Education News

1) Korean History will become a mandatory subject in Korean high schools starting next year, according to articles in the JoongAng Daily and the Korea Times. The decision reverses a policy adopted only in 2009 to make history optional in the name of decreasing the academic burden on students. Why the quick turnaround?

“Due to the Japanese government’s recent claim over Dokdo, demands have been high for teaching students the history of Korea,” said Lee Ju-ho, the education minister. “The new policy is aimed at encouraging students to feel proud of Korean history and uphold their will to protect our territory.”

Ah, Dokdo. Of course.

2) In an unpublished survey of 290,000 Korean students and parents, students give low approval to leveled single-classroom English courses.

The Hankyoreh acquired an unpublished Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) research report on the results of English education policy and plans for development Thursday through the office of Kwon Young-ghil, Democratic Labor Party lawmaker and National Assembly Education, Science and Technology Committee member. Middle and high school students were surveyed on five areas of English education policy, namely leveled single-classroom English courses, English-only classes, EBS English education broadcasts, weekly one-hour conversation classes, and subject-based classrooms. Of these, only the EBS program was found to have more than 50 percent of respondents answering that they believed their English skills improved after the experience. Positive response rates generally fell in the 40 percent range for the remainder.

Fewer than half the high school (39%) and middle school (48%) students responded that they believed subject-based classrooms would be helpful in improving their English skills. These would generally be classrooms in which native speaking teachers require students to listen to English and actually speak in English some non-zero amount.

"In contrast, some 64.9 percent of high school students and 68.9 percent of middle school students responded affirmatively to a question about whether they believed the EBS [television] program helped them develop their English abilities." In this class, students are not required to do anything other than watch TV, or go to sleep.

“This report clearly shows that the Lee Myung-bak administration’s ‘English immersion education’ is nothing more than a lot of noisy sloganeering, and that satisfaction rates at the actual scenes are low on the whole,” Kwon [Young-ghil, Democratic Labor Party lawmaker] said.

This report in actually proves nothing at all, except perhaps that Korean middle and high school students hate to actually speak English and much prefer to sleep or watch TV. The survey asked their opinions but did nothing to evaluate their English proficiency or its improvement.

But let's be realistic. I (like most in EPIK) teach students for fifty minutes once a week, in about fifteen of the 19 weeks of a semester. That's 25 hours of contact time, max. There is not a lot of room in there to affect dramatic change--so I settle for incremental improvement, mostly in the unwillingness to try speaking a little bit.

Not surprisingly, high marks were found in the elementary school area, where about 80% felt that adding one to two hours of English instruction per week would help them improve their English abilities. No shit, Sherlock.

The Hankoryeh story begins with this anecdote:

In January 2008, then-Presidential Transition Committee Chairwoman Lee Kyung-sook, currently chairperson of the Korea Student Aid Foundation, said at a hearing on English education, “Americans do not understand when you say ‘oh-ren-jee.’ You need to say ‘ah-rinj’ for them to understand you.” Lee expressed the view that the method for writing English words should be changed accordingly. “Ah-rinj" subsequently became a symbol of the Lee Myung-bak administration’s “English immersion policy,” and a number of English education policies were implemented under the administration, including leveled single-classroom English courses. Three years later, however, the results have been poor.

Indeed, Koreans still say oh-ren-jee. But other than that, actual results of the programs were left totally unexamined by the report.

An Occurrence in Whitechapel

"As you can see, something terrible has happened here! Your job today is to find out who this person is; who did this to them; and why they did it!"

Thus begins this week's lesson, a create-your-own style mystery set in Victorian England. The student pairs are Mycroft Pound and his friend and associate Dr. Browning, who must work their way to the solution of the crime by reading the "event cards" and deciding what to do next.

3 1/2 hours spent arranging my classroom after school last Friday was the final stage in preparation of this lesson. I adapted the story from one by Helen Brooke titled "Mystery in London", put the events into MS Word, with their various "go to" statements and some appropriate images to suggest atmosphere, and had them laminated.

Laminating was a good move, because I did this identical lesson two years ago. I created an all-new Pound and Browning mystery for last year's classes, "Murder in Hyde Park". I only teach students for two years, so two mysteries is all I need--I'll recycle Hyde Park next year, should I still be here, etc, etc.

After the dramatic introduction and explanation, students pair up as the detective duo and receive their handout:

They have to read the opening and answer a few comprehension questions before they can begin. They record the number of each event card they visit as they go along in the grid below the picture of themselves (that's Mycroft--or more humorously, "Microsoft"--Pound on the left).

I have the luxury of a deserted classroom across the hall from me, so once a team solves the case and answers my exit questions, they can repair next door and work on a puzzle page I made reinforcing key terms from the lesson.

Most students really enjoy doing activities like this--it is challenge for many of them: while the most fluent teams may finish in ten minutes or so, twenty-five minutes is a more likely time frame. Of course, these stories could be adapted further to make them harder to solve, or much easier, depending on your needs. It's one of a teacher's rewards to observe the victory celebration as they exult in completing this task.

Sadly, many of my classes have a few students who resist doing anything productive no matter how I try to motivate them. Frankly, I just do not expend too much energy worrying about them. I would rather focus on the cases where students had not finished the mystery when classtime was over, but still wanted to find out what happened--naturally I or my co would shepherd them through the final cards so they could reach the end.

Survey Says

I have been doing the same lesson back-to-back in my first grade classes the last two weeks. Well, it isn't the same lesson, per se, but the same activity--a survey of habits and preferences of other students in the class.

Each team has to create three survey questions about their specific topic, then spread out and find their classmates' opinions, habits, preferences, etc. I give them a form, thus:

Curiously, there are a few difficulties with this form, experienced by more students than I would like to admit: 1) writing their questions along the slanted lines--some students ignore the lines and write horizontally; b) trying to fill in the answers to the three questions going down a column, rather than across a row (??!); 3) writing their own name repeatedly in the space labeled Name. So I have created a mock-up version to illustrate how to complete the form. In fact, I have a whole notebook filled with mock-up versions of different hand-outs for my lessons.

Each team is given a specific topic related to the general unit topic. for instance, last week we finished the cell phone chapter, so topics included: game-playing; camera; parents/punishment/restrictions; statistics. This week the subject is food, and topics include fast food, genetically modified foods, Youngil school lunch, snacks, cooking, etc. My classes have 40 students, or ten teams of four, and thus ten topics, but you get the idea. The co and I move actively from group to group helping them with their questions. Then they spend ten to twelve minutes going around the classroom, asking their questions and answering other students'.

At least, hopefully. Korean students have a real desire to please the teacher, which means to them completing the worksheet. If there are twelve slots to fill in, they must fill in ALL twelve slots. They know it would be impossible to do this in twelve minutes by speaking their questions in English, waiting for their classmate to process and answer the questions, then understand the answers and write them down (which is exactly what I want them to do), especially if they than repeat the process in reverse.

So they tend to do two things which utterly defeat the purpose of the activity, no matter how strenuously and clearly they told NOT to do them: a) give their survey paper to the other person, let him read and write his own answers (see, they read and write English quite well--they just can't speak and listen. That that fact is why they have this class doesn't seem to register with them in their zeal to complete the assignment); or b) read it in English once, then translate into Korean for the sake of expediency.

During the last phase, they return to their groups, combine the data and calculate the results; to wrap up, I ask each group a question to see what they learned about the class's food preferences, like: "Team I, what percentage of students think the school lunch service is delicious?" and "Team A, what is the favorite fast food in this class?" For MI Theory practitioners, this is the opportunity for the math/logic intelligence to shine.

The class survey, pretty good lesson idea. It's not perfect--I don't yet have any lessons that are. It provides a focused, student-generated opportunity for conversation. It requires both teachers to actively listen and relentlessly correct during conversation, which makes it quite tiring.

But you learn things. For instance, very few students admit to having "self-pics" on their cell phone, and ice cream is easily the most popular dessert food among my students. Also about 70% are happy with the school lunch program, a turn-around from two years ago, when we ditched J & J Catering for Dongwon Food Service.

The funny thing is, Dongwon was so much worse, the situation became such that the faculty lunchroom was deserted because everyone left campus for lunch. Now, they have J & J back again, and people seem far happier.

Education News

1) All the major papers are covering events at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute for Sciece and Technology), where four college students have committed suicide since the beginning of the year.  This seems extraordinary, but according to the DongA's take on the tragedy:

... a combined 16 students have committed suicide, with four taking their lives in 2003 and this year each. Given the student body of 10,000, this translates into 1.4 to 1.5 suicides per 10,000 students per year.
This figure is no different from the national average suicide rate for undergraduate and graduate students. Of 2.1 million undergraduate and graduate students nationwide, 230 to 340 kill themselves every year.

Still, the recent flurry of deaths have prompted concern.  Some critics place the blame on president Suh Nam-pyo, a former MIT prof. who took over the reins in 2006.  The Korea Herald chronicles:

Suh revised the tenure system which used to guarantee the faculty members’ right to stay permanently at the school. He then ordered all lectures at the school to be delivered in English.

In 2007, Suh adopted a unique tuition system, which is believed to have driven many students to the verge of breakdown.
The state-funded elite school, which was established in 1971 to nurture talented scientists and engineers, had not originally received any tuition from students.
However, under the new tuition system, students are required to pay different levels of fees up to 6 million won ($5,538) a year when their grade point averages are less than 3.0 out of 4.3.
Of the total 7,805 students enrolled last year, 1,600 students, or 12.9 percent, paid an average of 2.45 million won. And the figure has been on the rise recently, with 4.9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2009.

 According to reports, this problem did not affect the students who died, but Suh is nonetheless walking back the policy.  It seems to me a pretty poor policy to begin with, adding huge pressures to students, espcially from poorer families; it was also an effective design to empower unethical professors to bestow grades in return for, ah, favors.

2) Speaking of bestowing grades, a JoongAng Daily article titled 'Teachers are under fire for revising report cards' reports on homeroom teachers at 23 high schools in Seoul for revising previous teachers' comments on report cards without permission, to enhance sthe students' chances for admission to colleges. 

According to the office, the teachers revised the cards because so many parents and students pressured them to do so, saying any negative comments would hinder the students from gaining admission.
“It is true that teachers feel burdened when parents and students beg them to change the comments on the cards,” a teacher in Seoul said. “If we don’t do it, they would blame us, saying we are leading students to fail to enter university.” [...]
Among the revised comments on the cards, 41 percent of them were about career counseling for students, and 32 percent were about reading habits of students. The rest of them were about student club activities or volunteering.
Teachers who committed the unauthorized revisions of report cards will be given warnings or reprimands.

3) Finally this week, both the Times and the Herald cover a report from Korea Educational Development Institute stating the number of high school students choosing to study a second foreign language (after English) fell sharply last year, after authorities decided it was no longer necessary:

The number of second foreign language classes at high schools nationwide also fell 11.2 percent to 18,554, the data found.
The dive in popularity for a second foreign language has come after the government adjusted high school curricula in 2009 to put more emphasis on the study of English, Korean language and math. Learning a second foreign language was compulsory until 2009.
By language, the number of students who chose German as a second foreign language marked the steepest 26.9 percent fall from 29,881 to 21,841, according to the data.
Students of Spanish also fell 25.4 percent, followed by French (18.6 percent), Japanese (17.5 percent), Chinese (13.3 percent) and Russian (5.6 percent), they said.

Korean Teenager News

Instead of my usual "Education News Roundup" I'm going to focus on two stories from the paps reporting on survey results comparing Korean teenagers' attitudes to those of other nations'. Both surveys came out of the National Youth Policy Institute, but were carried by Korea Times and Korea Herald, respectively.

1) Korean teens less happy than Chinese, Japanese

71.2 percent of surveyed young Koreans said they are happy, lower than the 92.3 percent of Chinese contentment and 75.5 percent of Japanese gladness.
The survey was conducted on 2,268 Korean middle and high school students, 1,167 Chinese and 1,144 Japanese students last October and November.
Of the Korean students who answered "yes" to the question, 20.8 percent said they were very happy, far lower than the ratio of Chinese students' 60.2 percent and still less than that of the 27.6 percent in Japan.

Korean teens also showed the least contentment with their free time, 67.5% being satisfied, presumably with amount and type of leisure time, compared to 78 percent of Chinese and 74.7 percent of Japanese respondents. While it is easy to blame this on lengthy and intensive study time, as the researcher does, it is worth remembering that Japanese students run a similar prep gauntlet.

Check out this BBC report on South Korean education.

Koreans, at 48%, were sandwiched between Chinese (83.7%) and Japanese (23.9%) when asked if they will do anything for their country if it is in danger. Of course, the males will do their mandatory military service, so perhaps they feel it satisfies the requirement.

2) S. Korean teens' social skills among worst in world: report
No surprise there.

Each nation was assessed in the three areas of relationship promotion, social cooperation and conflict management through surveys of students' participation in local and school communities, their perceptions of community and foreigners, as well as democratic solutions to conflicts, the report said.
South Korean teens scored the lowest among the 36 nations with scores of zero in the two areas -- relationship promotion and social cooperation -- that valued highly voluntary participation in local and school communities.

Koreans scored well in the third component, Conflict Resolution, because of their ability to list off possible methods for democratic resolutions--not because of any demonstrated ability to resolve conflicts democratically. The article continues:

Teenagers in Thailand had the best social skills with 0.69 points, while Indonesia (0.64), Ireland (0.60), Guatemala (0.59), Britain (0.53) and Chile (0.52) followed closely behind.
"Social interaction skills are linked to the ability to live harmoniously with culturally or socioeconomically different counterparts, so they are very important to teenagers who are the leading players in a globalized and multicultural age," the report [from NYPI] said.
"(We must) pay attention to the fact that Korean children scored well only in areas with a strong emphasis on written assessments and performed very poorly in areas related to internal and external activities. There is a need for measures to change the policy on developing knowledge toward nurturing independence," it added.