Are external books necessary for our pupils ?7 billion LE spent on them. are they needed ?

Question

the Ministery of Education says that 7 billion LE were spent on external books .

it wants to eliminate them so that the pupils would focus on their textbooks .

we are supposed to give our opinions on this .

what do you think ?

Answer 1

Smart answer would be let us have a text book that includes the best of both. That would help everyone focus as well as save those 7 billion.

Answer 2

I think this money was supposed to be spent in improving the free textbooks....why don't they make it like the external books...

lazm yb2a feh floos betet2bd men wara el kotob we 5alas........

Answer 3

once i had two fine students

each one has different character but both were top students in studies

the first student worked on both the text book and my lectures which was very wide and extended in knowledge so both materials were arranged to gather very well jointly step by step point after point

the other student was just considering the text book in his answer and used my lecture just as general knowledge

both went to the exam

the second one has higher marks than the first one

i m sure the first one has many additional points in his papers but the examiner was just trained on conventional answers

Answer 4

Am one of those who studied from external books.

Textbooks ya Moon is not enough at all as u can see what they say after the lesson ends "maza ta3alamt mn haza el dars?"

The lesson itself in books is represented in points !!!

External books are complete i.e. in details with questions and answers plus the whole meanings of the difficult words in the lesson.

Thanks for this question.

Answer 5

actually I went through school years in an Arabic country, and i never depended on external books.

when i applied for Higher Level exam (el mostawa el rafie3) in order to enhance my High school graduation grade, i only needed one external book for the Math test, for Biology test i didn't need one.

the Math's external book was good because it contained a huge number of exercises and tests and mini-tests, with its solutions, so it was a very good practice I really needed. although i didn't join any private lessons i scored 10/10 in Math.

I said this experience just to say yes it has benefits, external books are a necessity in any education system, as students will be motivated to read things out of the text books of the ministry. And external books give better opportunity to exercise more. A good example is the varied number of TOEFL preparation books, the same for GRE or SAT...

But the main problem I see here in Egypt that it indicates the students mis-trust in the educational system as a whole. And these external books are designed to modulate your answer into a certain form or pattern. It doesn’t make them think more or practice more (except for some subjects such as Math and Physics)

I can suggest eh following:

(1) First we have to acknowledge the "real" benefits students get from these external books, in order to revise the ministry text books and refine them to make them better.

(2) The ministry must put some kind of restriction on these books, or some kind of an ISO certificate from the ministry. As the ETS do with TOEFL preparation books. Just to assure it is real beneficial to the students.

(3) The government should provide more budget to the development of ministry text-books. And more budget to teachers. And more firm regulations about students absence; In order to restore order to our governmental schools. And this will make students and their relatives re-believe in the education system again.

Because the main problem –as I mentions earlier- is a mis-trust into the education system.

(4) The ministry should do a social study on the student who purchase these books, and their social level of income, and some kind of comparative statistical study between them and students who can't afford buying them and just depends on old books.

This will help the ministry in a number of ways:

To regulate "small" taxes on the publishers of external books, and use these money for the development of the ministry text books.

To enhance the libraries of the schools with bigger number of books –audio and text-(in general not only external) so the students can find them whenever they want.

(5) trying to change the way students do their homewroks, and make more like research-type work, which involves more data gathering from the lib and the internet. This could be something like a monthly research they do, or a term research. This will open-up their minds into more horizons of knowledge and not just stick to their ministry text books or external books.

When I meet someone in his house and show me his one-shelf library, I say in my-self "do you call this a library?!!" you don’t have to an academic person or a novelist to own a lib. If you watch any amrican movies you see their house walls are full of shelves of books.

Maybe I went so far in my answer. External books are ok in general. But my point was that our students must NOT deal with books are a model answer reference for their tests, as a runaway method from thinking. and so these books have to be designed in a different way...

and to achieve this, the type of learning we adopt in our homeworks and tests system should be re-evaluated in order to get away from the model-answer test we use now.

Answer 6

No they are not, and you're hearing this from a 2nd Prep. Student, I'm one the few students who don't even have the external, I rely on the school provided book, after all the test won't contain anything that is not mentioned in the official books.

Answer 7

The problem is NOT about the external (( or internal )) books .

Why people always focus on the branches & forget the source ??

The whole education system in Egypt needs to be renewed .

Am i right ???

Answer 8

at my time back in thanaweya 3amma, like 9/10 years ago, they were helpful specially in the exams and the typical answers in it..

i think now they are not that help full with this all the teachers and the internet researches..