Parents back to school!
July 25, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
Imagine that: after 30 years you go back to school. You must do your homework again, write exam tests, answer to teachers’ questions in front of your class. Are you ready?
Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza asked two adult reporters in their mid-30s and mid-40s to check for themselves how it is at school nowadays. Is it really different from ours? Do students really have less work than we all had?
Marek Was and Marek Sterlingow had to spend a week at school in a class with 14-years-olds. (I can tell you: they dealt easily with math and history, but surrendered to the Polish orthography and geologic eras.)
They discovered a lot of things about modern youth:
When we both were 14 years: to be interested in politics meant to say: “no” [to Communist institutions and the Soviet Union's policies]. Today it is very different, as everybody prefers: “yes”. The school says “yes” the European Union. The class says “yes” to the EU. The Union is an absolute, a thing comparable only to what the [Catholic] Church used to mean for us in the old times.
Two reporters told their school story in the newspaper at the end of March 2008.
Then we invited readers to discuss their discoveries and share their experiences and views on the Polish education system.
Teachers who were giving extra paid rehearsals for students told their story: what the Polish schools could not teach for years?
Ambitious parents who had sent their kids to the best schools in towns told about their nightmare when they realized that kids could not meet the requirements. Other readers quickly responded with some advice.
Economists tried to calculate just for fun if the investment in your kids’ education is more profitable than -let’s say – stock exchange or bank deposit. Guess what was the result…
1. Tests for parents
We gave our adult readers an opportunity to test their skills and knowledge. Did they still meet requirements of a secondary school? Could they really help their children to do their homework and to shine at school?
We assigned teachers to prepare tests for the Polish language, English, math and history and we printed them daily in the newspaper.
2. Online teaching tool
We also launched a new website for teachers and parents: UczymySie.pl (We learn and teach together). People could there share ideas how to explain certain topics from school books.
For example: imagine that you are good at math, but you are poor in English. On this website you can find another parent to help your kid in English grammar and at the same time you can help another parent’s kid in math.
It is very easy to use: you just ask a question and wait for somebody else’s answer.
In order to promote the website we invited some well known people to serve as premium users like members of the government, parliament, movie directors, writers etc.
In the first three months the new website welcomed more than 40,000 users.
Tagged: feature, Gazeta, newspaper, test, user-generated-content
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