June 13, 2020

Home schooling: How the bad pupils become the best ones

topic:	Child rights
located:	Bosnia and Herzegovina
editor:	Katarina Panić

The teaching in primary schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended yesterday. For the last three months in Republika Srpska, one of the two Bosnian entities, long-distance learning has been conducted by public broadcasting service RTRS. The coronavirus lockdown closed schools on March 10, and seven days later the TV school had begun. Teachers all over the country stood in front of TV cameras – most of them for the very first time – and filmed the classes one by one.

Everyone agrees the educational authorities reacted promptly. Not everyone agrees about anything else: the quality of schooling, the lack of digital competence and the shortage of logistics. The solidarity was terrific when it came to equipment. The authorities, schools and companies unified and bought the missing gadgets. Still, temporary power outages or the insufficient strength of the internet interfered with teaching continuously.

As for the quality of teaching, most people say it's better than nothing. Yet, far from the process that usually takes place in the classrooms.

"The teachers could hardly influence the motivation of students. Student self-responsibility was very important here. The necessity of parents being additionally involved was quite challenging. Furthermore, we used to talk to students face to face, to observe their non-verbal communication, their body language. Now, we lost one of the most potent tools: approach. Not Zoom nor any other platform would ever fulfil that gap", a school psychologist Maja Zorić said to fairplanet.

The TV lessons were some five hours per day for all nine grades - less time than every single one spends in school each day. A school principal that wanted to stay anonymous told FairPlanet that the problems are going to be more visible once the students get back to classrooms.

"It would be better to spend one month in schools than the last three months online combined. It does not matter if it is July or August. Who says that we have to have a holiday in the summer? It is not a usual situation, but an emergency one. So, we could deal with that," she said.

According to her, the weakest link is rather bad students' parents. They used to do the homework for them, and now they insist on the highest grades. However, they cannot get excellent since the categories before the pandemic are also considered.

"There are students with grade one (the lowest one) in five to six school subjects after the first semester. During home-schooling, they have all fives, but their homework did not have their handwriting. The parents now request additional exams not accepting anything less than five (the highest grade). It could even decrease the grades since their kids are the ones to be examined, not them," the principal added.

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