Sunday, March 15, 2009

alternative schools

Read a few newspaper articles or a random English teachers blog, and inevitably you will come across something about South Korea's behemoth of an education system. Like China and Japan, Korea's education system emphasizes rote memorization and testing to assess student performance and aptitude. The pressure on kids starts as young as elementary school, when parents begin to push kids to attain high marks, often enrolling them in hours of afterschool academies that teach anything under the sun -- art, math, science, history, Chinese, Japanese, and, of course English. Academies, many parents believe, give kids a leg up in a fiercely competitive society. Their elementary school marks will determine what kind of middle school they enter, middle school marks determine the high school they enter, which all goes to determine the college they enter. And much more than in the US, this will play a heavy hand in their future job prospects.

My host siblings last year, who were both on the cusp of elementary and middle school, went to an average of 9 hours of hagwon a week and have taken two two-month trips to the Philippines just to study English. And this is not an extreme, but the norm of what middle and upper class families do to ensure their children have decent job prospects in the future. Its not unusual to meet Korean students who have been sent abroad to foreign boarding school for years beginning in middle school or high school so that they can master English abroad rather than drudging away for hours in after school academies to learn it.

The results, as you might predict, turn out to be that students spend an insane amount of time memorizing information for tests that they will forget after passing. The mother of all of these tests is the 수학능력시험 (National Scholastic Achievement test for college entrance). Leading up to the test you can seen families in church, temple, and in front of the testing center, praying for the good marks that will land their children into a prestigious university. The niece of my host parents stopped coming to family holidays for the past year and a half because she was too busy preparing for the high school examinations that prepare students for this goliath of a test. Unlike the SATs, the board of education holds the 수학능력시험 once a year. Students usually have only once chance at taking it, unless their family is willing to support them while they curl over in library cubicles preparing an additional year for the chance at a better score (a friend of mine took it three years because he wanted a score that would get him into a more reputable university). I asked my roommate a Korean grammar question the other day and he said "I had to study that for the college entrance exam but I forget it, like most of that stuff."

Especially in language education, Koreans are starting to realize that the system doesn't work. Its produced a sizable number of Koreans who know English grammar better than many native speakers but can barely put together a 5 word sentence. And from what I saw in my elementary classroom last year, teachers are beginning to use more activity-based techniques that get students actively using the language rather than studying only grammar and vocabulary from books.

Believing that the mainstream education was failing many students, a group of alternative schools has sprung up in Korea that are trying to address the stress of public schooling. In the past 12 years Koreans established at least 80 alternative schools throughout the country. Many of these are organized by different interest groups (christians, buddhists), but a sizable portion (that I can't find a link to an actual number at the moment) of schools are being established to create student-centered environments for the students. Over the winter vacation I volunteered at one of the Seoul-based schools that are attempting to create these types of environments -- The Haja Production center.

So here's the point in the post where I am planned to give a well-organized description of what this school is and to argue that it is doing something effective that normal Korean schools are missing. Really though, I only volunteered at this school for a week and while I did get close with the students i worked with, that's hardly enough to make some big point with. So instead I'm going to use this space here to just generally talk about what I do know about the Haja center and what i liked about it during the time I was helping there.

Haja was set up for students who were disillusioned with the public education system (not only those who quit school, but also students who wanted a different style of education). The center is set up more like an open university space where students can come and go in and out of the building freely when they don't have class but are expected to attend scheduled classes throughout the day. There are a range of different disciplines. From what I can remember there is global studies, where students study social issues -- especially through the social conditions of migrant workers living in Korea, percussion ensemble, video production, writing, fashion design, hip hop music production, and a few other things that I forget. I believe the students have one year of general studies, choose a discipline to focus on in their second year which they will continue studying for the final 3 years of the school. In their senior year they are expected to organize a large project related to their discipline (which is what brought me to the center -- I was helping a student run a 4 day English camp that was helping her plan for a series of camps that she will give throughout the spring in different alternative schools around Seoul). To change the students impressions about education and the bad associations that they have with schools in the traditional sense, the school does not use the word teacher (which is always attached to a teachers name as a sign of respect in Korea) or student, replacing these words with words that mean something like the producers (students) and the people who are always at the center working to make it run(teachers). The school seemed to have pretty high expectations about students accepting others regardless of age, gender, sex, sexuality, size, shape, and on down the list. What I found during my time there is an environment where students seem to work together with less power struggles and little squabbles than I have seen in other students their age. I also noticed that students are much more willing to express themselves, both in their choice of clothing, their willingness to volunteer, and their use of ideas in creative projects. This is all coming from someone who has experience with college and elementary students but little with high school students. So I don't have a whole lot to compare it against. But, it was a place that i felt the students were very comfortable and that I personally felt was one of the most comfortable places for myself that I have been in here in Korea. Working there and being away from teaching for the few months before made me realize that I do really enjoy teaching and that I think I will do it when I get back to the united states as "the big job." Ideally, I'd like to teach in an alternative school working on similar principles as the Haja Center.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

English Camps

Since I haven't worked a real job since July, all throughout the fall I'd been looking for winter English camp jobs to supplement my lack of income. Luckily, Fulbright (whose English camp I taught at this summer) started a new winter English camp that I hopped onto, and so January third I caught a train 3 hours south to just about as far south as you can go in mainland Korea, to a town called Mokpo. The camp was put together by the board of education for an area called Shinan, that is a group of thousands of islands off the mainland of Korea, and people still live on many of these islands, go to school, farm, and do what people do on the mainland minus the convenience of a nearby city and plus the benefit of doing it on a beautiful, green, craggy island. Plus, the area is famed for having the second largest sea salt field in the world (next to brittany -- where celtic sea salt comes from). All of the kids took boats or crossed huge steel bridges to get from their homes to the mainland. Sixty 6th graders piled in with us at a local YMCA, and teaching these kids was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in Korea.

Compared to the Fulbright camp I taught over the summer, all of the instructors and counselors got much closer and many of us went on to another camp in Pohang that followed immediately after the Mokpo camp. Over the course of these camps I learned many swear words and extremely rude words in Korean through the korean counselors and finally chose a Korean name -- 김더덕 (Kim Deo Deok). Deo Deok is a relative of ginseng, and in the hierarchy of the ginseng family, it ranks the lowest. Which, I feel, fits my personality well, plus when its broiled its one of my favorite Korean foods.

Also of note, Korea leased half the arable land in Madagascar for growing corn and palm oil(http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1861145,00.html) for processed foods and ethanol.