Month: August 2015

I haven't even touched my [broken link! FIXME] IIRTHW ("if I ran the hagwon") effort in more than a year. I kind of gave up on it as excessively idealistic and not relevant to my goals. But of course, the nature of my job means that I nevertheless think about it frequently.

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my boss about his constant casting-about for new, more effective approaches to curriculum.

It's odd, because I feel like we've reversed roles, somewhat, in comparison to when we first met, years ago. Back then, I thought, and argued frequently, that curriculum design was important, while he said, much to my consternation, that a "good teacher" ought to be able to work with whatever curriculum was on hand. 

I resented this at the time, and took it to mean that my frustrations with curriculum were symptomatic of my not being a good enough teacher. 

Yet over the last several years, I've evolved to a point where I more or less agree with the sentiment. Much to my dismay, yesterday, Curt seemed to essentially disagree when I said something to this effect. I had said that we should focus on improving our teachers, rather than on improving our curriculum. And his reaction was that he didn't see teachers as being the problem. It wasn't a direct rejection of the earlier philosophy, but it certainly felt like an about face to me. 

The context in which I suggested focusing on teachers instead of curriculum was actually a sort of brainstorm I had, during our conversation, about curriculum. Curt is looking at alternatives to the fairly fossilized "Reading-Listening-Speaking-Writing-Grammar-Vocab" subdivision of material that prevails in hagwon. I first went with my prefered notion, what he called "Immersion" but that I think of as "subject-driven" – teaching "subjects" in English, integrating the various functional components.

When Curt rejected that, for the same reason he always does – the dearth of native-speaking teacher to serve as a focus for that style of teaching (a rejection that strikes me as utterly rational if not completely necessary), I decided to suggest another alternative arrangement that I've been mulling over lately, mostly out of frustration with the seemingly excessive complexity of our modest hagwon's schedule. 

This alternative would essentially say we only have 3 types of classes, which is really my observation that we have three basic types of teachers in our hagwon: 

1) integrated class – this is the native speakers (like myself or Razel or Grace), who focus on "subjects" or "topics" in the immersion style mentioned above

2) analytic class – this is the grammar-translation style that is most traditional in Korean English education, rejected by pedagogy but a reality "on the ground" and we have teachers who teach this way and we might as well support them – some are quite good in many respects

3) foundations class – this is the "daily word test", the memorization words and also the naesin (school term tests) style memorization of speeches, essays and other fragments; this also includes the attendance-keeping and counseling aspects of the "homeroom" teacher job. I hate this memorizaiton stuff, not because I don't think it's helpful – I actually strongly believe that it is helpful – but when overly emphasized, it makes English painful, and that discourages students, and destroys motivation. 

Anyway, I laid these ideas out to Curt. He basically said, "that sounds like it's teacher centered." I said, well, but that's OK. If we focus on our teachers' strengths, and develop them, that will benefit the students, in the long run, as our consistency and quality will increase." He asked about how we would decide the curriculum for these new divisions of labor, and I said what he'd once said to me, that it didn't really matter – the focus was improved teaching and good teachers would inevitably choose or develop appropriately good curriculum. He was somewhat scandalized by this notion.

Hence my feeling that the tables had been turned. 

I haven't developed a specific thought about this at this point, mostly just recording here for future reference. 

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Last week we had a rather competitive debate in my HS cohort (HS means "pre-HS", not High School – they are 9th graders, and are in their last year of middle school in the Korean system). I divided them into teams randomly, but neither team was really working well. Instead, each team seemed to be working to sabotage the other members of their own team. 

I had place an incentive of reduced homework for the winning team. I couldn't understand why the teams were self-sabotaging. I asked, and even explained the word "sabotage" to them in some detail.

The dynamic in the class is complicated by the fact that the class is divided about evenly between some very diligent, hard-working students who always do their homework, and some more slackish students who often don't. One student said explicitly, that he didn't mind if his team lost, because even if he got homework, it was unlikely he would do it. I commented that that seemed like a realistic but regrettable perspective. 

But then I asked, well, why bother anyway, then? 

And Jinu said, in much better English than he normally uses in his speeches, "My only aim is for Jihun to do homework." 

Jihun is one of the diligent ones. He is so diligent, that he is often the best prepared. As such, he has sometimes won one of my homework exemptions in the past. I guess this had caused resentment on the part of his peers, so they were sacrificing their own chance of avoiding homework simply to see him "go down." 

Indeed, Jihun's team lost, and so they got stuck with homework.

The unsurprising thing is, this week – the following week – we met again, and Jihun had done his homework. Indeed, since the other team had won the exemption, and since his own team were mostly slackers, he was the only one who had done homework. He gave his speech, self-satisfiedly. The other students seemed to regret their previous strategy, since my grade sheet filled up with a plethora of zeros, and, of course, as the only one who had done his homework, Jihun won yet another exemption.

I'm not sure if this exemption policy really works the way I want it to. I'm rethinking things, and have temporarily suspended the policy. 

[daily log: walking, 6 km]