culture

At least 94 percent of teachers of the school are model teachers and all teachers have received the certificates of registration of new teaching methods and those of invention of experimental apparatuses and teaching aids.

A teacher of the school was nominated as one of the first top ten teachers in the country.

Teachers of the school have won top and first prizes in national and provincial teaching contests every year.

Every year more than 50 percent of its graduates are enrolled at higher educational institutions such as Pyongyang Middle School No. 1, International Football School, Sariwon Middle School No. 1, Sariwon Foreign Languages School and Sariwon Art School and other schools in the fields of the arts and sports. And dozens of its pupils are awarded the “Our Classroom” Literature Prize, the April 15 Mangyongdae Production Prize of Loyalty and the National Children’s Literature Prize.

“Our school was unknown several years ago. But it made its name as a competent one in the country in these years. It is attributable to the untiring efforts of headmistress Kim Hye Gyong,” said Ryu Chun Hyok, the school’s deputy headmaster.

Kim was a teacher for more than 20 years and has been working as headmistress for only four years.

In those years since she was appointed as headmistress she turned the school into an institution with high educational capacity and the most excellent model school in the province.

“The merits of our headmistress are untiring passion and the trait of setting personal examples. She developed a new teaching method and generalized it and led all teachers, young and old, to be engrossed in working out new teaching methods,” said Ri Myong Sun, a teacher of the school.

Kim was a teacher at another school in Sariwon before she was appointed as headmistress of Unha Primary School. That day she entered the school with mixed feelings, she recalled.

It was because the school failed to improve its educational environment as required by the new era and the teaching methods of its teachers remained unchanged.

“Shouldering the destiny of an educational unit, I came to understand, though little, what education is and how important and heavy duty a headmaster assumes in education,” she recalled.

She made up her mind to decisively improve the teaching methods of the school while upgrading its educational environment.

But she was terribly short of time. 

She came to school early in the morning and was busy helping teachers develop new teaching methods and sprucing up the school buildings till evening. And after they all went back home, she sat at the table facing her computer late at night, burning the midnight oil trying to invent a new teaching method.

The only spare time for her was night time when all others sleep and when she walked the street to and from the school.

She devoted all that time to the invention of a new teaching method.

With such passion, she presented a model of practicability, generalization and modernization of the educational content in the field of general education in a small local primary school by dealing with practical and generalized issues which can give students basic and common knowledge of nature and society simultaneously.

And she developed 30 new teaching methods in four years and generalized them across the country. They include the method of evaluating students' ability to develop their creative application and intellectual faculties to the maximum, which was praised as an excellent ability evaluation method to be introduced into all kinds of schools in the field of general education.

She also encouraged all teachers in the school to take an active part in the development of new teaching methods.

As a result, hundreds of new teaching methods invented by the teachers of the school have been generalized across the country over the past four years.

“It is the determination of our headmistress to train all pupils of the school to become pillars of the country. She usually says to the teachers that education is conscience, devotion and patriotism, and that only when they become competent teachers, can they train able pupils,” said the deputy headmaster.