"Teaching to beat" in a Korean Academic High School

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an intensive two-year ethnographic study focusing on what teachers do when they teach in college preparatory academic high schools in Korea. The main concern is how they select, organize, and present classroom knowledge, while keeping order in the classes. Usually the teaching practices in academic high schools have been characterized as rote memory oriented, and this has become the major strategy to prepare the students for the College Entrance Examination (hereafter C.E.E.). This study, however, reveals that the practices are more than teaching students how and what to memorize. The teachers select what they judge important out of the nationally standardized textbooks, break it down, restucture it in a way that makes classroom knowledge readily "digestible stuffs", and "put it into their mouths" so that the students can easily transfer welldigested bits of knowledge into scores on the C.E.E.. This teaching method is prevalent only among "competent" teachers across the school subjects.