TICKET Teachers Share Experiences in Fort Lee Schools

It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination for most people—even those who have never set foot in a South Korean classroom—to understand that the Korean education system differs from its American counterpart. But three English teachers from the greater Seoul area currently in residence in Fort Lee schools are getting a firsthand look at just how big that difference can be. They’re also honing their English and teaching skills and learning techniques they hope to apply in their own classrooms back home.

Soo-Ah Lee, Hye-Min Kim and Dae-Hoi Huh are the latest three Korean teachers of English to spend time—in their case, eight weeks—in Fort Lee classrooms being mentored by local teachers, observing, helping out when they can and even on occasion co-teaching as part of the Bloomfield College-sponsored Total Immersion Course for Korean English Teachers (TICKET) program. They are the first group in the three-year history of the school district’s participation in the program to work at Fort Lee’s middle and high schools. Fort Lee also hosted seven teachers, who were—like their predecessors—placed in the elementary schools, earlier in the school year.

Lee is at Lewis F. Cole Middle School. Her mentor there is Language Arts teacher Barbara Milone. Kim and Huh are doing their residencies at the high school, mentored by History and International Baccalaureate (IB) program teacher Adrian Rodriguez and English and Theater teacher Jodi Etra respectively. A fourth teacher, who had been placed at the middle school with Lee, unexpectedly had to return to Korea because of a death in the family, according to Fort Lee District Supervisor of Curriculum and Instruction for ESL, Bilingual and World Languages Sharon Amato.

“This is a professional development opportunity for teachers in Korea,” Amato explained of the TICKET program. “They are English teachers, but the way that they learned to teach English is based on the structural aspects of the language. So the kids learn how to read and write, and they learn all the grammar. But the techniques and strategies that we use here are more communicative-based, where kids are able to offer their opinions about things and analyze.”

Through the TICKET program, for which the Fort Lee Board of Education recently renewed and expanded its partnership with Bloomfield College, English teachers from Korea partner with and are mentored by Fort Lee teachers, learning classroom management, parent outreach and communication skills and teaching techniques they can take back to Korea. They also act as second teachers in Fort Lee classrooms, working with students directly and providing extra support to the teachers and students with whom they work. The Korean government’s Ministry of Education picks up the tab.

“In Korea, the educational system is very standard, so everywhere it’s the same—same system, same subject content, same materials,” said Lee, who taught French in a middle school in Korea for about 20 years before recently switching to English. “In Korea, if you are an English teacher, you have to teach what’s in the textbook. According to the textbook, the students have to pass a test. We don’t have that much freedom to do anything differently in our classrooms, but here, there’s much more freedom that teachers have [in terms of how they teach]. They can choose their materials, and they can speak more freely, I think.”

Lee also said her experience so far at the middle school represents “a big change personally.”

“I just started my English teaching career, so I’m still learning,” said Lee, who’s visiting the U.S. for the first time. “My personal purpose is to improve my English skills, and at the same time, learn about the educational system here.”

The 27 current participants in the program, including Lee, Kim and Huh, were chosen from a group of more than 50,000 applicants—English teachers from Seoul, Korea’s largest city, according to The American Language Center at Bloomfield College. They began the program together at the college, receiving four weeks of intensive instruction “not only on the language, but also about American culture, history and the educational system before they’re placed in classrooms,” Amato said.

“So they have a good sense and a good knowledge of how schools work,” she said. “But, of course, you never really know until you’re in the school.”

Lee says she’s not exactly teaching in the school, but rather observing—so far in ESL and Korean bilingual classes at the middle school, but she has had the opportunity to interact with students, especially during group activities. She said she’s also noticed behavioral differences between the American students and those she teaches in Korea.

“The school day is longer [in Korea],” Lee said. “Sometimes students stay in school until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m., so school is just their life. They are tired. Sometimes they are sleepy, so their behavior is not that good. They study, study, study and study. Some students just sleep in the classroom.”

By way of contrast she described the Fort Lee students she’s had a chance to work with as “more active,” adding, “they can express themselves.”

In a school district that boasts a particularly large population of students of Korean descent—Fort Lee Superintendent of Schools Raymond Bandlow has estimated that about 40 percent of students in Fort Lee schools fall into that category—Lee said she hasn’t felt that the students are particularly interested in learning about her native Korean culture, at least not yet—she’s just three weeks into her eight-week residency.

“I feel that they are just American kids—not Korean,” she said. “There are even some Korean students who can’t speak Korean. But still, they study very hard, and that’s a Korean thing.”

Lee, who was rooming in Fort Lee with the teacher who had to leave amid unfortunate family circumstances, said the two would speak nightly about how they are going to apply what they’re learning in their classrooms back home.

“When I go back to my country, I want to just try to make real content for my students,” Lee said. “It’s not an easy task, but if I can convince my colleagues at the school, it’s not impossible. In Korea, things are changing, but still there are a lot of aging English teachers, so we need this kind of program—an opportunity to see the real life here and improve our English skills is really important.”

Over at Fort Lee High School, Huh and Kim described similar experiences in their local classrooms and observed similar differences between the Korean and American education systems.

“I don’t know where to start,” Kim said, when asked about the differences.

Huh, who has been teaching English in a private high school for boys for the past 15 years and is also in the U.S. for the first time, started by saying, “It’s a totally different situation in Korea.”

He said students in Korea stay in the same classroom all day, for example, while the teachers move around from class to class. And with a longer school day, Korean students get 10-minute breaks between classes, compared to the four minutes Fort Lee students get to move to their next class.

“The students and the teachers seem very busy here,” Huh said.

Kim, who spent a year at Brigham Young University about 10 years ago and has been teaching English in a co-ed public high school in Korea for five years, seemed most impressed by the difference in class size.

“In Korea … we have to manage at least 36 students in each class,” she said. “And managing their behavior can be a problem. Teachers have to be stricter during class time. But here, what I’ve found is that teachers and students discuss—sometimes chatting related to the subject—and they’re very comfortable in the classroom, because the class size is smaller. They talk freely about one discussion subject, so that is a huge difference. Because of the student numbers, I feel a little bit jealous of this American classroom.”

Amato, however, pointed out that the 10- to 20-student class size in the IB program, which Kim was using as a reference, has smaller numbers because of enrollment, and that those small classes are “not typical in our school district, unfortunately.”

“While some classes might have a smaller enrollment, it’s more typical to have about 20-25 students in each class,” Amato said. “Those academy programs tend to have smaller classes, but we don’t have 36 kids in each class.”

Huh, who’s keeping a journal of his experiences, said he thinks he can adapt at least some of the activities he’s observed at Fort Lee High School for use in his own classroom in Korea.

“I can try to make small changes, little by little,” he said.

Kim isn’t so sure how much of difference one teacher can make, but she says she’s going to try.

“In Korea, the government controls [the education system],” she said. “We can’t really change it. Here, the concept of teaching is more like giving the students the opportunity to talk about their opinions. We are more like a lecture style. So in Korea, I think I will give [my students] more chance to talk—even if they could be disoriented at first.”

All three teachers are staying with host families in Fort Lee. Kim in particular is enjoying the relationship she’s developed with hers.

“They have two kids,” she said. “They are like such a traditional family, so I love that. I have dinner with them as much as I can.”

She added that that type of experience more so than her work with students in the school is helping her improve her conversational English.

Huh says that in the “mainstream classrooms” he doesn’t always “understand the communication between the teacher and students, especially in the acting class.”

“They speak so fast,” he said.

But both high school teachers said they’re getting a chance to work with students directly, especially in ESL classes with Fort Lee High School’s Sun Kim, an ESL and Korean Bilingual teacher.

Kim, the visiting TICKET teacher, differed from Lee at the middle school in her opinion of Fort Lee’s “Korean” students. She was open about her personal feelings and made a distinction between American students of Korean descent and what she referred to as “Korean-American” students—those who were born in Korea and moved to the U.S. with their families.

“Because we share the same memory and experience, we can talk and communicate with each other,” she said of the students from Korea. “And they know how to respect older people. They know that we are teachers, so they are quite like the Korean way to treat the teachers. [The American kids of Korean descent] are just like Americans, but they look like Koreans. They don’t know exactly, but they learn from their parents when you should bow to your teachers, and they try. And when we try to talk to them, they don’t really speak [Korean] well, so we feel a little bit distant. I feel more comfortable with the Korean-American kids. I feel more connection to them because they have a little bit of a hard time to adjust to this new cultural environment. It’s the same with us. We are here, and we have to adjust and adapt to this culture as fast as we can, so we have this common bond.”

Mrs. Kim, they say, has also taught them about the many nationalities represented in the school system—not just Korean and Korean-American kids. Bandlow, in fact, has estimated that more than half of Fort Lee students are of Asian descent, including smaller groups of Japanese, Chinese and others, and that kids in the district speak an estimated 60 different languages with many of them speaking a language other than English at home.

“I think that is very good for the students,” Huh said of such diversity. “I think they are very lucky.”

When the three teachers return to Korea, they will be asked not only to apply some of what they’ve learned in their own classrooms, but to share information with colleagues and government officials and play a leading role in developing English communication and conversation curriculum as opposed to the structural approach that has dominated Korean English education for many years.

Kim, who said she didn’t know much about the short history of the program before applying, said she feels “like a pioneer,” and that along with that status comes some level of pressure “because they spent a lot of money on us, so of course we feel pressure to show them that we learned this much—the results.”

“I feel like in Korea we push our students a lot to study, study, study,” she explained. “And we are here as trainees, and the government pushed us to learn, learn, learn. So back in Korea I will be more nice and gentle to my students.”

Huh said the fact that the Korean government makes such an investment in the teachers to train overseas is a sign that what they really want in return for that investment is change.

“I believe that’s why they sent us to other countries, not only the states,” he said. “This time, I think I experienced a lot so far. So maybe I can show and tell my students about the students here and the experience I had during my stay.”

But while the visiting teachers are focused on learning themselves and figuring out how they’re going to apply and convey what they have indeed learned during their stay, Amato stresses the impact the teachers’ presence in Fort Lee classrooms is having on the students who are benefitting from it now.

“The great thing about this program is that it increases the global awareness of our kids,” Amato said. “We have a large Korean population, but many of our kids are Korean-Americans, so other than their families and their parents, they haven’t met a teacher who is teaching in Korea now. So even for them this is a great experience. It’s really added so much to our school district.”

More TICKET teachers are scheduled to come to Fort Lee in the fall, according to Amato. The number depends to some extent on the district’s ability to find host families to house them, but she said that over the past three years the district has hosted as many as seven to 13 teachers at a time, and that the benefits for Fort Lee students, visiting teachers and host families alike make the program worthwhile.

Back at the middle school, Lee summed up what the program has taught her.

“Basically, human beings are the same,” she said. “Even though there are a lot of differences here and in Korea, kids are kids and teachers are teachers. We have more in common than not. Teachers are trying, struggling to make a difference for their students. It’s the same in Korea.”