Caveat: 두려움과 배움은 함께 춤출 수 없다

Fear and learning cannot dance together.

Today at work, I got a ride home with my coworker Mr Lee. He’s like the vice-vice principal. I think he’s a nice guy, and I can tell he’s really smart, but I mostly appreciate him to the extent he runs interference with the nefarious vice principal. He has a difficult job.

I used to interact more with him, when I was carpooling with Mr Choi last spring. But Mr Choi transferred to another school, and Mr Lee was too recalcitrant, for whatever reason, to offer carpooling – mostly, I suspect, because he has very little English, and feels badly about that.

Anyway, I sat in the back seat of his Kia (there was another teacher in the passenger seat, the new social studies teacher who replaced Mr Choi, whose name I haven’t figured out). And there, on the seat, was a book. Being the typical curious person that I am, I began deciphering the title, and with the social studies teacher’s help. And I discovered it was something I’d heard of:  the Albany Free School (q.v. at wikipedia). The English title of Mercogliano’s book is Making It Up As We Go Along, but the Korean title is 두려움과 배움은 함께 춤출 수 없다 [fear and learning cannot dance together], which, frankly, I like a lot better (Korean edition cover at left). It’s interesting to me, sometimes, to realize there are a lot of “new ideas” circulating in education circles, in Korea – even in a backwater like Yeonggwang County, where the evidence of progressive pedagogy on the ground is almost zero. Given my own background in “alternative education” (both my grandparents’ “Pacific Ackworth” experiment (1940’s-60’s), and my own time at Arcata’s “Centering School” and my teaching at “Moorestown Friends” in 97~98… all these things have exposed me to a lot of alternative pedagogical thought and left me convinced that convention, in education, is way overrated.

And there, on the back seat of a vice-vice principal’s car in Yeonggwang County, Korea, there was another little piece.

[this is a back-post, added 2010-11-20]