The Plight of the Korean Student

This past week has been the first week of Camp Fulbright. Camp Fulbright is an intensive two-week English Immersion Camp for Korean students during which former ETAs and my group of ETAs in training teach Koreans English. The entire camp is conducted in English, including games, night activities, every class and just conversations in the lunch room with friends. This past week I only taught one lesson and I will teach two lessons next week. I have also had time to participate in other camp activities including Homework Help, Night Fun and Mental Gymnastics. It has been so much fun having the kids around but it also made me realize I never fully divulged everything I've been learning about schooling in Korea.

As you may or may not be aware of a South Korean education is one of the best educations a child can receive. South Korea consistently outranks nearly every other country on international tests. The cost of performing so high is extreme. Beginning in elementary school students attend hagwons after school. Hagwons are private academies that tutor children so that they can get ahead and remain ahead of their peers. Yet, since nearly every students attends hagwon it is more or less necessary just to remain competitive with peers. Hagwons can specialize in english, math, science or they can be more comprehensive. Due to hagwon attendance elementary school children are frequently at school until dinner time and they will sometimes study after dinner at home as well. In middle school many students' schedules intensify. The school day extends later, most of the time until at least 4 (and students typically arrive at school at 7 to clean the building prior to classes). Middle school students also participate in hagwons after school in attempts to get ahead.

In high school a students' devotion to school drastically increases in preparation for the University Entrance Exam. In order to get into the top universities students must do well on this test. Many students who don't perform as well as they hope will simply defer getting a job or attending college for a year in order to simply study and retake the exam a year later (you can only take the exam once a year). An average high school students life is demanding. They frequently arrive at school at 7AM and have classes until around 5. They then may have a dinner break before returning to school for mandatory study hours or attending hagwons. When the schools close around 10PM students then shuffle to more hagwons or a private study room that the child's parents rent for them at a local library. Most high school students remain awake until at least 2AM studying every single night. In fact the ETAs teaching high school have been prepared to have several of their students sleep in their class everyday because the students are so deprived.

Many students also have Saturday classes, despite the government making it illegal in June 2011. Other students frequently suffer from corporal punishment. Corporal punishment was also recently made illegal but it is still very commonplace.

This system is complicated by the growing number of North Korean defectors who are returning to South Korea. They are entering the education system but are unbelievably ill-equipped to deal with the academic demands. Some special schools are being created to educate North Korean defectors but South Korea is still working on developing a strategy to deal with this problem. Five North Korean defectors received a scholarship to attend Camp Fulbright from the US Embassy and I was able to teach three of the students in my low beginner English class this past week. The three students were all in high school, one of the boys was actually 19, but there English was so low that they were placed in a class with all elementary and lower middle school students. It was difficult to keep them engaged and not discouraged in this setting but I am glad I had the ability to interact with them.

Last week I also had the opportunity to attend several talks. One talk was about the project Korean Students Speak that a current ETA grantee started. The ETA decided to give each of her students a blank piece of paper and challenged them to write whatever message they wanted to send to the world on it. She then photographed them and started the Tumblr Korean Students Speak. The project has now extended to over 2,000 elementary, middle and high school students both on the peninsula and on Jeju Island. The messages are heartbreaking and uplifting all at once. Korea is a very homogenous society that doesn't support individuality and self-expression. Therefore, this project is very unique and empowering for the students. As the creator said, in America even if you grow up with unsupportive parents you grow up in a society that tells you it will all be okay and being different is okay and not wanting what others want for you is okay. In Korea there is no one sending that message. Your teachers, your parents, your friends, your neighborhood are always consistently pressuring you to be thinner, smarter, more studious, etc. (In fact, I also learned that Korea has the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world and has the highest suicide rate)

Anyways, I encourage you to check out the blog and if you want to read more about the Korean Education system there are plenty of news articles available online. This is a great Times article on the difficulties North Korean defectors face. And lastly, here are just a few photos from Korean Students Speak.

I don't know what I want to be yet. Do not force me to choose one.

There are two Koreas but we are the one!

I want to stop studying and enjoy my life.

I want to sleep.

I want to participate UFC. 

A Religious Weekend

So I was trying to think of how to tie together the many things I've been doing since I last wrote and I think the most unifying theme is religion. This weekend KAEC and the Fulbright Office paid for our entire group to enjoy a beach weekend vacation in Donghae on the East Coast. Camp Fulbright, a two week English immersion camp that we all teach at, started on Monday so we all needed to relax before the real work started.

The weekend as a whole was amazing and very rejuvenating. It began with us learning a lot about Buddhism, which is a major religion in Korea. We attended a talk by a Buddhist monk who grew up in the US but then came to Korea twenty years ago. During his first year in Korea he discovered Buddhism and it soon became his way of life and Korea became his home because he decided to remain here instead of returning to the United States. He then accompanied us to Samhwasa Temple, which is about 40 minutes outside Donghae. The temple was absolutely gorgeous and we were lucky enough to learn about the various instruments they use at the temple and were even able to ring the bells.

My friend Maggie and I near the temple

Drinking fresh mountain water from the temple

Some offerings for Buddha

Lanterns on the temple grounds 

The bell we were able to ring. Here it's being rung to indicate the beginning of a prayer service.

The experience at the temple and the talk by the Buddhist monk led me to really want to do a temple stay. There are many opportunities during the fall and spring to stay overnight in the mountains at a Buddhist Temple. You generally are awaken at 3AM by a call to prayer and then participate in meditation and chanting until dawn. You then participate in more ceremonies before a very large meal at noon. You can do two night temple stays but I tend to think one night would be intense enough for me.

The other religion that I have been continually exposed to has been the Unification Church. I'm not sure if I divulged this before but the University that we are currently at is owned by the Unification Church, hence the marble-everywhere. (You can check out pictures that a fellow ETA took of our Univeristy here. Well, it turns out that the hotel we stayed at in Donghae is also owned by the Unification church and was a very similar marble palace! Luckily, my room was very nice and included one queen size bed that a friend and I could share and then one Korean style mat bed. We also received a room with a kitchen. Several of our friends were not as lucky and simple had one big empty room with three mats to make Korean style beds. The hotel did have two very attractive perks though- one was an unlimited breakfast buffet with Western foods like cereal, eggs, bacon and bread and the other perk was a wonderful spa. Since the weather was not very great on Saturday many of the female ETAs chose to visit the Korean bathhouse/spa at the hotel. Basically you enter the spa and must completely strip. You then shower and are able to enter any of the seven heated pools, some which are also herbal infused, or any of the five saunas. There was even a salt water pool! All of the pools and saunas are different temperatures and are infused with different herbs or other medicinal things. You also can scrub yourself, which is something Koreans do very frequently. You basically soak until you are pruney and then rub your skin with a rough clothe until all of the dead skin and dirt rubs off. The entire experience was very neat and really exposed me to another side of Korean culture. 

Some friends and I at the beach on Friday.

The last part of our trip was a museum visit on Sunday. Of course the museum was owned by the Unification Church and was another marble palace. In fact, Korea has seven marble palaces and by the conclusion of this weekend we had seen three of the seven. The museum was probably the weirdest museum I have ever been to and included fake stalagmites and stalactites both inside and outside the museum. There was actually a stalagmite and stalactite garden. Then there were weird copies of objects such as the Trevi Fountain, the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks. There seemed to be very few real objects in the museum come to think of it. 

The garden at the museum.

In the end though the weekend was incredibly enjoyable and helped me relax before my teaching this week, which I will write about a little later! And I promise my next blog entry will not be so long!

A Visit to Cheongju

This weekend the Fulbright Orientation team gave us our first free day. There were two day trips led by Orientation Counselors to nearby areas but being the brave soul I am a few friends and I decided to explore a little on our own (and to be honest the other trips had limited spots and were full). Since Goesan is such a small town there are only two buses. One takes you to Seoul and the other takes you to Cheongju, which is a suburb that is an hour away. I had traveled there to observe an elementary school last week and was shocked to find that suburb meant the size of Detroit. Since Korea's population is so large any area with less than 1 million people is a suburb and may not actually be a suburb of any larger city- it's a city completely unto itself.

Anyways my friends and I had been told verbally about the buses and began trying to find out if there was anything cool to do or hike at the end of this hour bus ride. The only problem was that we had only verbally been told about Cheongju and had never seen the cities name written in English or Korean. And there is a Chungju and a Cheongju within an hour's drive of Goesan. After a ten minute attempt to ask a Korean student which Chungju/Cheongju the bus went to a renewing ETA who was in town to speak to us conversed with the Korean and quickly told us the bus would take us to Cheongju.

And we were off! After the confusion about where we were even traveling to we set our sights low and aspired to simply get lunch in Cheongju. Anything else we managed to do would be a bonus. We set off at noon and by 12:40 a fellow traveler said we were in Cheongju so we promptly got off the bus. Little did we know it was not the main bus terminal but my roommate Rachel speaks Korean very well and was able to find out which direction was downtown.

After a half an hour stroll the eight of us arrived at Dream Plaza, a neat pedestrian walkway that was surrounded by restaurants and shops. Lots of the shops were super familiar and others were just funny Korean attempts at English like Hell the Vintage Shop, Teenie Weeny, and Brick, another vintage shop.

A coffee place

While strolling the streets we also stumbled onto a large market that sold everything you could ever imagine including pig heads, dried silkworm cocoons, live turtles, lots of live small crustaceans, squid, and more.

A park in Cheongju.

We did manage to get some delicious Korean food from an authentic restaurant. It was a family-owned for twenty years and the wife cooked right in front of us. We also got delicious PatBingSue, a traditional summertime dessert that consists of shaved ice, ice cream, moochi, strrawberries and more!

PatBingSue! (also called Popping Sue)

The side dishes at the restaurant we went to.

Also taekwondo has been going wonderfully and we got our uniforms!

This weekend we are headed to the beach with our program for some well deserved relaxation so expect an update after that!

Unleashing My Power

This week was my first full week of Taekwondo lessons and it was awesome! Our teacher is a fifth degree black belt and is unbelievably talented. He often laughs at our class and finds us all very amusing, like most Koreans do. I knew we were in over our heads on the first day during warm up. Our teacher first had us do jumping jacks, which was manageable. Then he asked us to do three different kinds of toe touch jumps! First we had to jump and swing our feet directly in front of us and touch our toes in mid-air. Then we had to jump and do a split mid-air and touch our toes. Lastly, We had to do a back bend in mid-air and touch our toes by reaching behind us. Needless to say almost our entire class failed and this and were all just flailing about. We need to do the jumps at the beginning of every class though so hopefully we will improve.

During another class, after we learned how to punch correctly, we were broken into groups and each group received a candle. It was then our job to extinguish the flame with the wind generated by our punches. So one by one we approached the flame and measured the distance of our arm and then began punching towards the candle. Everyone in my group was able to extinguish the flame. It was awesome!

Trying to extinguish the flame

On Friday night a large group of us went out to B&B again to celebrate three birthdays that fell during the week. B&B was a lot of fun again but 노래방 (noraebang) was even more fun! Noraebang means song room and is karaoke. Karaoke is huge in Korea and there are places everywhere. After B&B three friends and I walked to noraebang and had a blast. You receive your own room, a few snacks and some complimentary beer and are able to just sing until your heart's content. It's great! 

 My friends singing karaoke.

My friend Maggie and I singing karaoke.

Today we have a free day and some friends and I are headed into Cheongju (not to be confused with Chongju). It is an hour bus ride away and is considered a neat suburb even though it is the size of Detroit. South Korea is extremely dense so its concept of rural, suburban and urban is slightly skewed. We are only going for a few hours in the afternoon because everyone has a Korean quiz tomorrow and we have lesson plans that are due Tuesday. The Korean quiz is very important too because if we do not receive a 70 on the 10 question quiz we have to go to study hours Sunday through Thursday from 7-9! 

Celebrating America in Korea

These past few days we have been getting lots of little tastes of home, which has been extremely nice. On Friday after the GLEE Club party with the Korean students at the University almost 60 of us decided to go to a HoF (aka a bar) in town. The RAs called ten cabs and the cabs drove back and forth taking us to B&B. The full name is Beer & Bewer. Koreans don't have an equivalent to the English letter r so they have a really hard time recognizing the sound in words. Thus brewer becomes bewer. The HoF was really fun even though it was mainly our group. There was only one table of actual Koreans. Most of the bars here also serve complimentary food with your drinks and all of the American tables received fries, dumplings, egg rolls and other greasy, fried foods whereas the Koreans received dried fish.

Our greasy American bar food.

Some of us at B&B

Our Orientation Coordinators also realized that we all had missed the Fourth of July because we were flying to Korea so they bought a lot of fireworks and we set them off near the soccer fields on campus. It was really fun and very nice of the Orientation Team. They have really done an excellent job keeping everyone busy and happy.

On Sunday the OCTs also surprised us with dinner outings. My group had an American style dinner on the veranda overlooking the fields. We ate pizza, fried chicken, and some American-style Chinese food. It was a delicious reminder of home and much appreciated because the cafeteria food gets mighty repetitive.

Today we visited a Korean Elementary School in Cheongju, which is about an hour away from Goesan. We received a tour of the school, had tea with the principal, ate lunch with some students in the cafeteria and observed a current ETA teaching one of her classes. It was an extremely rewarding experience. All of the kids loved seeing a large group of 14 foreigners and we were constantly garnering cheers, screams, hellos and bows. It was adorable. I also really enjoyed being able to visualize what's in store for me this coming year.

After we returned back to the University a few friends and I went on a hike in the hills. The hike wasn't really on a trail and so we did a lot of bushwhacking but it was very neat and the view was astonishing. We also caught a glimpse of the nearby Military University. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures because I forgot my camera but hopefully I can grab some from a friend or just repeat the hike!

Tomorrow's my first day of Korean class, TKD and GLEE Club plus we have a teaching workshop so it will be a very busy day!

Hello from Korea!

I've been here a day and a half so far and it has been really fun but very interesting. After a 14 hour flight I arrived at Incheon Airport and met many other ETAs as we waited for everyone to arrive. We then departed for Jungwon University in Gosean (http://eng.jwu.ac.kr), which was a two hour drive. The University is beautiful but very remote and not indicative of any other University in Korea- it's all one building!

The town we are living in.

Yesterday we just listened to a lot of talks about the program and what to expect for the summer. I also was able to sign up for Taekwando lessons, which start on Monday. The lessons will be Monday through Thursday until the end of August so hopefully I will get pretty good. I also signed up for a Korean Cooking Class, which should be really interesting since the food here is quite different. Yesterday for lunch we had small anchovies as a side and there's generally spicy unidentifiable meat at every meal. Luckily, there's always rice and a soup and most of the time the food isn't too spicy for me as long as I have lots of water!

Some anchovies from dinner.

Today we reviewed Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, and then took our Korean Language Test. The test for me consisted of writing I don't know any Korean and walking out. Luckily, there are LOTS of other beginners. Tonight we have a GLEE Club mixer, which is a party with Korean students from the University and us. I plan on joining the GLEE Club, which meets twice a week for an hour and is a chance to practice your Korean. 

Oh, I've also been learning how to greet people in Korean and most of the Koreans I tried it out on just giggle at my attempts but it is very fun. All of the Koreans have been so helpful and bow back to me but I think they still find me pretty funny.