Debra Li

debra_lidan@163.com

EARLIER this month, an incident that happened in higher education in the United States garnered wide attention and sparked heated discussion across that country, and also provides food for thought in our own.

Prof. Maitland Jones, Jr., who taught chemistry at New York University (NYU) after semi-retiring from an earlier four-decade academic career at Princeton University, had been fired after students complained about their grades, his teaching and the lack of support for them during the pandemic.

Jones, an award-winning professor of organic chemistry, had been credited with pioneering a new way of teaching that emphasized problem-based learning over a “lecture-memorize-regurgitate facts” style.

But in May, 82 of Jones’ 350 NYU students signed a petition against him arguing that the course was too hard and blamed Jones for their poor test scores.

Organic chemistry is a tough subject, and the pandemic obviously took its toll on the students who since 2020 have had to take online lessons over long periods of time.

Similar harm has also been done to Chinese students. For science courses, particularly chemistry, where lab experiments play an important role in learning, online teaching compromises a large part of its effectiveness. Things are not much better in liberal arts courses, when the class discussion is often incoherent, lacks efficiency and is frequently disrupted by all kinds of technical problems.

My daughter, now in fifth grade, took months of online lessons over the past three years. To reduce the harm of long screen time on the kids’ eyesight, online courses for primary school students are often limited to within half an hour. According to my observation, at least five minutes out of the precious 30 were often wasted on the disruption during the process in which the teacher asked a question, the kids raised their hands (by clicking a button), a kid was chosen, he or she adjusted their microphone and camera, and finally gave an answer. Online teaching also increased the burden of submitting homework online on the part of the student (or parent) and that of rating the homework on the part of the teacher, for the teacher had to click open each submission on their computer and try to make out the not always neat and tidy handwriting of the kids. Midterm and final exams were also canceled several times because of the sudden flare-up of COVID during the past three years, leaving parents at a loss about the status of their kids’ academic performance. The pandemic certainly produced huge economic losses to the whole world, and a much more serious aftermath has yet to be taken seriously in the form of inadequate school learning for children, the future of our society.

Then, the incident in which Jones was fired also serves as a reminder of how far we have gone to appease the students, the “buyers” who pay a large sum of tuition fee for their education. The desire to keep students happy has left administrators caving to their demands, while universities should be a place where students are challenged academically and try to develop the most of their potential.

Here in China, a similar focus has been given to the happiness of the students, particularly those in the compulsory education period. To alleviate the burden of students and parents, Chinese students from first to third grade have now been exempted from written homework as well as exams. That attitude seems to have gone from one extreme to another, as in the past, Chinese students were given an infamously heavy load of homework once they started school.

Although past research shows that homework has no demonstrated benefits for students in the early elementary grades, a daily 10-minute practice in writing newly-learned Chinese characters could do no harm.

And while there might be no correlation between academic achievement and homework, especially in the lower grades, nightly reading is hugely important, according to Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and the author of the 2015 book, “Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy Successful Kids.” So if your child is not being given any homework, make sure they spend some of that extra time reading books.

It is difficult to find the golden mean in the choices we make, including the appropriate workload for children to keep them learning and stimulated, but without drowning them in homework.

However, schools and parents had better take precautions against the attitude that “happiness” outweighs everything else in education, just in case that many years later, our children would repent not having worked hard enough at school and having lost the opportunity to become the best selves they could have been.

(The author is a Features Department editor of Shenzhen Daily.)