HONG KONG-Teachers and students in Hong Kong expressed concern over when they will return to normal academic life after the city’s education chief said there was still no fixed date for local schools to re-open.
Briefing media on Thursday morning, Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung Yun-hung said the bureau has not decided which date to re-open schools, as the authorities are still working to provide sufficient supplies of protective gear to schools.
His remarks came a day after the city decided to allow the Diploma of Secondary Education exams – Hong Kong’s college entrance exams – to go ahead on April 24.
Yeung, however, noted that the conditions for resuming classes were completely different from those for holding examinations. To resume classes across the city, the department had to consider large numbers of students, as well as frequent communication between them.
The primary and secondary schools and universities have extended their Lunar New Year holiday due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Hong Kong. This has led to classes being suspended since January.
Tang Fei, principal of Heung To Secondary School (Tseung Kwan O), said the form-5 senior students who will sit next year’s DSE exams are in a more worrying situation than other students. This is because it is very hard for them to make up for the lost time even though schools will shorten their summer breaks.
“Students in the ongoing school year have lost too much time and their schoolwork has fallen behind schedule,” Tang explained.
Although students were having online classes, learning efficiency was not the same as normal classroom lessons, Tang said.
Agreeing with the principal, Rubina Cheng, a Form-5 student, said that she had fallen behind in various courses. She had also failed to get a solid understanding of some subjects during three months of online classes.
She attributed this to a learning environment which made it harder for students to concentrate. Cheng met with her classmates for study before the city banned gatherings and discouraged people from going out.
Cheng said she was concerned these problems during the current semester would affect her performance in the DSE exams next year.
An assistant teacher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who preferred to be called Chris Tong, said online courses obviously had a lower attendance levels than traditional courses. The lack of face-to-face interaction between students and teachers meant some students were making limited progress, the computer programming teacher said
Some students have admitted they cannot reach the required standards as they are limited by the devices they are using at home, explained Tong. For example, some students had no access to some paid software, which were usually provided by the university’s laboratory.
Tong’s class will have a mid-term test next week. As the teachers cannot supervise it, they will shorten the test time and give each student different questions to prevent cheating.
