While I studied at teachers’ college, I dreamt of being a good teacher who played a small part in making our society better, and I also wanted to enjoy my free time reading English literature. I vividly remember how elated I was when I became an English teacher at a public school.

However, my teacher’s life was very different from what I had expected. I was too busy to talk about a better society while working with accumulated paperwork and teaching textbook English for exams. I could not even find time to see a doctor when I was ill. I could have been very disappointed in experiencing the hectic life after the long preparation of becoming a teacher.

Instead, I thought I would become very professional and confident within 10 years. I trusted the Korean proverb: “Even the nature of the world changes in 10 years.” However, this saying is no consolation anymore as I have already taught much longer than 10 years.

As I am not the only one who suffers at school, there may be systematic problems in the current education system in Korea. As a teacher who has a passion for students and vision for a better education, I would like to discuss one of the many challenges in our education: teachers’ assessments of their students.

Teachers should have the power to assess their students’ abilities by changing the way of making exam questions. It should be changed from the current joint work to individual teachers’ work. Ideally, it is good for all English teachers of the same grade to collaborate and update students’ textbooks with additional comprehensible and compelling materials.

However, teachers in most cases do not know which grade they will teach until only a few days before the new school year starts. Even experienced teachers need their own time to make good lesson plans for a new book. Teachers physically do not have time to work together before the semester starts. Even if time were given, it would be an extremely difficult job to choose materials other than the textbook through unanimous consent of all teachers.

As far as they are consistent with the syllabus made by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, a variety of ideas should be respected. However, when different teachers use different texts, a serious problem arises on school exam days. It does not matter if additional materials meet students’ needs. From students’ point of view, when a certain passage is taught in a class but not in other classes, the students who learn it in class definitely will have more opportunity to achieve a higher score.

Therefore, the passage is eliminated from the exam questions. It is laborious and time-consuming to screen exam questions only to make sure that all the different teachers dealt with the same words and grammatical points! It is very inefficient for teachers and harmful for students’ learning because students will focus on limited textbook English.

What change could we see if the teachers had the right to evaluate their students? Students would be more willing to participate in class instead of idly sitting or dozing off after staying up late at night at home or at a private institute. As teachers know what students are interested in, they can make a lot of interesting materials to satisfy their own students’ needs.

Students will be exposed to authentic and useful expressions through those materials. In addition, private tutors who are non-attendee in a class have less chance to guess how the exam paper will turn out. By allowing individual teachers to grade students’ academic work, public schools would be reborn with authority and students would enthusiastically participate in class with respect for their teachers. It is not a bad idea to encourage teachers’ passion for the development of their own materials using their experience by giving them the right to rate students’ ability.

Students and their parents should open their heart, accepting the fact that teachers are the ones who gladly want to help students grow up. Let them make exam papers on their own. We Koreans speak well of the book, “Whale Done!” by Kenneth Blanchard, advocating that even a whale dances when it is praised.

Apply the same rule to Korean teachers! When they are trusted by the public, they can do much more than is required.

For a long time, I have been waiting, thinking there is somebody out there who understands the current school problems and waiting for someone to come solve the problem. “Is anyone out there who can share this heavy load? We teachers want to water the flowers of our future with our genuine passion.”

By Kim Hee-soo

Kim Hee-soo teaches English at Baekma Middle School in Ilsan, Goyang City, Gyeonggi Province. ― Ed.