Koreans kids work hard. I've got a room full of elementary school students who grab a snack after school before running to catch the academy bus, finish my class to get the 4 to 8 pages of homework multiplied by the six 6 hours of class at our academy each week. Last week I was leaving the school after work to walk into a crowd of students flooding out of a math academy down the street and I saw one of my students who had left my class 2 hours earlier. It's busy. Often they get home after 10 or 11 at night to sit down to dinner that their mother has kept warm for them. One girl says she does her homework first as eating dinner puts her to sleep before she's finished homework. And these kids are all in grade 6 or less!
Eileen found some stats on the internet saying that working Koreans average over 200 hours more than Canadians every year. That's 4 extra hours every week including holidays. And don't get me started on holidays. If a holiday falls on a Saturday that's the day you get off. There are no days in lue. Then when it comes to actual holidays most companies don't offer them until you've worked for the company two years. Finally there's the question of actually taking the holidays once you've earned them. I was talking to one Korean friend who suggested in some offices they are hesitant to actually use those holidays because of office pressure so many many of those hard earned holidays end up being paid out. Sounds painful right. Maybe not as much as you'd think.
Popular topics of discussion over lunch with my other teachers includes picking apart Korea's apparent cultural weaknesses that will eventually kill their success. This is in despite of the astronomical growth they've created in the last few decades. This includes everything from phobia of foreigners, to the authoritarian management structures, to lack of creativity and entrepreneurship. I tend to disagree. While I certainly have kids who show up regularly without their homework completed, it's sometimes surprising what they do learn through the six hours of class they have each week. Then there are the students who write the essays declaring their national pride in the strength of the education that Korean students get by the time they graduate. Some of our teachers have taken issue with foreigner comments about the excess of education given students here. One teacher argued "what's wrong with working hard so your country gets ahead while improving your personal standard of living." Looking at how far Korea has come from a poor developing country to an essentially first world experience it's hard to argue.
