong, we will wonder if there is something wrong with the answer? ! If you are still not sure, discuss it with several classmates. After one semester, we did find a few exercises with wrong answers.

This method has developed the habit of questioning authority. No matter who gives the standard answer, we have to do the math ourselves first to see if there is anything wrong with the answer. The side effect is that several of our classmates became thorns in high school because they dared to doubt what the teacher said!

Summary

Back to the issue of burden reduction, I feel that the current domestic advanced teaching, question-based tactics, and routine teaching are all problematic. This burden should indeed be reduced!

However, cutting the teaching hours in schools is not necessarily a good idea. To truly reduce the burden, we need to improve teaching methods and improve the curriculum system.