The hits and misses (mostly MISSES here!!!), of the new reforms of education, the perspectives of these, LABRATS, the first generation of high schoolers in this “program” that this government had, started up, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
The First Generation of Students Cried Out in Anger: Wasting All of Our Spare Time to “Evaluate”, Doesn’t Help Us Find the Areas of Interests in Our Futures
The major change of the new curricular reform is in the high school students’ learning process profiles, which takes up twenty-percent of the college application process. Although the government encouraged the students to use this as a process to discover where their interests lie, to get into the subjects they’re into, to write the minor theses, the reports, but, the final year high school students who are about to go take their entrance exams, this first generations of graduates under the new reforms of education complained, that making the learning process profiles are too time-consuming, taking up all of their times outside of school, but the files they present were like shooting blanks, or, just, “balancing”, and in the end, they’d not known where their interests lie, that it doesn’t do ANYTHING for their career explorations.
The high schooler of Jien-Guo High School, Chang stated it straightforward, “learning process profiles aren’t a good idea”, most of the students are totally clueless of their majors of interests, and can only blindly select the “minor theses classes”, and followed everybody else’s steps, like shooting with the blindfolds on. The high school student, Lin from Chiai also said, that back in their first year of high school, a lot of his fellow classmates don’t know what their goals are in study, but, to get the learning process profiles uploaded by the deadlines, they’d, aimed at the medical, the engineering, and other more popular majors of choice.
This generation of high school students also believed, that it’s a waste of their lives, having to send and upload too many papers online. The student, Wu from Neihu High School in Taipei told, that on average, he’d had to turn in three, to four projects based off of what he’d learned in his courses, that, some of the knowledge he’d acquired, are completely, useless, for instance, in his instructor’s recommendations, he’d turned in the Chinese and the Home Ec projects, but, the projects has nothing to do with the major he wanted to pursue when he enters into higher education: the mathematics.
Lee from Fuxing High School of Taipei said, that the learning process profiles can help in exploration of one’s own areas of interests, but more of his fellow classmates are submitting by quantity, not by quality of the work they turn in, and, it’s like, the whole class is, reading themselves for war.
if you want to have an idea of WHAT the reforms of education look like right now, it looks like, this…
Lin, from Xietong High School stated, that the course evaluations, the activities, and the files are mostly, rushed into production, right before the day of the deadline, and, in this short a time, everybody comes up with generally, the same ideas, the files are like out of the production lines of a factory, and, the book reports, they are forced to write, are all, hot air, the quality isn’t that high. And, the high school student from Neihu High School, Wu even asked, “to get enough in quantity, we’d turned the notes we took in our separate classes into written files, do the college professors really want to see them?”
He’d also told, that a lot of the files are group work, but, the students are burdened by their academic school work on the weekdays, and needed to head to the cram school sessions after school, he and his classmates can only play catch-up on the weekends; there was a report, that his classmate came all the way from Hsintien, where he lived, to finish with him on, he’d commuted for weeks on end, until the project was, finally, competed, it’d made him think “taking the time to study, or to get involved in the extracurricular activities, wouldn’t that be time better spent?”
The female student from Zhong Shan All Girls’ High School who was able to upload five, to six projects per semester mentioned, that other than spending a lot of time discussing the projects, the reports, and the small theses with her classmates, she’d believed, that being involved in the extracurricular activities is, way more important than the academic, and so, she’d worked hard, to keep up with her academic school work, and her extracurricular activities at the same time.
And, the result of this “program” is??? A whole lot of students, getting BURNED out completely, and they’d not even begun in universities yet, this is still due to how the government, wanted to become more like the western worlds in education, without knowing, that HEY, in the WESTERN societies, these sorts of researches, group projects had been done back in the middle school years, not the moment before we’re all out of high school, entering into college, and this country’s playing that game of, “catch-up” is still, going B-U-S-T here!