Jun 1, 2012

Vietnam - With poor laboratories, Vietnamese students weak at practice

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VietNamNet Bridge – Seventeen out of the 85 non-state high schools in HCM City still do not have laboratories as required. Meanwhile, state owned schools’ teachers feel perplexed when using the laboratory equipments and teaching aids provided.

Buying equipment to leave in storehouses

Headmasters of schools complain that they have some kinds of laboratory equipment in excess, while they lack other kinds of equipment. Especially, a lot of experimental instruments cannot meet the standards set up in textbooks.

Hoang Thi Nguyet, a laboratory officer of the Nguyen Hue High School in district 9 of HCM City, said the school only needs six sets of ADN molecular models, while the school has been allocated 20 sets. A lot of equipment have still left unused and kept in storehouses, while the school does not have other necessary teaching aids to serve the lessons.

Nguyet has also complained about the accuracy of the equipment. In the lesson about single pendulum, students need to take experiment with the pendulum with the length of 75 cm. However, the experiment tool provided to the school only has the length of 50 cm. The quality of the photo-electric portal is bad, because of which students cannot get the results as described in the textbook, while teachers also give up.

The teachers of Phan Tay Ho Secondary School in Go Vap district have also complained that they lack a lot of teaching aids, while the allocated equipments have low quality and unsuitable materials.

The model of an animal skeleton, for example, is made of plaster, therefore, it is easy to get broken. The parts of the model would become separated just after several times of using. The gauges used for physics lessons do not have high accuracy.

It’d better to avoid… practice hours

According to the HCM City Education and Training Department, many non-state owned schools have made heavy investment in the teaching aids and experiment tools to upgrade their teaching quality. Meanwhile, other schools do not have money for investments. Seventeen out of the 85 operational schools still do not have laboratories.

The representative of a private high school said the school does not have laboratory because of the poor infrastructure. The students of the schools now have to learn in leased buildings, and ensuring enough classrooms remains the priority task of the school’s board of management.

Meanwhile, analysts have pointed out that in fact, schools do not pay much attention to practice hours, because students just need to master theoretical knowledge to be able to pass exams. No experiment would be asked during the exams.

The HCM City education department, in an effort to improve the teaching quality, has told the schools without laboratories to equip with necessary teaching aids, or it would revoke the operation licenses granted before to the schools.

State owned schools, though having laboratories, also do want to run practice lessons. Phung Thi Nguyet Thu, Deputy Headmaster of Mac Dinh Chi High School in district 6, said the number of practice hours and the expenses on experiment tools have increased since the day schools were told to teach students in accordance with newly complied textbooks. However, this does not mean that students’ skills could be improved, because the majority of teachers try to avoid complicated experiments.

Sharing the same view with Nguyet, headmaster of a high school in Go Vap district said most of the teachers can carry out simple experiments, because they have not been trained for managing, organizing and using experiment tools.

Source: NLD


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