Korean Academy

I teach at an international school in Shanghai, and a large percentage of the students are from Asian countries other than China. Of my Asian students, a large number of them are from Korea. I am teaching Algebra II, and it has become clear that there is a divide in my class. The students from Korea regularly score at the top of class with grades in the high range. Below them, the rest of the class. This part of the class consists of students from the US, Canada, Europe and the Scandanavian countries. I've done my best to mitigate this difference, often pairing a Korean student with a non-Korean student. This works to a certain extent, but most of my Korean students don't speak English very well, and so are either unwilling or ineffective in expressing their ideas.

Why do they do so well? In the latest TIMMS(Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) results, Korean 8th graders, who finished second overall, scored a 597 on a standardized math test with an average score of 500. American students scored a 508 and were in 8th place.

Part of the reason for the Korean success is something called Korean academy. Korean students begin attending academy in grade 3. My Korean students, after attending my school from 7:30 am until 3 pm, head to another round of classes taught in Korean, by Korean teachers, with Korean classmates. This is Korean Academy. From 4 pm to 8 pm these students study math, science and English. They have an unrelenting schedule. Most of my Korean students attend academy 6 days a week, and Saturday's academy is an all day affair. They have a day off on Sunday. I once asked one of my Korean students, Jenny, if she slept all day on Sunday since it was her only day off each week. She looked at me strangely and said, "I can't sleep on Sunday, because that's the day I study."

So as I wonder what the tradeoff is for "all work, no play", I look around my class on any given day and see my Korean students spending their free time diligently working on some assignment, while a majority of my Western students spend their free time talking, laughing or surfing the net. While I contemplate what the long term implications are for these two subsets of teenagers, and to extrapolate, the respective countries, I know how much I cherish my quintessentially American youth and wonder if it would be worth giving that up for 89 points on a test.