"We Don't Realize How Much Other Countries are Trying to Come Up to Our Standard": A Conversation with Pam Gilbert Smith  
by Andrew Kerr
March 2006

When I first encountered Pam Gilbert Smith at a focus group meeting a few weeks ago, she struck me as an outspoken shoot-from-the-hip sort of person, just the kind of teacher who would make for a good interview. As it turns out, she also has a great sense of humor and great enthusiasm about teaching, which only added to the fun on my end!

You teach chemistry at Chamblee Charter High School. What exactly is a "charter" school versus a "regular" school?

Charter schools are set up so that the parents and teachers and students govern the school. There's a charter organization that you apply to to get yourself started. So, it's site-based management. The council is governed by parents, teachers, and students.

Do you think the charter system works better?

I think that it has of bit of something to it from the standpoint that the parents have a very vested interest. This is my 30th year of teaching, and this is one of the environments I've been in where the parents have been most involved. It offers a few more checks and balances within the system and just a little bit more support for those of us who are in the system.

This Monday we had a cultural arts assembly. The parents have brought in a cultural group for the students that has been just awesome. Divine, these African American ladies, sing, and they talk about how they've traveled around the world singing these songs, and where the songs come from. And we had a group talk about drums, African drums from the different countries of Africa, and how, as slave trade picked up, those drums migrated, and how the drum was used for communication, how the drums changed from Mexico to Brazil. Parents being that involved has really helped on the enrichment side.

You've done GIFT for how many years now?

Three years in a row.

Were these experiences very different from one another, or were they pretty similar?

I'd say they were radically different environments. In "03" I went to Korea for six weeks, and in "04" to Japan for six weeks. This year I worked with Dr. [Valeria] Milam.

How did you prepare yourself for visiting Korea and Japan?

It was some personal research, called "buying some books," "asking some folks who went," and "trying not to get preconceived ideas." I bought some books and tapes to try to understand the language.

Were you in Seoul, Korea? And what were the names of these schools?

I was south-ish of Seoul. It was called Sung Kun Kom [Editor's note: We're still trying to confirm that spelling]. In Japan I taught in Tsukuba at Meikei High School.

What were the differences first between the Korean and the Japanese schools, and then between those schools and American ones?

The schools were very, very different. In Korea I was at a boarding type of school in the country. The students don't live with their parents; they live at the school. The school in Japan, Meikei High School, was a private school, some students lived there and some students did not. Of course the school I'm teaching at in the United States is not a boarding school; boarding schools are not as common here.

Both of them had students who had lived in the United States with their families. Their parents were working or studying in the United States. So, many of them had excellent English language skills; some spoke English without any accents at all.

What was very interesting was that after I told the Japanese class that I had been to Korea the summer before, the Japanese kids said, "The Koreans, they study all the time!"

I found that the Koreans seemed more serious. Now remember: I don't speak the language--I'm looking at body language and anything else I could pick up on, but the Korean kids were very attentive, very much into their classes and whatever they were doing. I saw some situations in the Japanese school where the teacher was talking and the students were talking amongst themselves too, and the students were never reprimanded. In America there is a lot of management in the classroom, but the Japanese teacher just continued to teach.

One day when I was in Japan and I taught the class, I told the kids I was going to teach the class just like I would my classroom in the United States. There was a girl with her head down on the desk. In America of course we don't allow a student to have her head down on the desk, so I approached her and kind of shook her. I have no idea what she said to me!

I was amazed one day when the kids at the Korean school had just had a major paper or something due, I think in physics class, and most of them had their heads down on the desk and they were dead asleep. The teacher never missed a beat or went around shaking anybody.

Why do you think they would allow the kids to sleep like that?

I think they understood that the kids had been working a lot and had been up late studying. And essentially it came off as it was their [the kids'] responsibility.

Any other differences you observed?

I saw labs in the classrooms that I recognized from United States physics, chemistry, and biology classes. For example, in Japan I saw the students do an experiment on the extraction of the salivary glands of fruit flies. This is one of the very classic experiments that you would do here in the "olden days" here in the U.S. The kids were getting some good stuff out of the lab; seeing it again reminded me of what a good lab it actually is.

Most of the classrooms had LCD projectors to project power point presentations. This was something I noticed more in Japan. And in Japan the teachers moved more than students moved. The teachers brought their technology stick (so they could control the projector), and carried their thumb drives so that they could teach the class from that room. In Korea different students shared a room and teachers stayed pretty stable.

Teachers seemed to have a lot more preparation time, but then again these were private schools, so it wasn't like they taught five periods a day every day. They seemed to have a lot more time they would spend preparing. I saw the biology teacher a number of times with his camera around campus; later he incorporated the pictures he took into his class.

Do most of the kids go on to university?

Yes, most of the students go to university. One of the things they talk about a lot is the big test to get into university. I understand that they have almost a semester off where they spend their time studying for the exam. So high school is pretty rigorous and pretty intense, pretty serious. But they say that college is not like that. They party more and have fun.

For instance in Korea, on my first night on campus we ended up in this college building, and it had a bunch of study carrels, and everybody was smoking and just hanging out.

They have study carrels in high school as well; they've got them decorated, and they have to sit in their study carrels for a two or three hour study period in the evening.

Is everything taught at the high school level in those countries geared exclusively towards preparing those students for that all-important college entrance exam, or is it up to the kids to anticipate what items might be on that?

I think it's more up to the kids to assimilate that knowledge.

The stress associated with taking the test is legendary in Japan. It has spawned many reports of high suicide rates amongst students.

They have a high suicide rate, that's actually true. The Japanese teachers wouldn't talk with me about that, but the English teacher from New Zealand told me about that. It is not an urban myth.

There's a lot that we [American teachers] do to nurture our students, although I did see a lot of nurturing going on over there, too. But we as a system do a lot more nurturing.

The general impression is that high school students in other industrialized countries are doing better than we are in math and science. Did you see major differences between the psychologies of Japanese/Korean students and their American counterparts?

In Japan and Korea they knew who was the top student and they try to beat the top student. There was this one student in Japan who was talking to me in English all the time during the class. I asked him if that was a good thing to do, since the teacher was lecturing. He said, "It's OK, because I'm the top student." And I saw that when tests were handed back, all the students looked to him to see how he did.

Our kids are competitive too, but I notice more that our kids are trying to hide their competitveness. It's cooler to look like a slouch.

When it comes time for the hard thinking, I see my students more willing to give up, whereas I see the students in Japan and Korea seemingly continue to question and ponder the things posed to them. Again, keep in mind that I don't speak the language; this is just what how it appeared to me.

[Editor's note: Probably the most respected study comparing students on a country by country basis is the Trends in International Science and Mathematics (TIMMS) study, which looks at 4th and 8th grade math and science performance--but not high school. In 2003, 8th graders in Japan and Korea outperformed their American counterparts. The next TIMMS data collection venture will be in 2007.]

One of the things that I liked: In the cafeteria the kids help prepare the food, and the kid preparers in the cafeteria had a big vat of rice and soup. The kids had to put the food on the plates of their classmates. There was this one little homeroom of students who happened to sit near us, and we could see where there were times where they took food off of other people's plates to kind of even things up, so that everybody had the same amount of food. So even though there's a lot of competition, they also take care of each other, too.

I went to an elementary school in Korea where they planted a garden that went along with some poetry that they read. They had kids growing, I think a cabbage head, and looking at the worms that damaged this cabbage head. I would say these students were in first through fourth grade.

They had a girl who did all the labs for the students. Some of the supplies and things she had were outstanding; they rivaled anything I'd seen in American schools, elementary schools. She brought the kids in and they did the labs in their classroom and they had ongoing experiments.

It kind of reminded me of stuff that we used to do before teaching became more processed.

I want to go back to the issue of competitiveness, because this is an enormously important subject, and you have had the great fortune to see classrooms in other countries. In your opinion, what are the big changes that we need to make to stay competitive with the rest of the world?

I don't think we as Americans are really ready to hit that global economy thing. I've been watching "20/20" and "60 Minutes." I was watching this thing on "60 Minutes" where they talked about these kids who were majoring in the top science universities, like UC Berkely, and they were going back to their countries after they finished. There were five or six PhD's and maybe one of them would stay in the United States.

I don't think most of us are looking at this growth in other countries. We cry about outsourcing, but this is putting more money into the pockets of these people in other countries. The people that we're educating are going back to establish and build that [the infrastructure that makes outsourcing possible in the first place]. There once was a time where when you traveled and said you were an American, you were viewed almost as if you were like a prince or princess. I don't think we realize how much these other countries are trying to come up to our standard. We're losing a lot of ground, and outsourcing is an indicator of the amount of ground that we're losing. When I learned that the prefix "HAN" meant Korean, I began to realize that many major companies were Korean. Kias, Sonatas--those cars are being built by Korean companies.

[Editor's note: As a revealing exercise, visit www.kia.com, the American page for the automotive company, and try to find any reference to the company's Korean origins. After several minutes I was finally able to find one. Can you?]

There's a global economy. In Japan everyone seems to be focused on making their country better. When a terror alert was elevated to orange in Japan you saw that it was elevated. There would be increased police presence, extra security.

Whereas in America we are generally asked to "be vigilant" and squint suspiciously at our neighbors.

We just don't have that focus. It seems when we look around the infrastructure is not there.

Let's talk about the work you did this summer, and what you're working on right now. As I understand it you're working on implementing some sort of a new class?

What we figured out a little while ago is that we should look at having a course in high schools on materials science. We felt it would get some of the students that were seemingly not interested in some of the other sciences, we could get them interested in science that had more of a hands-on type of approach. We have really bright kids who are maybe not making A's and B's in the other sciences, but they are really good at working with their hands. So we looked at how we could get a course in materials science, one taught cooperatively between chemistry, physics, and technology teachers. So, this would be a team teaching kind of a thing, a hands on kind of a thing. More of a project-based curriculum.

What my mentor [Georgia Tech Materials Science and Engineering professor Valeria Milam] wanted to do was come in and give a guest lecture. She could probably do something starting out with me and ending up with the same kids in a physics class. So what my job was was to just make certain that the kids knew what to do as they moved through my chemistry curriculum. I am teaching my kids about crystal formation and packaging and things like that, to sort of get them set up for what she was going to do with the colloidal crystals [one of Dr. Milam's main areas of research].

The course has to be approved by the Department of Education. What I'm supposed to be working on in my spare time is preparing the paperwork for it so that we can present it to them.

So if this gets approved, can any teacher, or group of teachers, rather, in Georgia teach this course?

Yes.

This is thrilling to me. One of the things I recently noticed is that most high schools in Georgia don't seem to have a computer science program (computer programming, as opposed to software applications). It's fantastic to know that teachers who identify a need for something currently lacking can get together to develop classes to address that need. Does it look like it's going to work out?

I think we're going to get through. The latest buzz in education is high schools that use the integration model between different disciplines, so since what we're proposing is going along those lines I think we'll be OK.