Yung Tae Kim ollied, kick-flipped, and grinded on the plastic skateboard packaged with the Tony Hawk: Ride video game last fall and reached a conclusion shared by critics and gamers alike: it wasn’t very good.
But while most of those critics shrugged and moved on in the months that followed, Kim would soon leave his classroom at Northwestern and find his way to Robomodo, the Chicago company that created the game. His mission: fix the board.
But Kim’s father, an electronics technician, and his mother, a department-store clerk, were at least partially appeased by his academic success. Despite a professed hatred of school, he was good at it, making high grades, especially in math and science.
“If I wanted to learn, say, a front-side flip in skateboarding, I’d have to go to a parking lot and the only certainty would be that I’d have to keep going out there and work on it until I figured it out,” says Kim. “I’d change my technique, shuffle my feet or change my balance, until I got it. Once I got it once, I’d practice it over and over until I’d get it consistently.”
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“Tae was a resource for us and we would ask for his help about concepts we didn’t understand or applying tools we had but didn’t know how to us. But for the most part, he just let us do our thing,” says another class of ’11 student, Michael Medford. “He’s absolutely right that science education is broken and pushes people away who otherwise could be great for the field. The problem was that he was still mandated to fit the class into a ten-week schedule and to give out grades. It’s really hard to change a system that you are forced into operating within.
Maybe it was the skateboarder in him, but he couldn’t resist leaving Northwestern with a little bit of a piss take. His final lecture, at the end of spring semester 2009, was called “Building a New Culture of Teaching and Learning” and was basically a summary of his skateboarding-as-education model. Some of the students in attendance insisted that he should post the lecture online. Last July he recorded a refined version of it, which can be seen at his website DrTae.org.
