A personal anecdote. I have a friend who teaches English in South Korea. He teaches at a private Academy, and the administration is terrified of the parents. The students openly mock teachers, hurl racial abuse at those of color, without fear. Disciplining them risks drawing the ire of the parents, who blame the school and therefore the parents withdrawing their kids from the academies.
I wish they gave some concrete examples of why the teachers are so afraid. What do they mean by discipline? Can a teacher send a student to the principals office? Would that risk them being sued by their parents?
"Ahn says she would like to see penalties for parents who make unfounded accusations against teachers or practical measures put in place so that mandated changes can be adopted in classrooms, such as removing a disruptive student elsewhere to allow teaching to continue."
So, it seems like they don't even have the power to make a student leave their classroom without fear of retaliation at the moment.
If you send a student somewhere outside of the classroom, the parents can argue that 1) you deprived him/her of educational opportunities; 2) you mentally abused him/her by sending her alone into the dark, scary corridor; and 3) you damaged his/her self-esteem by doing this in front of all the other students. If the parents are in a particularly vindictive mood, they can probably get a psychiatrist to back up their bullshit, too.
None of these charges are likely to stick under the revised legal framework, but the mere threat of a lawsuit can be tremendously burdensome to a young teacher just out of college. The teacher who committed suicide in Gangnam last summer was only 23 years old.
I have heard similar stories from US teachers I hike with. Parents will side with their kinds or just not care and school administration will side with the parents or do nothing. This leaves teachers having to deal with discipline issues but not having any tools or support to actually enforce discipline. They all want to leave the job or take retirement as soon as they can.
I’m sorry but good. A mass resigning or mass exodus from that industry would be good for everyone involved.
Teachers should never have been disciplinarians. Their role is to teach kids. If kids are a behavior problem, the teacher should be allowed to expel/ban them from the classroom. This is the only thing that school administration needs to back teachers on. Education being compulsory for students who don’t want it is an extreme social mistake and one we should remedy as soon as possible. These disruptive students do far more damage to other good students than the benefit they provide if you “try hard” to make them work anyway. Not worth it.
The status quo in America gives teachers far too much power to decide the lifetime earning potential and fate of young students. Teachers are extremely tyrannical and that fact is never brought up at all in education discourse. (not even by the “anti teacher” right wingers)
The power of education has nothing to do with the teachers. It has to do with hiring for professional employment with degree requirements (e.g. management, government, lab techs, etc). There are tons of people who can do various jobs but do not have the required (often extraneous) certification. Parents are not chasing learning, they are chasing certification. Those two things correlate, but not enough to satisfy parents.
A good example of this is journalism, which used to require little to no certification, but which today can require masters degrees for some positions.
In the end, the people that know and learn will have longer more productive careers, but there are enough sinecures in Korean (and US) society that the value of certification is overweighted.
> Education being compulsory for students who don’t want it is an extreme social mistake and one we should remedy as soon as possible
This is foolish. Contrary to the current insistence, children do not know what they want. They do not understand what they need. They are not small adults, they are children and children don't think ten minutes ahead let alone decades. Adults with the best interest of children (ideally their parents) are the ones responsible for thinking of their futures and making them do stuff today so they can have a good tomorrow.
I have to say that given what adults are currently doing to the planet, I'm not convinced that they're capable of planning decades ahead or thinking of the best interests of their children either.
Like, I'm not thrilled to be the perpetual doomsayer of HN, but reading someone talking about decades into the future in the context of children really bums me out these days. As a child I really thought the adults would sort things out, but increasingly it just looks like doom, and that's hard to accept.
I teach 3rd - 5th grade at a selective private school. The students are extraordinarily well behaved compared to the public school classrooms I've been in; the difference is night and day.
But classroom management / "discipline" is still a thing. Getting a group of 18 nine-year-olds to quiet down at the right time takes a certain degree of skill, and that will always be a part of teaching, at least for this age group.
There is a huge variety in teaching experiences across the USA, because each district is really different in terms of students and resources. So a teacher in a rich suburban school district probably has much more in satisfaction than a teacher in a poor urban or rural district.
not from korea but I think it's the same dynamics that can be seen elsewhere where there are private schools & cram schools, ie the parent are a direct source of revenue. where you have highly disrespectful and disruptive students that don't want to learn and cause a ruckus but the teachers can't say anything even sending them to the principals office because they risk getting fired, and they tend to be easily replaced in the private sector. sending them to the principal office does nothing, because they tend to be boot-lickers scared of losing a source of revenue. They won't scold the child and what exasperate the problem is the parents have the view that their child can do no wrong. Anecdotally, The only thing I've seen that work in that case is more parents with more social influence complaining about said problematic children (since they risk losing more if the group of parent decide to move their children).
The customer is not always right. Parents can be savages (speaking as a parent who has had to interact with some of these folks) and administration can have no spine or will. Also why there is a teacher shortage in the US. Shit job for shit wages.
The desired outcome is student education and actualization, not necessarily parental happiness. Some parents feel otherwise. Lots of Karens of all genders out there.
Why would you not unionize against your customers if a teacher? Clearly, some parents and their children are abusive and adversarial, leading to unionization being the only defense against abusive working conditions. Who else will protect you as a teacher? Administration and parents won’t. My apologies if this wasn’t clear from my comment you replied to.
unions, by their name, are just a way to organize workers
sure, there are legal protections given to officialized ones (and probably not-officialized as well) against employers, but that does not require for the word to be used only as "organization against evil employers"
The article poses it as a question, but the answer is evident - it's a culture problem. Not 'South Korean' culture, but specifically the culture of relationships they've allowed to develop between parents and teachers.
A good education comes from a collaboration between parents and teachers. Parents are ultimately responsible for their child's education, and teachers serve as helpers pursuing that. A teacher's authority is delegated from the parent.
The parents mentioned in this article appear to wish to train their children to treat them, their teachers, and others with harassment and disrespect. If a teacher or school system isn't willing to help them in that endeavor, then they are pursing different goals - it's not a relationship that can work. One of the parties in that relationship can and should leave to go do something else.
While the Korean public school system is very flawed at least the teachers get paid well enough there. I would not want to be a teacher in wealthy neighborhoods such as Gangnam.
> In the past, Ahn said, “If I could not give my personal phone number to them, sometimes some parents would come to the parking lot and watch and see and take a note of my phone number from my car, then they would text message me.” It is customary for Koreans to display their phone number in the bottom corner of their windscreen.
I'm amazed this can work without everyone being bombarded by spam calls etc.
It became customary because parking spaces are so hard to find in Seoul. You often need to block someone else's car. When the other car needs to move, they'll call the number on your windscreen. It's usually on the driver's side near the VIN sticker. Most people answer immediately. They know they should expect calls if they parked where they might block somebody's movement.
Collecting these numbers is not scalable, though, so it's rarely used for spamming. If you're worried about strangers getting hold of all the personal information and social network profiles tied to your phone number, you can get an anonymized 050 number that forwards to your real number.
Can't see anything on publicly available street view images. The stickers are generally small, have low contrast, and are often hidden by the dot pattern surrounding the windshield if you look from straight ahead. (They are inside the car, on the dashboard. Example: [1]) You need to stand right next to the driver's seat and look down.
Besides, there have been multiple data leaks of pretty much everyone's phone number, and over 80% of all available mobile numbers (010 + 8 digits) are in use. It would be much cheaper for spammers to buy a previously leaked dataset or even just call random numbers.
IIRC the guy who started one of those yellowpages.com-type sites started by acquiring, scanning, and OCRing various Yellow Pages books. Back in the day each one was hundreds of pages. I wouldn't underestimate folks' tenacity
> Government data shows 100 public school teachers killed themselves from January 2018 to June 2023
I think this kind of data analysis would be impossible in the U.S. and Canada, unless done by a government agency. I've never heard of a publicly available database[1] of cause of death in North American, let alone correlated with things like occupation, age, etc.
[1] Note that I'm talking about current data, not 100 year old historical data.
The CDC runs numbers on this for teachers the rate is about 7 per 100,000 every year this is one of the lowest rates out there. Similarly this rate translates from the 500,000 teachers to a rate of 4 per 100,000 which is statistically much lower than the USA and lower than the rates of suicides in the country as a whole. The article also likes to claim that this is caused directly by this specific policy which is also not true.
The suicide rate in South Korea is primarily focused on the elderly population that was abandoned while the nation grew, it's primarily focused on the financial collapse that occurred in the 90s when the nation's stock exchange was targeted by other financial markets in order to generate wealth a similar event has occurred in other Asian countries which forced several million people into poverty.
As for the other issues hyper competition is intense in most Asian countries, these issues are not unique to South Korea. In fact they are significantly worse in China and India. There is no culture problem but a systemic issue of a lack of jobs and opportunities and the overproduction of elites or highly educated individuals.
“ It is customary for Koreans to display their phone number in the bottom corner of their windscreen.” That’s a wtf cultural thing I didn’t know about Koreans
It's because there's a huge shortage of parking spots and too many cars in Korea, particularly in big cities. It's customary to just park illegally and rely on the other party calling you if you're blocking them in.
Amazing that this is so common people would affix their number on the car at all times instead of maybe putting a note on the wiper the few times they have to screw someone double parking
Also common in China. You can even get printed cards with a space for the number. Probably a healthier attitude to engage first and get angry second then a furiously passive aggressive social media rant or damaging the car, both of which I might expect if I blocked someone in over here.
Are all the students and parents a problem? Could there be a way to get non-disruptive students and their parents to fight against the disruptive ones? The teachers might not be able to do much because their job is on the line, but if enough parents who are equal customers get upset that their kids aren't getting the education they are paying for it seems like they could force the minority of disruptive students to fall in line.
That seems like a very complex scheme. The parents get only second hand information from their kids who quite possibly can't evaluate the situation correctly and often don't mind it (they themselves don't care that much about education, the disruptor is a cool kid) etc. It's also not clear how they would fight it, like vote to reprimand the disruptor / their parents?
First some context. Since long past, I've heard that public school teachers in the USA generally come from the bottom 20% of their class. In contrast, applicants for teacher training in South Korea are required to come from the top 1/3 of their class. I've experienced a huge difference in the quality of discussion I can have with American versus Korean educational professionals. My point here is that Korean teachers have a higher level of training and professionalism than Americans might expect, so if they are complaining about something, it's really serious.
Now, on to what has changed in Korean society the past decade. TFA points to the symptom but not the cause with "the teacher-parent dynamic is unrecognizable from just a decade or two ago" and "parents are regarded as like a consumer, with consumer sovereignty." The big issue that TFA doesn't mention is demographics. With a declining student population, schools are desperate for cust--...err...students. I teach at the university level and academic standards have fallen through the floor. I'm not saying this is the only source of change, but I do think it is the main factor.
> I've heard that public school teachers in the USA generally come from the bottom 20% of their class.
No way this is true. ~57% of teachers have Master's degree or higher. Bottom 20% of their class means they'd barely have enough GPA to graduate, let alone get into a MEd program.
1. Not everyone who becomes a teacher is getting a teacher major. English Lit scores well in two areas.
2. Special education is just very expensive babysitting, so they don't actually need to know anything.
3. If you ever wonder why kids aren't learning math well, this should explain it. Every teaching major is in the bottom half of scores. Fucking nurses score better!
But if less than half of adults have any kind of college degree and more than half of teachers have a master's, just saying "the teachers are the bottom 20% of the class" is, at best, extremely misleading—it's not even the same class as the average non-teacher.
Teachers get on special educational programmes that have lighter requirements. For example, they don't get a math degree to teach math. They get a teacher's degree to teach math.
It isn’t weird that someone teaching K-12 math would learn to teach math to kids rather than focus on advanced math that they would never need or use for their job. Considering that even the most advanced math class in high school usually is a first or second semester class in university.
Teaching is a different kind of hard I guess, I wouldn’t say it is easier, especially for those of us who aren’t great at training up soft skills. I’m glad someone can make a good career out of it, I don’t think I could.
Don’t a lot of teachers who have a masters get that degree later on after they’ve been teaching? (If I understand correctly, it’s a direct ticket to a pay raise).
> ~57% of teachers have Master's degree or higher.
This points to an important issue. I think most college-educated people are aware that at a typical university in the USA, the College of Education is separate from the College of Arts & Sciences. What they are probably not aware of without direct experience is the tremendous difference in academic rigor between Education and the Social Sciences. I've been nosing around Education programs for years and a good deal of what goes on in classrooms reminds me of my own experiences in junior high school. We like to joke about classes in Underwater Basket Weaving, but I once actually saw a 10-week, upper-division course in how to make use of a photocopier.
Now to the point. Among the Social Sciences, the field that has developed the most rigor in experimental standards and application of mathematics is probably Psychology. On the other hand, over in the College of Education, there is a field of Educational Psychology, which may be held up as an example of cargo cult science.
Published results on the psychology of learning attract a fair amount of attention on HN, but often the most dramatic reports are coming out of Educational Psychology, not Psychology. Readers need to be aware of the distinction between those fields to better adjust the credence they give to their output.
It is probably impossible to compare education majors to say computer science majors just on their collegiate GPA, or comparing masters program admissions between those (mostly education graduates will go on to enter a masters in education program). There must be something else they are comparing, or maybe the fact is just made up (likely it is impossible to make this claim).
Interesting, have never explicitly heard that about American teachers. Only heard mean stuff about band teachers. What's the pay difference between USA and Korean public school teachers?
The U.S. does have a pretty notoriously bad public education program, so it wouldn't surprise me - am curious how the programs compare as a whole given the countries' differences (e.g. population size and demographics).
Public school teaching in Korea has a reputation for pretty good pay, but more importantly, for job security. Being a teacher is said to significantly improve one's attractiveness as a marriage prospect because of that. Admittance to teaching programs has been competitive in the past (just being in the top 1/3 wasn't a guarantee), but I don't know the current situation with college admissions in that field.
Does Korea have normal (teaching) universities like China does? If so, I would assume that they aren’t even going to the same schools as say STEM majors, which makes being at the top third of their class even more amazing (and WTF do the other two thirds do if they were going to school to be a teacher?).
When you are applying to enter a teaching program, you need to have been in the top 1/3 of the class you were just in. As I understand it, that's just a basic requirement and doesn't by itself guarantee admission. I haven't heard anything about attrition rates in teaching programs.
Something else to know about Korean universities is that admission to departments is competitive, and once students are accepted by a university, they will change departments before trying to change schools. I knew a girl who wanted to study biochemistry, but didn't make the cut in that department, so she went with an opening in silicon engineering, and now works at Samsung designing chips. I hear stories like that very frequently.
That’s actually how it works in the states, with many universities not requiring students to declare majors until they are at the end of being sophomores, and many departments being competitive (especially Computer Science). Education isn’t considered a hot major in the USA, so almost anyone can get in if they can get into the university offering it.
I guess silicon engineering isn’t as competitive as biochem because they have more spots for students (to support Samsung)?
I remember watching Hellbound and the most incredible thing to me was watching the scene where a a gang of 'minors' storm a police station because apparently nobody could stop them that they felt confident in attacking a police station full with armed police.
The series itself is pretty good but I just found it funny that this particular scene broke my immersion in a sceries with interdimensional deamons that come to take souls to hell.
>Ahn says parents have called her mobile phone some days from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., wanting to talk about their child or complain.
This happens in the US too. I think we generally need much stronger rules about when parents can contact teachers and what expectations there are about response times. You shouldn't need to spend every waking minute of your day on-call for a job that pays ~$60k/year. This kind of stuff is the norm now and people wonder why no one wants to go into the teaching profession anymore.
71 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread"Ahn says she would like to see penalties for parents who make unfounded accusations against teachers or practical measures put in place so that mandated changes can be adopted in classrooms, such as removing a disruptive student elsewhere to allow teaching to continue."
So, it seems like they don't even have the power to make a student leave their classroom without fear of retaliation at the moment.
None of these charges are likely to stick under the revised legal framework, but the mere threat of a lawsuit can be tremendously burdensome to a young teacher just out of college. The teacher who committed suicide in Gangnam last summer was only 23 years old.
Teachers should never have been disciplinarians. Their role is to teach kids. If kids are a behavior problem, the teacher should be allowed to expel/ban them from the classroom. This is the only thing that school administration needs to back teachers on. Education being compulsory for students who don’t want it is an extreme social mistake and one we should remedy as soon as possible. These disruptive students do far more damage to other good students than the benefit they provide if you “try hard” to make them work anyway. Not worth it.
The status quo in America gives teachers far too much power to decide the lifetime earning potential and fate of young students. Teachers are extremely tyrannical and that fact is never brought up at all in education discourse. (not even by the “anti teacher” right wingers)
A good example of this is journalism, which used to require little to no certification, but which today can require masters degrees for some positions.
In the end, the people that know and learn will have longer more productive careers, but there are enough sinecures in Korean (and US) society that the value of certification is overweighted.
I disagree. Children often don't see the value of education - partially because it's not shown to them.
This is foolish. Contrary to the current insistence, children do not know what they want. They do not understand what they need. They are not small adults, they are children and children don't think ten minutes ahead let alone decades. Adults with the best interest of children (ideally their parents) are the ones responsible for thinking of their futures and making them do stuff today so they can have a good tomorrow.
I have to say that given what adults are currently doing to the planet, I'm not convinced that they're capable of planning decades ahead or thinking of the best interests of their children either.
Like, I'm not thrilled to be the perpetual doomsayer of HN, but reading someone talking about decades into the future in the context of children really bums me out these days. As a child I really thought the adults would sort things out, but increasingly it just looks like doom, and that's hard to accept.
But classroom management / "discipline" is still a thing. Getting a group of 18 nine-year-olds to quiet down at the right time takes a certain degree of skill, and that will always be a part of teaching, at least for this age group.
The desired outcome is student education and actualization, not necessarily parental happiness. Some parents feel otherwise. Lots of Karens of all genders out there.
thadt’s comment is spot on (chef kiss): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38050798 Lots of other great comments in thread about what teachers face from parents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_Teacher...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Federation_of_Teachers%2...
sure, there are legal protections given to officialized ones (and probably not-officialized as well) against employers, but that does not require for the word to be used only as "organization against evil employers"
A good education comes from a collaboration between parents and teachers. Parents are ultimately responsible for their child's education, and teachers serve as helpers pursuing that. A teacher's authority is delegated from the parent.
The parents mentioned in this article appear to wish to train their children to treat them, their teachers, and others with harassment and disrespect. If a teacher or school system isn't willing to help them in that endeavor, then they are pursing different goals - it's not a relationship that can work. One of the parties in that relationship can and should leave to go do something else.
> In the past, Ahn said, “If I could not give my personal phone number to them, sometimes some parents would come to the parking lot and watch and see and take a note of my phone number from my car, then they would text message me.” It is customary for Koreans to display their phone number in the bottom corner of their windscreen.
I'm amazed this can work without everyone being bombarded by spam calls etc.
Collecting these numbers is not scalable, though, so it's rarely used for spamming. If you're worried about strangers getting hold of all the personal information and social network profiles tied to your phone number, you can get an anonymized 050 number that forwards to your real number.
Besides, there have been multiple data leaks of pretty much everyone's phone number, and over 80% of all available mobile numbers (010 + 8 digits) are in use. It would be much cheaper for spammers to buy a previously leaked dataset or even just call random numbers.
[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/42Yevdz3uoAo3tDZ9
And bazillion of others designs, including a piece of paper with a handwritten number.
This is absolutely true in North America as well, especially in more affluent neighborhoods.
I think this kind of data analysis would be impossible in the U.S. and Canada, unless done by a government agency. I've never heard of a publicly available database[1] of cause of death in North American, let alone correlated with things like occupation, age, etc.
[1] Note that I'm talking about current data, not 100 year old historical data.
The suicide rate in South Korea is primarily focused on the elderly population that was abandoned while the nation grew, it's primarily focused on the financial collapse that occurred in the 90s when the nation's stock exchange was targeted by other financial markets in order to generate wealth a similar event has occurred in other Asian countries which forced several million people into poverty.
As for the other issues hyper competition is intense in most Asian countries, these issues are not unique to South Korea. In fact they are significantly worse in China and India. There is no culture problem but a systemic issue of a lack of jobs and opportunities and the overproduction of elites or highly educated individuals.
There could be some privacy issues, but an escrow process could help, plus classroom should not afford expectation of privacy.
Now, on to what has changed in Korean society the past decade. TFA points to the symptom but not the cause with "the teacher-parent dynamic is unrecognizable from just a decade or two ago" and "parents are regarded as like a consumer, with consumer sovereignty." The big issue that TFA doesn't mention is demographics. With a declining student population, schools are desperate for cust--...err...students. I teach at the university level and academic standards have fallen through the floor. I'm not saying this is the only source of change, but I do think it is the main factor.
No way this is true. ~57% of teachers have Master's degree or higher. Bottom 20% of their class means they'd barely have enough GPA to graduate, let alone get into a MEd program.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ntps/tables/ntps1718_fltable04_t...
1. Not everyone who becomes a teacher is getting a teacher major. English Lit scores well in two areas.
2. Special education is just very expensive babysitting, so they don't actually need to know anything.
3. If you ever wonder why kids aren't learning math well, this should explain it. Every teaching major is in the bottom half of scores. Fucking nurses score better!
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/types-of-...
https://future.utsa.edu/programs/undergraduate/mathematics-f...
This points to an important issue. I think most college-educated people are aware that at a typical university in the USA, the College of Education is separate from the College of Arts & Sciences. What they are probably not aware of without direct experience is the tremendous difference in academic rigor between Education and the Social Sciences. I've been nosing around Education programs for years and a good deal of what goes on in classrooms reminds me of my own experiences in junior high school. We like to joke about classes in Underwater Basket Weaving, but I once actually saw a 10-week, upper-division course in how to make use of a photocopier.
Now to the point. Among the Social Sciences, the field that has developed the most rigor in experimental standards and application of mathematics is probably Psychology. On the other hand, over in the College of Education, there is a field of Educational Psychology, which may be held up as an example of cargo cult science.
Published results on the psychology of learning attract a fair amount of attention on HN, but often the most dramatic reports are coming out of Educational Psychology, not Psychology. Readers need to be aware of the distinction between those fields to better adjust the credence they give to their output.
Something else to know about Korean universities is that admission to departments is competitive, and once students are accepted by a university, they will change departments before trying to change schools. I knew a girl who wanted to study biochemistry, but didn't make the cut in that department, so she went with an opening in silicon engineering, and now works at Samsung designing chips. I hear stories like that very frequently.
I guess silicon engineering isn’t as competitive as biochem because they have more spots for students (to support Samsung)?
The series itself is pretty good but I just found it funny that this particular scene broke my immersion in a sceries with interdimensional deamons that come to take souls to hell.
This happens in the US too. I think we generally need much stronger rules about when parents can contact teachers and what expectations there are about response times. You shouldn't need to spend every waking minute of your day on-call for a job that pays ~$60k/year. This kind of stuff is the norm now and people wonder why no one wants to go into the teaching profession anymore.