I want to be a better teacher. Often, I feel like I drop the ball on this immense project. Sometimes, I lose sight of the objective, or else, I get frustrated, and stand still, for a long time.
Sometimes, one finds unexpected inspiration. Many of my fellow foreign teachers are my “friends” in facebook, and I occasionally take the time to survey the messy world of facebook postings, to see what’s going on. This morning I found some unexpected inspiration, in something someone posted a link to. So I’ll add it here.
I don’t know if this is possible in American public schools. It should be. Certainly, although not common, it’s at least not inconceivable in a Korean classroom, at least in my limited experience. It’s an example of what I’ve seen translated as “moral education,” which is an integrated part of the Korean classroom curriculum, as in Japan. My feeling is that although the teacher in the video is still an outlier (on the “good” end of the scale), he’s less of one in the Asian spectrum than in the Western one.
I haven’t finished watching all five parts on youtube. Much of it isn’t per se relevant to working as a foreign language teacher (as opposed to, say, a local-native-language homeroom teacher) – empathy can be hard to convey when the kids only understand a small percentage of what one is saying to them.
But I’ve never found the concept of “moral education” offensive, the way that many Westerners react to this Asian classroom universality, and which this teacher in this video has integrated so deeply into his classroom. Certainly, done badly, it can be full of nonsense and propaganda. But done well, it’s the absolute main purpose of putting children into collective groups and “educating” them – much more important than math, reading, writing, etc.
I often end up on the losing side of arguments with Westerners (and even with Koreans) over whether the Korean education system is “broken” – I believe it is much less “broken” than our American system, at least at the elementary level. And in part, it’s because I think that the sort of “moral education” being exemplified in the video is at least not impossible here, if nevertheless rare. Whereas it’s become my impression that such a classroom experience would simply be out of the question in the US. Maybe it is, and I’m just out of touch with how education works in my home country. But that’s my impression. And the fact is, if I had kids right now, I’d rather them going to school in Korea or Japan than in the US or Canada.