Education News Roundup

I have been out of the loop, but the new school year is just a few days away, so here's the latest goings-on in the Korean education world:

1)  Corporal punishment was banned in Gyeonggi-do schools last October, and the ban has since grown to include Seoul and many other school districts.  Frankly, the Korean system has relied almost entirely on the threat of physical pain to keep students in line for so long that no one seems to have thought about any alternative disciplinary modi. 

Fortunately, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has come to the rescue, releasing new discipline guidelines, according to the JoongAng Daily:

Under the guidelines, teachers are permitted to discipline students by ordering them to do push-ups, stand in the back of the classroom, or run or walk a few laps around the school playground. Teachers will be permitted to suspend students from school for up to ten days, with a maximum suspension of 30 days a year. Suspended students will receive counseling from education experts. If a student keeps misbehaving after 30 days of suspension, the ministry will allow teachers to summon parents to school for counseling. [...]

The ordinance that banned corporal punishment said teachers could summon parents of a misbehaving student, but teachers complained it wasn’t legally binding and chances were high that parents wouldn’t obey.
The ministry plans to revise a law to mandate parents to appear at schools when teachers summon them to discuss their children’s misbehavior.

The problem is that even suspension is an ineffective tool, since students are never ever held back to repeat a school year.  In Korea's Confucian confusion, group harmony is so important that disruptive students who ruin the educational exerience for their cohort must be allowed to continue doing so.  Until this changes, nothing else will.

Mind you, I am quite blessed in this area, since my classes really experience very little in the way of disruption--the biggest problem I have is quite the opposite: sleeping students, who are only disruptive if they snore loudly.  And, furthermore, my co-teachers, even if they can do little else, can at least go round making sure everyone stays awake.  Getting them enthused about the class activities--that's my job.

2)  Under the headline "They may be old, but ‘school sheriffs’ good to go," JoongAng reports on a Seoul city government response to an increase in crime near city schools:

Three months ago, the city announced plans to improve children’s safety by hiring a team of these “sheriffs.” A total of 1,094 people were selected and survived four levels of fastidious evaluations. They will be deployed to 547 schools in early March.

These “sheriffs” learned similar tactics to what police learn.

 Now, of course, they're "good to go" or "ready to roll", according to the article. Their average age is 59. 

Choi Young-hee, 67, one of the few female attendees, is a former police officer with 30 years of experience. She recalls an incident in 1980, when seven male students raped two middle school girls behind the school.

“All the assailants were arrested but the shock still remains today,” said Choi.

3)  Unfortunately, that kind of thing hasn't stopped since 1980, as a Korea Times story illustrates: four teenagers lured a middle school girl to a nearby school playground (in Busan's Nambu district) and forced her to drink alcohol. "After molesting the girl, they abandoned her in the 6.8 centimeter deep snow that had fallen in Busan that day, and fled."  Police arrested two students for rape and booked two others without physical detention, the story notes.  It doesn't say why, but presumably there's a better reason than that they weren't foreign English teachers.

4)  Read the whole story here to get all the ins and outs, but the daughter of a Korean English teacher in a Seoul high school is accused of stealing the English exams and using them in tutoring students prepping for the exams.  Complicating the story is that the school was identified in 2009 (and given lots of government money) for being a school "without private education".  But the most interesting feature of the story to me is this quote:

Urging an investigation, one teacher said, “Since we made many questions meant to develop creativity as encouraged by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, it is practically impossible to provide such tutoring without stealing questions.”

Hmmm.  See, I think it's practically impossible to provide such tutoring without developing the student's creativity.

5)  The DongA Ilbo gives us a statistics-laden report on the drop in the number of Korean students studying overseas.  The decline was quite significant, with 33.7% fewer overseas students year-on-year. 

The number of primary and secondary school students going abroad started to surge from 2000 and peaked at 29,511 in 2006. The figure, however, decreased to 27,668 in 2007 and has since declined for three consecutive years.

6)  Finally, for a bit of comic relief, we turn to the Herald, which steals a story from the Straits Times (Singapore) about a Korean secondary school whose website was allegedly hacked and replaced by a pornographic website.  Turns out, though, that Junyuan Secondary School had teminated its old URL at www.junyuansec.net while building a new net presence. 

As a school webmaster, I've actually seen both ends of this, first when the McEachern HS website actually was hacked and its homepage replaced by a pr0n image; secondly, my school failed to pay its yearly bill to our provider, and someone moved in under us and bought the address.  Fortunately, this guy only put up clothes merchandising, and I was able to hunt him down (somewhere in South Africa) and buy it back.

Education News Roundup

Not much is happening on the education front as the school year has ended along with the calendar one--the new school year traditionally begins the day after Sam-il or 3-1, the March First Movement, which was an early attempt by Koreans to rebel against Japanese occupation. Similarly, in the US, school traditionally begins the day after Labor Day.

Anyway, Korea Times carries a report on SMOE, under new superintendant Gwak No Hyun, promising to publish the identity of schools where principals and others have been caught in "corrupt or illicit practices":

A list of such schools will be posted on the office’s website (www.sen.go.kr) as part of moves to root out corruption at schools.
It will also disclose the outcome of audits on schools and staff members. However, the disclosure of the names of teachers and other staff members will be withheld.
"Revealing the names of staff involved in misconduct will be difficult as it could conflict with related laws, but school names will be made public regardless of the severity of the offenses," said Song Byung-choon, an inspector of the city education office. "It will help root out illicit practices," Song added.

Seems like a logical, even minimal, sort of step to take. KT also has an article of interest in Business/Finance--it's actually an opinion piece, but it doesn't carry any labelling--regarding the future of university education in Korea. Titled "Will 'gross well-being product' resonate soon?", here are the nut grafs:

It is hard to believe that there is a government that discourages its citizens from going to college, but Korea is such a country. A year ago, Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun said Korea needs fewer universities for the sake of its economy. His faith remains firm in the New Year.
The Ministry of Strategy and Finance said in its 2011 policy plan that Korea should reduce the number of universities through “restructuring” in order to raise “competence” and to “nurture a workforce that fits industrial demand.”
In other words, the government will try to shut down dozens of universities this year so that more high school graduates have to give up on going to college and instead take blue-collar jobs.

The author, Cho Jin-seo, is arguing that the government is turning its back on the idea of measuring the nation's success through a "happiness index" and will focus singlemindedly on burnishing its GDP numbers. Back to the relation with education, he opines:

The change in educational budget structure has a symbolic meaning in this debate of which matters more between economic growth and happiness. The idea of reducing number of universities and cutting state funds to liberal arts and social science courses, and of shifting the saved government budget to vocational training programs at two-year colleges and high schools is appealing to policymakers who prioritize GDP over the joy of learning.
There is resistance, however. Professors at Seoul National University, the most prestigious school in Korea, are holding rallies on its campus this winter to protest the government’s decision to make the school run as a public foundation, where board members will be designated by the education ministry. The teachers fear that this will lead to closure of many liberal art programs and contaminate the school’s academic atmosphere with capitalism.

Interesting stuff. Still, while the GNP (ruling party) assumption about happiness and economic growth is just that, an assumption, so we must admit is it an assumption that higher education automatically leads to higher quality of life.

A bit more mundane, and possibly more practical, is this Korea Herald piece: Teachers seek to reshape English education. The article looks at three schools with "creative English programs", identified by Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, which try to bridge the divide between what students "learn in school with what society expects from them."

Disseminating 10 idioms and expressions per week throughout the school, rewarding students for "creative, longer sentences", creating an "Englsih-only environment" ... Reading between the lines, the primary innovation of these schools is that they have streamed or split their English classes according to English ability not just overall academic ability. Something I have been asking for at my school since the week after I arrived.

Scheduling that kind of thing is an absolute nightmare, I know, having done some scheduling myself; still, they promised me at the last department meeting (a delightful hanu beef place called 대도시) it's going to happen, but warned me that it will mean more lesson preparations for me. I think I can cope.

2010 Teacher of the Year

UPDATE: Korea Times profiled me on Wed, Jan. 5, 2011, click here.

Just to make it official, I had to go in to school today for the final faculty meeting and a free (delicious) lunch. I was one of five NSETs (Native Speaker English Teachers) in Seoul to receive the award.

It snowed again last night,so there was a fresh coat of snow on everything. Here are two views out of my classroom window:

Laura Ingalls, Lousy Teacher

I found this clip from "Little House on the Prairie" where Laura Ingalls, played by Melissa Gilbert, (unintentionally) showcases about six terrible teaching techniques in the space of about three minutes.

1) Although "cold questioning" can be useful as a way to open a lesson, it becomes immediately clear that she's asking questions about material to which they've never been introduced.

2) Her impatience mounts after one kid lucks into an answer; she seems to think that if one student has heard of one borough of New York, they clearly should all know all five boroughs--as if they are just refusing to answer out of obstinacy.

3) She allows the minor disruption of the spitball to take over and sideline the class activity, such as it is. Furthermore, she singles out and punishes Willy without actually knowing he did it--all the more reason for Willy to act out, if he knows he'll be punished anyway. (Self-fulfilling prophesy, anyone?)

4) Willy's question is a legitimate one, one for which teachers should have a ready answer. And she does have an answer--but does she have to be so mean about it?

5) When Willy confuses 'borough' with 'burro', Laura passes up the chance to conduct an interesting side-trip into homophones, so that she can instead belittle him and goad him into further acting out. Good choice, Laura Teacha!

6) It might occur to the students that the Brooklyn Bridge goes to Brooklyn if they had, say, a map; the bridge also goes to Manhattan, so why isn't it called the Manhattan Bridge, then? A map would also help in identifying the three rivers in question.

It's well and good to have high expectations for your students--I use the TESA model myself--but clairvoyance is a bit too much. Give them some tools, Miss Ingalls! A hand-drawn map on the board would suffice, since you probably didn't have a textbook in the 1880s.

Well do I remember the maps of Mr Ferguson, a big beefy guy who taught history at Chaplin School in the 1970s. Four color works of art they were, beautifully lettered, bold arrows illustrating troop movements, mountain chains so real you felt your chest tighten in the thin air. We were expected to copy them down in the first minutes of class. The rest of the period, Mr Ferguson dictated, and we wrote everything down. 45% was the passing grade in his class; I never knew anyone who got over an 80. He wasn't perfect, but he didn't expect us to know things before he taught them.

He set up his classroom with a big open space in the middle, through which he would pace, droning his dictation, with rows of desks on opposite sides, facing in. Dale M--- and I would spend most of class trying to look up Janet E---'s dress. I've never used that desk arrangement, and still blame it to this day for why I don't understand how the von Schlieffen Plan led to Germany's defeat in WWI.

Bragging Rights

1) Norfolk & Chance earned the "Hat Trick" last night at 3 Alley Pub's Quiz Night, first place three times in a row. Well done, us! Unfortunately, we have to take a miss the next couple of weeks--at least under that team name.

2) This week's class activity is "create your own superhero", something fun and relatively easy with which to end the year. So far, my favorite superhero is Whassup Man. Students name and provide the characteristics of their hero or villain by fillng in the blanks on a worksheet I stole from Simon and Martina and fixed up for my purposes. I take (or sometimes choose) volunteers to read about their superhero/villain aloud at the end of class. It's generally a humorous, nice way to end things up.

Most classes have one or two students that take shots at a disliked teacher or the principal; and a couple who make me into the superhero, angling for brownie points on the last day. I felt pretty good today that one student actually tried to describe my traits as a teacher: "TuttleTeacher can freeze students with his stopwatch", "TuttleTeacher can make students pay attention without using corporal punishment", "His television shows interesting videos".

3) My teaching--or my ego--got a more official boost today; the principal showed me a certificate naming me Seoul Office of Education 2010 NSET Teacher of the Year. My co-teacher said there are five teachers receiving the award; I don't know if she meant total, per division, per region or what. Anyway, recognition is nice. And the monetary prize is nice, too--don't know how much it is, but it's nice.

I don't know the criteria or the process that was involved, but I do know I was asked a few weeks ago to put together some sample lesson plans, and I gather this was at a late stage of the selection procedure. I also know that the evaluators of my "open class" gave me a perfect score; and that my school's English Department gave me an "A+".

So, those are some nice laurels to rest on over the holidays!

A Day in the Life ...

... of a Korean High School Student:


Thanks to But Different.

An eloquent eleven seconds, indeed.

Education News Roundup

First, and unsurprisingly, a analysis of data acquired by Dong-A Ilbo found that teachers are "more generous than students or parents in assessing their colleagues." The paper studied the results of the first-ever national evaluation of tachers conducted by the Education, Science and Technology Ministry:

The data suggested that the average score given by teachers to their colleagues was higher than those from students and parents in all categories.
A discrepancy of up to 1.85 times characterized the evaluation scores of teachers and students and up to 2.54 times between those awarded by teachers and parents. [...]
Jeon Je-sang, an education professor at Gyeongju University who conducted a joint study with the regional education research center at Chungbuk National University, said, “Efforts are urgently needed to correct the practice of teachers granting high scores to their colleagues due to sympathy.”

The aticle did not provide information on the basis by which Jeon was able to determine that higher scores were due to "sympathy" or why efforts to correct the practice are needed urgently, since the ministry has not determined any policy procedures that would be impacted by the study.

Second, another story on the so-called "English-teaching" so-called "robots" being pushed by KIST (Korea Institute of Science and Technology) as the solution to the native-teacher so-called "problem", this one from Korea Times, never the brightest pap in the rack:

"We learned that Engkey [the "robot's" nickname] should be able to fare well in markets based on the first phase of experiments. We are poised to conduct more pilot runs before commercially launching the robots in 2013, [said KIST spokesman Park Young-ho.]"
Engkey has arrested the attention of students in the English-language classes in Masan elementary schools this year thanks to her cute penguin-like shape, tender female-voice pronunciation and ability to interact.
However, the robot was found to freeze if a student goes off the scripted dialogue.

In other words, Engkey is a CD-ROM on wheels, in a plastic shell that looks like what children think a robot should look like. Utter shite, as my Brit friends would say.

Finally, and quite disturbingly, JoongAng Daily's story carries the header: Seoul high schools to eliminate P.E. classes "for third-year high school students next year to give students more time to study for the university entrance exam."

Wow! Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick! If anything, what these kids need is less time with their noses in the books, and more time in the fresh (well, you know what I mean) air, exercising their long, skinny bodies. PE teachers' jobs, of course, don't face elimination (which is purpose of those robots in the story above for English teachers), as the number of PE hours will remain the same. The reporters explain:

Schools are currently required to give students 272 hours of physical education during their three years of high school, with 102 hours each for first- and second- year students and 68 hours for third-year students.
Starting next year, schools will be free to divide the number of class hours in any way they like, following the passage of a new regulation that also stipulates that schools offer classes in just eight subject areas.
According to statistics from the Seoul Office of Education, half of the 178 high schools in Seoul that offered physical education classes this year say they will reduce or eliminate the number of physical education hours for third-year students and allocate all of the physical education class hours to the first and second year of high school.

I asked around at my school about this, and they have no plans to make such a change. In fact, they're still hoping to find money for the new gymnasium project despite the big budget cuts for facilities in next year's appropriations.