If you want to learn trig or calculus, it’s set at such a pace in schools that it guarantees that only the absolutely best students will learn it.” No one says to a toddler, ‘You have ten weeks to walk, and if you can’t, you get an F and you’re not allowed to try to walk anymore.’ It’s absurd, right? But the same thing is true with math and science education. “The persistence and the dedication needed in skateboarding-that’s what we need to be teaching. The school is the thing that’s artificial and pathological,” he says. “Real-life research is more like skateboarding than something manufactured in a school curriculum. Once I got it once, I’d practice it over and over until I’d get it consistently.”įor Kim, this model stands in stark contrast to the academic model of learning, where the rigid pace is set by teachers and administrators. “I’d change my technique, shuffle my feet or change my balance, until I got it. “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. Behind every successful trick is a period of near-constant failure.
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Learning how to skate isn’t an easy process, and it’s often not a lot of fun, he says. Kim thinks professors and teachers should take a page from skateboarding. But his time behind the lectern only confirmed what he’d felt since childhood-which, in his words, was that “school sucks,” especially when it comes to teaching math and science. After that he moved to DePaul for two years, and then to Northwestern for the 2008-’09 school year. With no other path in mind, he let academic achievement, and an inspiring physics course he took in college, lead him to a career in academia, where he says he never exactly fit in either.Īfter earning his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he got a job as a visiting physics professor at Lake Forest College for two semesters in 2005-’06. I didn’t consider that a very nurturing environment.” Getting something less than an A wasn’t a disappointment, it was an outright failure. He says there wasn’t much choice: “There was a lot of pressure from my family not really to have a career path in mind, just to get good grades. Despite a professed hatred of school, he was good at it, making high grades, especially in math and science. “My parents fell into the trap of, ‘all skaters are no good, punk-ass hooligans who are not to be trusted and we don’t want you to fall into that bad crowd,'” he says.īut Kim’s father, an electronics technician, and his mother, a department-store clerk, were at least partially appeased by his academic success. His skateboarding obsession also caused tension between him and his strict Korean immigrant parents, who Kim says believed skateboard ownership would put him on the fast track to becoming a drug addict. “I was the nerdy straight-A student that never really fit into the skater image.” “In middle school, it was weird that here was this guy who was good at math hanging out with the skate kids,” said Kim, now 35. When he first picked up a board as a 14-year-old in Atlanta, he didn’t fit in with the freaks or the geeks. It’s a dichotomy he’s embraced since his teenage years. Tae”-looks too prim to be a skateboarder but a shade rough-and-ready to be a professor.
With his slightly shaggy short hair, his black T-shirt half tucked into khaki pants, Kim-better known as “Dr. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreationīut 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.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Line-Up Announced > Close
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