My older elemnetary class has started a new unit this week and it's all about comparing schools in other countries. This group of students is particularily bright and we can usually just converse about a lot of the new topics that come up, but this one was most interesting to me since I'm so curious about their school life.
These students only come three days a week, I'm their only teacher at our school, but how many schools do they go to?
Our reading came to a section on going to school after school. In my life these are known as after school programs if I think really hard I did:
-Art
-Swimming
-Skating
-Circus trampoline
-Aerial silks
-Roller hockey
-T-ball
-Soccer
-Girl Guides
-Guitar lessons
-Extra help with reading
-Extra help with French
But that was spaced out over the course of twelve years. I don't think I ever did more than three at once.
When I ask what other after school programs they go to the first answer was a lugh followed by "All."
All the students, except one, had a standard set of Piano, English, Taekwondo, Swimming, Soccer, Math, and personal tutoring. Then there were some special one. Painting class, robotics school, some even sound fun right? So basically they go to school and after school they have three or four schools to go to after. The girl who said all told me that she would go home after our class, which finishes at 5:45pm, and have an hour of private tutoring before going to bed. Two of the other students said they were jealous of that since they keep going until 9:30pm. 10pm is the legal cut-off, there are no classes to be taught after 10pm.
This story is actually a really common one here. Writing about this is like writing that milk is white, "yeah, we know." But it occurs to me that my outside-of-Korea audience might find this interesting.
Check out this article. 83% of five year olds are going to academies, and even children as young as two are getting tutoring. It's basically the opposite of Finland's education.
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