Kim Sung Bok, a teacher at Toksong Primary School in Phyongsong City, is one of the most competent primary school teachers across the country.

After graduating from Phyongsong Teachers Training College over 20 years ago she began her career as primary school teacher as her mother wished. Her mother had devoted most of her life to education.

At first she found her job quite challenging as she had to teach young students who spend any free time playing.

Out of impatience, she used to reprimand the students to persuade them to study hard or make them continue with their study in their classroom after school was over, but in vain. Sometimes she wept in an empty classroom as the academic performance of her students lagged behind those in other classes.

Once the head of her department told her that educational work is an undertaking to train people and moreover, when it comes to the teachers of young children, they are obliged to fully understand children’s psychology and find and apply corresponding methods in education.

After that, Kim worked harder to prepare herself as a highly virtuous, able and qualified educator.

She read a lot of reference books and documents and developed new teaching methods and plans of her own style while drawing on the successes and experience of excellent teachers so that the students could digest and apply what they had learnt.

Meanwhile, she made and introduced visual aids and multimedia that would contribute to stimulating the zeal and competitiveness of students for learning and improving their creative thinking ability.

Her painstaking efforts began to pay off. The students showed growing trust in their teacher and zeal for learning.

She was met with a hail of questions by the students and the students pooled their efforts to try to find answers to the problems raised by her through self-study and mutual assistance. This led to a marked improvement in their performance.

Her lectures combined with interesting and impressive contents and information and reality were welcomed by the students. Finally, she became capable of dealing with any primary school subject. In the course of this, she won her master’s degree in pedagogy.

She gave demonstration lectures at scores of teaching contests including the national contest in the field of general education held in 2017. Hers were appreciated as excellent and exemplary lectures by the jury and participants. The multimedia showing her giving lectures was distributed among the primary schools across the country.

Many of her students have entered Kumsong Middle School No. 1, Kim Jong Suk Middle School No. 1 and Pyongyang Foreign Languages School.

For her meritorious contribution to education she was invited to the 14th National Conference of Teachers as a delegate and was selected as one of the top 10 teachers of 2024.

Ko Jin Chol