32 Gwangju Abroad
Growing with Montessori
Gwangju Abroad
Written by Yul Kim
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
April 2020
I
am a very typical Korean, as I spent most of my life in Korea. During my time in Korea, I was not a bad student, but studying was not my strength. I did not know why I had to study, and this problem caused me to have a difficult time, just as it has for so many other Korean students. After I realized the fact that studying was not the purpose of life, I started to have an interest in education – when I was 28. Soon after, I started my master’s degree in the U.S. and studied about Montessori education. This amazing experience naturally led me to a teaching career, and now I am teaching elementary students in the U.S. Here, I will go over some of my impressions of teaching in the U.S. while reflecting on my experience with the Korean educational system as a youth. The school that I work at is based on the Montessori educational philosophy, and there I teach lowerelementary students from the first to third grades. Despite the unique nature of the Montessori philosophy, with mixed-age students (6–9 years old) sharing the same classroom, the negative aspects of this system are surprisingly few. This is because, unlike in Korea, it is not a vertically structured system, ranked according to age. As a result, there are positive outcomes from mixedage student interactions that hierarchically structured systems lack. This is the biggest difference that I feel every day in my classroom.
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The comparatively equal structure of American culture is well integrated in the school – the space where children learn – which enables them to speak up in class. Not only are our Montessori schools encouraging mixed-age classrooms, but all other types of educational institutions in the U.S., including universities, are based on a more horizontally aligned culture. After having been through the Korean educational system as a youth, I can appreciate the different strengths of both systems. Another difference in education that I have experienced is the sheer variety of educational methods that foster creative-thinking skills. Although specific teaching methods and goals exist, they can be adapted and differentiated to match individual student proficiencies, limited only by the teacher’s ingenuity. This may, of course, depend on the guidelines of the school or the educational goals that the state seeks to pursue, but what has been observed in many schools so far is that, at least the Montessori method is strongly reliant on the teacher’s ability. Rather than obtaining data to judge students through the results of different types of tests, it is highly desirable that the observation of students’ activities in real classroom environments becomes a major evaluative measure. Few would challenge that test results are an important resource for measuring students’ understanding and
3/27/2020 2:43:07 PM
