Korean Job Discussion Forums

[call_the_shots]

More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_more_school

[Fox]

More time in school is not the answer. American students are doing worse because American students aren't working as hard. It's that simple. When American kids work as hard as Asian kids, they'll get similar results.

[Underwaterbob]

They're probably also only taking public school into account. Some of my students spend as much time in hagwons as they do regular school, effectively doubling the amount of instructional hours.

[thurst]

in america the school day was 830-230 for me...here it's 9-230 with a f-ton of extra activities and hagwon hrs. i'm not gonna do the math, but it's obvious who spends more time in school.

[eamo]

American schools would probably do as many schooldays and hours as Korean schools if Americans had the same attitude to Ivy League as Koreans do to 'SKY'......

The pleasing fact is that American students and their parents are happy enough to go to any number of good universities in the US. They don't feel a need to bust their nuts to get into only Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

IMO, most westerners are far more sensible about education than Korean 'hyper-moms' who see it as a family failure if their son or daughter doesn't get into SNU, Korea U, or Yonsei.

[OculisOrbis]

if you remove the number of days that koreans have exam prep days, mock test days, real test days -- i'm sure the number of actual meaningful in-class instruction hours would be equal to or less than that of american children.

[warmachinenkorea]

Let's just count the 10 minute breaks and 1 hr lunch.

[Moldy Rutabaga]

I am not sure in itself that a longer school year is a bad idea, but the idea that it solves big problems doesn't wash. Judging from my daughter's experience in an American school, the problem to me wasn't necessarily the textbooks or teachers or curriculum, but the ridiculous grade inflation -- if students could fart in key they would get grades in the 90s, killing incentive for those students who really did excel -- and the lack of consequences for students who didn't attend. Parents go on vacation, the child has a pimple on his bum, whatever, it's a missed day. In Korea, there's no missing school as a child. Your leg was chewed off by a wolf, you have dysentery, doesn't matter. Stop shaming your family and get yourself in that van! Students need to be in class, or a longer school year won't help them.

[Goku]

Quality over quantity

If we had only an 1 hour of school everyday, don't you think most of us would memorize pretty much everything? It's pretty short time to be in school everyday.

What if we went to school for 12 hours? It'd be mind numbingly terrible. Look at the highschoolers in Korea. What do they do most of the time? Sleeping in class. Look what they do in our classes? JACK Snit.

Life is short and we need to learn ways to increase education through fundamental principals and a consistent teaching agenda for all teachers. eg. all schools teach multiplication at 4th grade.

Increasing times in schools is not the answer IF the goal is better education. If the goal is to keep kids off the streets for the summer, then this would be a good solution. But by no means does it directly correlate to an improvement in education.

[curiousaboutkorea]

[seonsengnimble]

One of the major problems I found was that so little was taught in elementary and middle school compared to high school. While I learned a lot in high school, my attitude towards studies wasn't what it was when I was younger.

I was ready and willing to learn something beyond arithmetic and fractions in elementary, but we stuck with those from 1st-7th grade. Even the advanced math class was just pre-algebra which maxes out with questions like "5+x=7." After learning for seven years that I didn't need to open my book or do any homework in order to fully understand my math classes, I went to high school where they go through geometry, trigonometry, calculus and up in four years. The same was true for other subjects like science where we just seemed to fool around with random facts and "experiments" until high school where we finally used the scientific method.

English and Social Studies seemed to be handled decently, but I still don't understand why reading was so hard for so many kids. If you're dyslexic, I can understand, but not being able to read things like "The dog ran after the cat" after five or more years in school is ridiculous. I'm also still bitter about the test I took on Crime and Punishment which asked questions like "What color was the pawnbroker's living room?" and "What was the number of the brick where Raskolnikov hid the evidence?"

I never found there to be too many issues with grade inflation. Maybe there was in elementary school, but there were things other than grades which teachers used to motivate students. In middle school and high school, the grades were pretty decently set up. Tests, quizzes and homework all had a specific value, and if you performed badly in one of those areas, your grade suffered.

All of this aside, I still prefer the educational system of the US(at least the system I was brought up in) to the system in Korea. Understanding the subjects was more important than test scores, and there was considerably less memorization.

[Fox]

[mises]

[nathanrutledge]

Mises, interesting article. It kind of pulls off the track this thread was heading it seems, but it's spot on in regards to what needs to be done to excel.

Goku and curiousaboutkorea hit the nail on the head, IMO. Quality over quantity and creativity. I'd rather every American kid scored 90's and had some modicum of creativity and uniqueness as opposed to 99's with a personality as dull as, well, my students!

[Underwaterbob]