“Around 60 percent of school teachers are opposed to the incoming government’s plan to conduct classes in English from 2010, according to a survey yesterday.” - Korea Herald

It is not suprising that the UAE would introduce English-medium instruction from elementary school and employ large numbers of foreign teachers. The UAE, after all, has a foreign majority population, and even if most of the students being served in the schools are UAE nationals, English is a widely spoken language. Moreover, I’ve not heard that UAE students excel in math or science while Koreans routinely place in the top five in international tests. Whatever is wrong with Korean education, one can say that most of the 99% who graduate have strong literacy and numeracy skills and a solid background in science and social studies.

I have to tell you, it’s messy. Everything we do needs approved by the private company I work for, by ADEC (Abu Dhabi Education Council), and by the federal Ministry of Education. Everything is slow, and it can be amazingly frustrating.

That being said, I think it’s worth it, mostly because a lot of the problem here was simply an abundance of comfort on the teachers’ part. Once there were outsiders like us hanging about, suddenly there was a lot more English and less Arabic being used in the classrooms, and a lot more time was spent on things like lesson planning.

In addition, although my job is only concerned with the English teachers, science teachers were frequently coming up to ask questions about things they didn’t understand in the English-language books (sometimes it was something as simple as “What is celery?” for a suggested experiment that didn’t include a picture). Some of the teachers really embraced the change. Unfortunately, there are some teachers (although thankfully, not in the English department) that cannot teach a class in English, which is a HUGE problem because they just go back and teach the class in Arabic. Then we end up with half of the students knowing the information in English and doing well on the test, and half the students knowing the information in Arabic and failing the test because it’s all administered in English.

I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that teachers are the key, and that perhaps decent private sector involvement could be worthwhile. It’s a messy, frustrating process, but so far it has shown improvement in student performance, interestingly, regardless of the company that went to each school.

Wouldn’t a decisive switch away from rote learning toward critical thinking IN KOREAN be the way to go?

But who would they get to teach that way? Heh.

If anything, it will serve to reinforce a wider range of errors in English unless the get teachers who are competent in both English and the subject being taught.

If this flies, it’ll be good. But getting it to fly requires that 1) the teachers can teach effectively in English (which even many college professors have a problem with)

And that’s EXACTLY why this won’t fly - a huge lack of high school subject teachers with advanced English skills capable of delivering complex subject matter effectively in English. Notice how two of the three subjects, math and art, are the least language-dependent. I don’t see how talking about polynomials and negative integers in English will develop the general communication skills of students. Several years ago I did a teacher training course for Korean elementary school teachers after the government decided upon mandatory English lessons for elementary school children. The veteran teachers were not happy at being forced to upgrade their language skills when they had not originally been hired to teach English. 2010 is only two years away. This is yet another hasty government decree foisted upon unprepared teachers.

First, though, in response to #2 – yeah, they exist in FLHS’s now, but most of these kids are from the elite of the elite. Realistically, whether it’s the raw tuition costs, or the gargantuan expenditures in private education costs required to get you past the entrance exams to get there (entire hagwons exist JUST to get kids into Daewon FLHS ALONE), only rich kids get access to the FLHS, with the notable exceptions that end up proving the rule (e.g. super genius or super-motivated kids who eat pages out of dictionaries after they memorize them). On this, I at least see LMB’s point, even if it’s a rough rider way of implementing the change: most kids don’t get access to this kind of education.

What I think he’s doing is the only thing that can be done: a messy shakeup. The education system here is so deadlocked and non-functional that almost any change to the system is compensated and corrected for to keep the equilibrium.

For example, almost any curricular change will just become the new standard to teach to, and new hagwons will pop up. You should have seen the hagwons adjust to the new American SAT’s writing requirement. They barely skipped a beat. Emphasis on essays and GPA’s for Korean new applicants? Well, you’ve got hagwons that do your homework and make sure you understand the material, anyway. Change the standards of the 수능 itself? The private sector morphs instantaneously.

It’s like a hydra, and can only be stopped by just giving it a shotgun blast into the chest.

So going for the jugular and shaking out the teachers is really the only feasible idea I can see, since the reason the private sector dominates in the first place is because teachers here – not all, but far too many – simply suck.

Not because they’re stupid. But because they’re like civil servants – they don’t have to do jack, but they’re not getting fired. Sexually harass or even have sex with students? Reassignment (before recently) was the worst-case scenario. And the KTU? Don’t even get me started on those idiots, who are more concerned for their ideological and fiscal bottom lines than education itself.

In the end, I think LMB is trying to shake hardest at the root of the problem, and see how things adjust. One possibility that would seem to make sense in light of other stuff he’s trying to do would be bringing in qualified foreign teachers in specific subjects to teach math, science, art, and other subjects that don’t rely as heavily on language arts.

The side effect of that is that you’d also get a new style of teaching. The scary part is that you’d also require a huge and (gasp!) effective orientation/monitoring infrastructure that Korea just sucks at providing.

You’d also have to pay the money. And the bottom line is that no matter how much parents want to talk about valuing education, when it comes to foreigners, the bottom line has always been “as little as we can get away with” without any thought to quality – in the public sector.

Who am I going to work for – Waedae’s posh foreign language boarding school at Yongin, which, after the Ministry of Miseducation read that hit piece on my class and my school, changed the law to make it illegal for a foreigner to teach any subject other than English conversation during school hours, wanted me to come on for 35,000 an hour to teach English conversation in YONGIN.

Or, since I have the degrees that Kangnam moms want, 150,000 an hour teaching some subject in a hagwon? People in that situation would make more teaching a single SAT class on Sunday afternoon than most people make working a full-time job for 10 times the teaching hours. The private sector’s got their bases all covered. The public sector is totally fucked.

Nowadays, as many of you know, teachers in public schools just tell their kids to “get what you need in hagwon” and just sleepwalk through the required lessons. Public school teachers, as a rule, know that the majority of students are just going to go to the hagwon for 수능 prep anyway, so they don’t even feel the pressure to try anymore.

It’s called do the math, and I think LMB’s trying to hit at the only place you can: the public schools, raising their standards by sheer, brute force. It’ll be messy at first, but I think it’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long, long time.

And in the end, at some point, the system is going to have to REWARD foreign teachers instead of PUNISHING them for being…foreign. People think the modest proposal I blogged about is crazy, but I think you 1) have to provide incentives while 2) creating competition and obvious gradations of apparent quality as tiers within the system, since Koreans aren’t going to do it automatically. And 3) a special visa without being tied to an employer would also stick it hard to the hagwons, since in the end, they would HAVE TO BEHAVE. Since we could just QUIT.

Just like cutting 1% of civil servants is going to put a fire under people’s asses – you go to a 동네 사무소 and actually tried to get something complex done?

LMB - now, that’s what I’m talking about. We’ll see if he manages to not end up like the past few elected presidents and not be on everyone’s shit list at the end of 5 years, though.

Korean president - toughest job in the universe!

Should my native Australia look to teach some high school classes in Chinese I would welcome the move. I fail to see how pushing a country towards bilingualism in any way threatens linguistic sovereignty. The majority of continental Europeans I know are proficient at more than one language, yet retain solid roots to their culture. Ditto that for many SE Asians and Indians. These kind of arguments are the last refuge of rogues and scoundrels.