The essay is copied almost "stereotypically"

With the topic of analyzing the poem " You come to play at home" by author Nguyen Khuyen, the teacher hopes to see students' pen strokes that feel the beauty of language and poetry.

The sentences are certainly clumsy, the ideas are silly, the expressions are forced, but I appreciate every real piece of writing from my students. Because they are practicing writing, practicing feeling poetry, practicing writing literary analysis... Then the red pen marking the paper suddenly stops, wondering "I just read this essay a while ago", "why does it look so familiar", "or is it...". Flipping through the pile of papers, I came across two essays that were copied almost "stereotypically".

I was disappointed because in every class, the teacher guided the students on how to write an essay analyzing poetry, practiced it regularly with similar essays, and always encouraged them to write on their own. Yet the students returned the essay to the teacher with an exact copy…

It was even more heartbreaking because these were two students with good study habits and fairly good writing skills. Yet the two essays presented before my eyes were copied from a template somewhere and then copied to get their scores. After asking around, I found out that they were both attending extra classes at the same school. It is extremely worrying that there are extra classes for students to "copy" essays in such a dangerous way!

Lessons learned in class have been learned in advance in extra classes, test questions have been solved in advance in extra classes, students just remember, solve the questions, and rewrite the essays. If we do not correct this distorted and negative situation of extra classes, we will create learning machines to achieve sky-high scores, grab the top achievements, and compete for excellent titles. Meanwhile, critical thinking, creativity, and self-study skills are eroded and eliminated right from the childhood days of going to extra classes.

ILLUSTRATION: NHAT THINH

Students lose creative thinking because of mechanical learning

The two "stereotypical" essays above make us worried about the widespread and negative situation of extra classes leading to the consequence of students losing creative thinking and eroding their critical thinking ability.

Recently, the issue of extra teaching and learning has attracted public attention again after the proposal to add extra teaching to the list of conditional business lines at the National Assembly discussion session on November 20.

If extra teaching and learning were purely and transparently following the market's supply and demand laws, then perhaps the bad reputation would not have piled up and the public's complaints and indignation would not have been as "stormy" as it has been for so long.

Public opinion reacted because a group of teachers had gone astray from extra classes. In order to maintain overtime pay that far exceeded their regular salaries, some teachers used all kinds of tricks to entice and force students to attend extra classes. The situation of "hoarding lessons", "asking for questions" or discriminating between students who have and do not take extra classes is a painful reality. "One bad apple spoils the barrel" - the accumulation of bad reputations makes the hearts of honest teachers extremely painful.