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.” There is still time to prepare, but this student’s mind has already moved on to 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 also seen students’ grades improve while spending time with friends who study hard. Who you spend time with affects your studying too.

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

Students’ questions taught me something: even high scorers have gaps in their understanding. Skip an explanation because a student is doing well, and you may miss that gap. Scores alone cannot tell me where to pitch a lesson.

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 a student cannot explain why, we need to distinguish between memorising the rule and understanding it. Giving a familiar answer is not the same as applying the idea to a new problem.

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. If even the top class found it too fast, my own pace was the wrong measure. A lesson has to leave students enough time to work things out with their own hands. 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 the point of the book’s title. “If only our child would just study…” Worrying that a child is not studying changes nothing by itself. They need a routine that helps them start and keep going. That, I tell them, I will show them. “They get the ones they know wrong.” Reliability is part of ability too. Knowing something includes being able to use it without getting it wrong. 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. Those are the changes I look for before an improvement in scores. Study can produce different results only when the way a student works begins to change.

Repeaters, and Grades 10 and 11

At Daesung Academy’s full-time class for repeat-year students, I taught CSAT repeaters as well. Many repeaters assumed they knew material because they had studied it before, yet gaps appeared when they tried to solve a problem. In contrast, I saw grade-10 and grade-11 students acknowledge what they did not know and learn eagerly. That was when I saw them make real progress. 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.