조용히 무너지는 자리Where Students Quietly Give Way

The student stories in this episode are composites of many students. None of them is any one person.

The Dawn Shuttle

In 2024 I took a class in the medical-track division of Gangnam Daesung Boarding Academy, a class built around the academy’s own Gangdae materials. I would get up before dawn, board the shuttle at Gangnam Daesung, and ride out to the boarding medical-track campus in Icheon. The name says it all: these are students who move into a dormitory and stake a year on getting into medical school. The days I stood in front of them began before daybreak.

In Front of the Camera

In Daesung MyMac’s live classes, Daeinra and the Gangdae K Final, I taught the practice-exam classes that tie everything together in the second half of the year. A classroom and a camera are different. In a classroom you can see the student. You can see the moment a hand stops, the moment the eyes leave the problem, and that is when you go over. In front of a camera you cannot see any of that. There is no way to check, right there, whether the students are keeping up. That was the hard part. Over my time teaching online I thought about this problem for a long while, and I built several solutions for it. Those I will make public separately, when the time comes.

Where They Give Way

I have seen many students give way. What follows is a story made by combining many of them. The place where they give way is usually one of three.

The first is attitude. “I’ll just retake it next year anyway.” With the time that is left barely enough even at full effort, this student is already talking about next year. Pessimism is not laziness. The hand keeps moving, but the head has given up first. This student is not solving problems. This student is passing time.

The second is environment. There are friends around who do not work hard, and they go off together to do nothing but play games. I have seen the opposite too. Stay close to students who work hard and do well, and the grades go up. A child comes to resemble their friends. This is something I have seen in the classroom many times over.

The third is method. It is the most common, and the quietest. The student who works through three problem books, keeps an error notebook, sits through every online lecture that is supposed to be the best, and whose score does not move. Not lazy. Not slow either. Simply pushing, diligently, against a wall, with a wrong method that nobody ever properly corrected. The prologue of my book was written for this student.

The Student Who Comes with a Question

There is something I learned from students coming to me with questions. Even the high-scoring ones know less than you would think. That taught me to pitch the level carefully. Skip ahead because a student is good, and the place that student does not know stays empty for good.

So when I open a class, I briefly ask about the prerequisites for that lesson. If they say they know it, I ask again whether they really do. For a lesson on exponential functions, say, it goes like this. “Do you know the laws of exponents?” “Yes.” “What is two to the power of zero?” “One.” “Why is it one?” If the student gets stuck there, the student does not know the laws of exponents. The student has seen them. Knowing and having seen are different things. In the exam hall, that difference becomes a difference in score.

A Lesson That Failed

There have been lessons that failed too. It was when I first took on the medical-track division. I went at my own pace. Even the top class in the division said it was too fast. When the very best students say it is too fast, nobody in that lesson kept up. The speed of a lesson must be the speed of the students’ hands, not the speed of the instructor. I learned that then.

The Three Questions Parents Ask

In consultations with parents, three questions come up again and again. “Our child has a good head, but…” I tell them that math is not done with the head. That is why the book is titled the way it is. “If only our child would just study…” Knowing that the problem is not studying changes nothing by itself. What is needed is a system that makes the studying happen, one way or another. That, I tell them, I will show them. “They get the ones they know wrong.” That is ability. Ability includes not getting wrong what you know. All three answers are in Don’t Solve Math in Your Head.

When They Refuse to Write by Hand

Some students will not write by hand no matter how often you tell them. I do not force it. They have to get it wrong themselves before they know. That is how I learned it too. I only hope that the exam they get it wrong in is not one that matters.

The moment a student changes does not show up first in the score. It shows up first in behaviour. The student who only ever followed with the eyes starts writing by hand; the student who only ever looked at wrong answers starts tracing the examiner’s intent even in the problems they got right. Follow the action guidelines written in the book and the score follows. That is the order. Behaviour first, score after.

Repeaters, and Grades 10 and 11

At Daesung Academy’s full-time class for repeat-year students, I taught CSAT repeaters as well. Repeaters very often believe they know something when they do not. Grade-10 and grade-11 students know for themselves that they do not know. So they learn more actively, and that is when they grow the most. One more reason was added to my reasons for going to grades 10 and 11.

Reduced to a single line, what the classroom taught me is this: a student grows when they know that they do not know. Now that method had to be carried outside the classroom. That is the story of the next episode.