Culture in Korea

So I don’t think that I have yet talked about some of the extreme differences that the youth here in korea face than what we had in America growing up. In Korea they have what they call Hagwans or Academies in English. We work at one of them that is specifically geared towards English. But it is not just English academies that our students go to outside of their regular public schooling. There is an innumerable amount of different sort of academies. Just to name a few that we have heard of would include a: Math Academy, Science Academy, History Academy, Korean Academy, Homework Academy, Study Academy, Art Academy, Piano Academy, Music Academy, Taekwondo Academy, and many more. Most of our students are in school pretty much all day. So our students are in school pretty much all day. When they are finished with their public school which goes way longer than our schools alone they then go to a number of different sorts of academies. All of this can get pretty expensive so it seems as though most of the adults are having to work very long ridiculous amount of hours to be able to provide the education for their children. I was thinking about this recently because Liji and I have shown a lot of pictures to our students now of us and our family back home doing a number of different activities. Well just the other day one of our higher level students told me that in Korea they don’t have the time to do all the stuff that we got to do. He just can’t believe all that we have done because for them he says they are always just working or studying. I think our students think kids in America just get to play all the time. Which comparatively I would say it’s true. But I am so thankful for the quality play time I have been able to get in, with my family and friends. These kids have Middle School finals coming up next week and their whole focus has been on this test for the last three weeks. The test has like eleven different subjects on it. Liji and I can’t believe that they are actually retaining much information because there is just so much that they are cramming in.
Koreans are also very conservative. We have a friend named sister Oh, who is 30 and living with her parents. She told us that part of the culture is that they can’t invite friends over to their house of the opposite sex unless they are like seriously dating; boyfriend/girlfriend. Otherwise it is just not proper. They also usually live at home unless they move to another city away from family for school or work. There is no just moving out because you’ve graduated from High School and your ready to live on your own, or with other roommates. It seems to be much safer here than America. They don’t have Gangs problems. A lot of men do seem to smoke and drink a lot but you don’t usually see the youth out doing this. Liji asked one of his classes of boys about what sort of crime that they knew of or what was the worst thing one of their friends had done, and the most he could get was one of the kids had a friend who had stole something before. So very low crime rate.
Also I was kind of surprised at first that I didn’t see a whole lot of my students coming in with their hair died at all, like to a lighter brown or something like that. But I found out why from the students when they told me that past Middle School you can only go to school if you have Black hair or ‘naturally’ Brown hair. I guess I wouldn’t be allowed inJ So we haven’t seen any of the teenagers going around with extreme hair styles, baggy pants hanging way down, or loads of earrings. It’s actually kind of nice that way.