I was prodded by the recent criticism of a local math teacher who gave her students a difficult math puzzle as an attempt at stimulating their math skills to put in my two cents worth on the subject.

>> An audio version of the story is available here

Now, I’m a total ignoramus at math. When the option came up in high school to opt out for another subject I ran headlong away to art and history. So the level of difficulty of the puzzle (which I’ve since learnt how to do) is not for me to unfairly comment on. Yet I did admire her attempt to find an interesting puzzle for the kids and felt extremely annoyed that she should be criticized, as local educators thought, for doing what dedicated teachers do all around the world.

Two questions immediately sprang to mind: Why did she have to search so hard for something she thought was appropriate? Where was the supplementary support for the course materials from the Ministry of Education and Training?

Before I criticize, I should say that I have no doubt that the better pedagogical training centers in the country have up-to-date courses covering such vital concepts, but in an educational system that spans over 3,000 kilometers of coastline, with around 20 million students and more than a million teachers, the likelihood of good training quality evenly spread across the system is highly unlikely.

Let’s look at professional teacher development. I’ve met a lot of local teachers who, to my utter amazement, have no idea what the terms “ESL” (English as a Second Language), “EFL” (English as a Foreign Language) or “TESOL” (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) mean. This is even more surprising as the Ministry of Education and Training has attempted to promote the ‘National Foreign Languages Project 2020’ to lift local English teaching skills.

Even worse, in late high school, college or university, teachers and students have little idea of these terms either. I struggle to understand why the very basics of these pedagogical concepts are so rarely known. And I suspect the same could be said of other disciplines such as mathematics. Why is that important?

Because of research: good teachers always hunt for extra materials for their students, and a sound knowledge of research techniques both online and in the library are compulsory topics in most teacher training courses. This raises the question of how far behind modern teaching methodology Vietnam’s teacher training has become. Why should that teacher need to search so much when it’s the duty of the Ministry of Education and Training to provide support materials and further professional development lessons?

The ministry does have some partnership online resources available. There are the Vietnam OpenCourseWare (VOCW) program, which started in 2007 with the Vietnam Foundation, and its support base for teaching resources, the Vietnam Open Educational Resource (VOER). These are but two examples, yet I wonder how many teachers across the land know they exist? Or know how to do sufficient research to find these resources? Worse still, how many teachers could find materials in English for subjects other than English?

There’s an interesting example of the problem recently reported by Tuoi Tre News. Nguyen The Nhat, a geology student at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, figured out how to convert his lessons into cartoons for his future students. Good for him, but shouldn’t that also be the job of the ministry and its partnerships to provide stimulating materials to support the curriculum?

Here’s an idea. Across the country there are thousands of IT students learning multimedia content, yet they have rarely been required to produce, create, design and publish online educational content. Could this yet be a potential source of future Vietnamese creativity?

I recommend the ministry study the design of the national portals of the educational ministries of countries such as Australia, Singapore, Sweden, Finland or Canada, which by the way feature brilliant course materials in both French and English.

We shouldn’t leave it up to individual educators to search in the dark. Also we should include compulsory IT skills in the educational toolkit of every new teacher graduate. 

So let’s turn on the lights and make education brighter.