convo with teacher on korea's education system
it has been a long time probly since mason posted educative limitations but i am still thinking about it. during test prep i emailed him once in a few days but for some reason not now when i have no tests. though i do have something else going on. anyways it is interesting to bring it up when i'm having convos with teachers, summarize the post and email thread, and hear the teachers' opinion.
today i had the opportunity to talk with whatever 수석교사 is in english, the teacher who chooses textbooks and comes up with teaching techniques. at first i was not intending to bring the email thread up. last period i was having a convo with my math teacher and i talked about how i recently learned set theory and how useful it is when learning math. so i brought that up, saying that i heard they used to teach set theory in middle school so i wonder why they removed it before moving it to high school. and the teacher said, 'cuz the brats at the board of education like to change things around' (she said '교육부 놈들' to refer to the people at the board of education, '놈' is a word you would use for someone you want to diss, not necessarily a swear word but rude)
so i asked why the board of education changes unneccessary things, she said that it was because people were angry about the current education system and the board of education had to do something, but they were ignorant and did not know how to reform curriculums correctly. so now there's a weird curriculum that's the old curriculum just rearranged in a nonsense way, middle school units that were needed to understand other units got moved but the other units that didn't get moved weren't changed so students are now confused and need private education. she said it would be much better if teachers who actually taught students and understood them were in charge of the curriculum, but a lot of the curriculum was decided by people who don't know how schools work.
i asked if what i had recently learned was true, that primary and secondary education are disconnected with teritiary education because of policy changes, and that universities have a huge gap in their quality of education which is why korean students and parents are hyperobsessed with going to a top university. the teacher said yes.
and that's when i brought up the email thread with mason, he had mentioned that many small schools in australia will design their curriculums and people don't care about grades to the point schools will give GPA awards incorrectly cuz learning is more important than grades obviously. and i was totally mind blown when he said that, like here is a high schooler not hyperobsessing about going to the best university they could but going 'oh yeah standardized scoring, who cares lol'. if a school gave a GPA award incorrectly in korea i'm sure someone has sued the school already.[citation needed]
at the mention of the GPA award, the teacher told me that korean schools (probly middle schools) give out GPA awards way too easily because a lot of people get perfect scores in a single subject and they all get GPA awards. just look at me, i got a GPA award in four subjects. she said that teachers are pressured to make tests in just the right difficulty that the board of education wants and make students score just the way they want. the teacher ranted about how when nobody gets a 100 on a test she made or the average is low, the board of education will make an angry comment about how the test was too hard. but sometimes students just don't study hard.
idk what the conclusion of this post is, but maybe korea is too obsessed about fairness to standardize things that are worse when standardized. on the contrary schools in australia can tweak their curriculum if they want to do that. and the reason korea is obsessed with fairness is because people compete a lot over university, because a lot of universities that aren't at the top aren't very good. meanwhile universities in australia, if i know it right, do equally good jobs on teaching students and preparing them for jobs.
yeah i thought that was interesting