Education Series, Part 2: The Difficulties of Moving to Korea as a Teenager
I first moved to Korea in the middle of 7th grade and attended a Korean school until the middle of my 9th grade. Just a few months after moving back to New York, I moved to Korea again in the summer of the same year and took a gap year, schooling through various online schools. A year later, I moved back to New York, and a year after that, I moved back to Korea again. I am currently attending Stanford Online High School and plan to graduate from the school. I was fortunate enough to attend a school that had foreign teachers and classes taught in English. I had two classes per core subject—one taught in Korea and one taught in English. By core subjects, I mean math, science, social studies, science, and English. Also, I don’t particularly like using the word ‘foreign,’ but this is the word we used to refer to the non-Korean English-speaking teachers.
My school was not an international school; the material that we learned in English classes (Unless I say English Language class, “English” will simply refer to classes that were taught in English.) were nowhere near the level difficulty of the Korean curriculum. Everyone treated grades in Korean classes as more important; the English classes sort of just felt like fun, bonus classes provided for English immersion. They weren’t too serious, and gave us breaks from studying intense material in Korean. If I had not been able to attend this school, I’m not sure what I would have done.
Most people who move to Korea in their teenage years after living outside of Korea for most of or the entirety of their life will consider taking these routes:
Attend public school where all subjects were completely taught in Korean
Attend an international/foreign school
These are the most common routes. Here are some uncommon paths one could consider:
Do home schooling, either with or without the assistance of online education (from my experience, this was quite difficult)
Do online school (which I fortunately found out about, but is still unknown to many people)
As you can see, there aren’t very many options. In my future posts, I will elaborate on the pros and cons of these different schooling options. Let’s look at the pros and cons of attending public school first.
Pros
The most obvious pro of attending a public Korean school is that you’ll be attending school for free. School lunches are actually free until high school as well. It depends on your age that you move, but you will be able to learn Korean quickly. Being completely immersed in a Korean-speaking environment is the best way to learn the Korean language and culture. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I mostly
learned Korean before moving to Korea by listening to my parents speak Korean, and attending Korean school on Sundays. To be very honest, I don’t think that Korean school was very helpful in the long run. Speaking, reading, and writing Korean once a week doesn’t get you a lot of places. I could have studied Korean at home, but did not feel the urgent need to do so.
Cons
I won’t go into the cons of the education system as whole right now. These are some difficulties or challenges just for students moving to Korean school in their teenage years. First, it may very well be difficult to transition to a completely new education system. Of course the difficulty of adjusting to a new school system will vary for everyone. Different people have different levels of Korean going into Korean school, varying abilities to learn new languages, as well as abilities to socialize with people in general. Regular Korean schools also do not offer regular, honors, or college level courses. Basically, everyone has to take classes that would be considered advanced (or college level for high school students) in the American public school system. Receiving the amount of material that Korean students have to study in your primary language would be difficult to manage. But to study so much in a language that you are not confident in would be extremely challenging. There is also a great difference between being able to speak a language well and being able to study academic subjects it it. It takes patience, time, and effort to learn essential vocabulary for core subjects.