Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Cram school
Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills
SEOUL, South Korea — It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.
A student and teacher at an elite South Korean school, the Minjok Leadership Academy, where sights are set on the Ivy League. More Photos »
Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.
“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.
It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.
“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.
Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.
How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.
Both schools seem to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit. Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras previously used to ensure that students did not doze in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating them as responsible citizens.
“American schools may do a better job at that,” Dr. Lee said.
Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects.
And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time.
“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!”
Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung’s classmates, said attractions tended to fade during hundreds of hours of close-quarters study. “We know each other too well to fall in love,” she said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils.
Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the application process resembles that at many American colleges, where students are judged on their grade-point averages, as well as their performance on special tests and in interviews.
“Even my worst students are great,” said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”
Korean applications to Harvard alone have tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. Harvard has 37 Korean undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok.
This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities — but not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three other prep schools.
“That was certainly not any statement” about the Daewon and Minjok schools, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “We’re alert to getting kids from schools where we haven’t had them before, but we’d never reject an applicant simply because he or she came from a school with a history of sending students to Harvard.”
South Korea’s academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign universities, graduated in February.
One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.
Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.
“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said.
Ms. Kim’s highest aspiration was to attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in her bedroom: “I’m going to an Ivy League!”
Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do well on the tests,” she said.
As bright as she is, she was just one great student among many, said Eric Cho, Daewon’s college counselor. Sitting at his computer terminal at the school, perched on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline, Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008’s academic records.
Their average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.
Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine Advanced Placement tests next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses. Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and devouring textbooks.
So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature.
At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.
Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by Hugh Quigley, a former Wall Street lawyer.
Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.
“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said.
The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before midnight, when they may sleep.
But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically we lead very tired lives,” he said.
Students sometimes report for classes so exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history, said he asked, “Did you go to bed at all last night?”
“But we’re not only nerds!” interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band, she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with photographs that showed him jamming with Minjok’s rockers during a visit to the school last year.
There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok building. “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not,” it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling.
South Korea is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China, with populations more than 20 times that of South Korea’s, send more students.
“Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of a national obsession in Korea,” said Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador to South Korea.
SEOUL, South Korea — It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing.
A student and teacher at an elite South Korean school, the Minjok Leadership Academy, where sights are set on the Ivy League. More Photos »
Kim Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.
“I can’t let myself waste even a second,” said Ms. Kim, who dreams of attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.
It is a success rate that American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an insanely selective college application season.
“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.
Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.
How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.
Both schools seem to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit. Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras previously used to ensure that students did not doze in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating them as responsible citizens.
“American schools may do a better job at that,” Dr. Lee said.
Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects.
And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time.
“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!”
Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung’s classmates, said attractions tended to fade during hundreds of hours of close-quarters study. “We know each other too well to fall in love,” she said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils.
Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the application process resembles that at many American colleges, where students are judged on their grade-point averages, as well as their performance on special tests and in interviews.
“Even my worst students are great,” said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”
Korean applications to Harvard alone have tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. Harvard has 37 Korean undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok.
This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities — but not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three other prep schools.
“That was certainly not any statement” about the Daewon and Minjok schools, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “We’re alert to getting kids from schools where we haven’t had them before, but we’d never reject an applicant simply because he or she came from a school with a history of sending students to Harvard.”
South Korea’s academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign universities, graduated in February.
One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.
Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.
“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said.
Ms. Kim’s highest aspiration was to attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in her bedroom: “I’m going to an Ivy League!”
Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do well on the tests,” she said.
As bright as she is, she was just one great student among many, said Eric Cho, Daewon’s college counselor. Sitting at his computer terminal at the school, perched on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline, Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008’s academic records.
Their average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.
Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine Advanced Placement tests next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses. Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and devouring textbooks.
So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature.
At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.
Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by Hugh Quigley, a former Wall Street lawyer.
Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.
“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said.
The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before midnight, when they may sleep.
But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically we lead very tired lives,” he said.
Students sometimes report for classes so exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history, said he asked, “Did you go to bed at all last night?”
“But we’re not only nerds!” interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band, she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with photographs that showed him jamming with Minjok’s rockers during a visit to the school last year.
There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok building. “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not,” it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling.
South Korea is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China, with populations more than 20 times that of South Korea’s, send more students.
“Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of a national obsession in Korea,” said Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador to South Korea.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
2 fun youtubes
1. "I will derive" (We should get certain person to sing this in math class hahaha)
2. Organic Chemistry: 7 Clues from Obi-Wan
2. Organic Chemistry: 7 Clues from Obi-Wan
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
epiphany
HUMANITIES: sociology, international relations, econs etc are core humanities through which society is modeled and predictions made. geog and hist are tools to study society, lenses through which we can learn about humanity. philo and lit are underlying skills.
(a similar comment about the sciences will earn me a lot of pokes... )
(a similar comment about the sciences will earn me a lot of pokes... )
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Celebrate... think about celebrating
see comments below
Today - Weekend, May 31, 2008
ONE of the greatest inventions in human history, and certainly the most delightful, is the celebration.
No other creature on earth celebrates. Some say the elephants have learned to mourn, and everyone knows the dolphins have learned to play. But people are the only creatures on the planet who actually celebrate a happy event.
You don’t see birds dance around an egg or antelope fuss over a birthday. And you can’t really count a doggie jumping up and down at the joy of receiving its master (doggies jump up and down at pretty much anything).
So if one of the greatest gifts of mankind is the capacity to celebrate, why is it so hard for the adult Singaporean to have a celebration?
It’s not about just having a good time. Expatriates havealready told us we don’t know how to party. When they invite us to one, we go, we eat, we hang out with our own families and then scoot early. We don’t stay and celebrate. Or party. At a party.
But the celebration is something more. It is that moment or day or period we mark something good, usually an achievement of sorts, and it can be done loud with a party or with as little as a drink at the coffeeshop with friends.
And that, it can be safely said, is not a strength of Singaporeans.
You seldom hear of people here calling for a celebration. When someone hits a milestone, they seem to look right past it to the next — an endless marathon with no tape to breast.
Okay, say we put it down to Asian modesty. We are not the sort to trumpet our achievements with a party, even though we may show off in other ways, with the flashy phone or latest car or coruscating jewellery.
Some even say it is the legacy of the immigrants’ culture. We are transients, collecting, never truly spending unless it is on an investment to make more. Gratification is waste.
Perhaps we even fear the curse of the third eye, so we look past the milestone and don’t dwell on it in case the heavens humble us with a calamity. It’s very Asian to be negative.
After all, statutory holidays aside, all our major celebrations are imported from the West, commercially manufactured events that probably bring more delight to people who run the classifieds sections than the actual targets waiting in long queues for dinner on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
But in modern Singapore, shouldn’t we stop now and then and mark a milestone in the life that our grandparents and parents gave up their own countries and families to build for us here?
If we could celebrate a personal milestone, invite home for a drink the ones who helped us make it possible because nothing good can be achieved only by self-will, no matter what we think — every pinnacle has a broader base.
And a thousand times better, pull together a celebration for someone we love or just like, to mark their personal milestones. Or if we are the focus of a celebration, can we accept it with grace, not embarrassment? Do we know how to receive a toast, let alone give it?
Imagine what a country we would be then. The MRT, the buses, the taxis and cars would be filled every day with a million people heading off every evening after work to a celebration of one sort or another. There would be more smiles, even for the stranger.
Now you may say this is a strange time to call for a culture of celebration when for many Singaporeans the struggle of daily life just got worse, with the price of nearly everything up by a measure. The mood, one could say, is suitably grim.
But we are already famously grim. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world, which have spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars just to ask ourselves to smile.
So perhaps it is in the tougher times we need to look for cheer the most, and flit to it like a moth to light. What else is there in life worth doing?
------------
Comments:
First, we should ask ourselves "what kind of celebration". It is a fallacy to equivocate all kinds of celebrations. An element of conspicuous, boisterous, and seemingly superficial fun seems intrinsic to the author's concept of celebration - indeed Singaporeans seem to lack this. Is this the only kind of celebration? Quiet reflection or a warm dinner would do as well, and in fact may be more valuable.
Today - Weekend, May 31, 2008
ONE of the greatest inventions in human history, and certainly the most delightful, is the celebration.
No other creature on earth celebrates. Some say the elephants have learned to mourn, and everyone knows the dolphins have learned to play. But people are the only creatures on the planet who actually celebrate a happy event.
You don’t see birds dance around an egg or antelope fuss over a birthday. And you can’t really count a doggie jumping up and down at the joy of receiving its master (doggies jump up and down at pretty much anything).
So if one of the greatest gifts of mankind is the capacity to celebrate, why is it so hard for the adult Singaporean to have a celebration?
It’s not about just having a good time. Expatriates havealready told us we don’t know how to party. When they invite us to one, we go, we eat, we hang out with our own families and then scoot early. We don’t stay and celebrate. Or party. At a party.
But the celebration is something more. It is that moment or day or period we mark something good, usually an achievement of sorts, and it can be done loud with a party or with as little as a drink at the coffeeshop with friends.
And that, it can be safely said, is not a strength of Singaporeans.
You seldom hear of people here calling for a celebration. When someone hits a milestone, they seem to look right past it to the next — an endless marathon with no tape to breast.
Okay, say we put it down to Asian modesty. We are not the sort to trumpet our achievements with a party, even though we may show off in other ways, with the flashy phone or latest car or coruscating jewellery.
Some even say it is the legacy of the immigrants’ culture. We are transients, collecting, never truly spending unless it is on an investment to make more. Gratification is waste.
Perhaps we even fear the curse of the third eye, so we look past the milestone and don’t dwell on it in case the heavens humble us with a calamity. It’s very Asian to be negative.
After all, statutory holidays aside, all our major celebrations are imported from the West, commercially manufactured events that probably bring more delight to people who run the classifieds sections than the actual targets waiting in long queues for dinner on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
But in modern Singapore, shouldn’t we stop now and then and mark a milestone in the life that our grandparents and parents gave up their own countries and families to build for us here?
If we could celebrate a personal milestone, invite home for a drink the ones who helped us make it possible because nothing good can be achieved only by self-will, no matter what we think — every pinnacle has a broader base.
And a thousand times better, pull together a celebration for someone we love or just like, to mark their personal milestones. Or if we are the focus of a celebration, can we accept it with grace, not embarrassment? Do we know how to receive a toast, let alone give it?
Imagine what a country we would be then. The MRT, the buses, the taxis and cars would be filled every day with a million people heading off every evening after work to a celebration of one sort or another. There would be more smiles, even for the stranger.
Now you may say this is a strange time to call for a culture of celebration when for many Singaporeans the struggle of daily life just got worse, with the price of nearly everything up by a measure. The mood, one could say, is suitably grim.
But we are already famously grim. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world, which have spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars just to ask ourselves to smile.
So perhaps it is in the tougher times we need to look for cheer the most, and flit to it like a moth to light. What else is there in life worth doing?
------------
Comments:
First, we should ask ourselves "what kind of celebration". It is a fallacy to equivocate all kinds of celebrations. An element of conspicuous, boisterous, and seemingly superficial fun seems intrinsic to the author's concept of celebration - indeed Singaporeans seem to lack this. Is this the only kind of celebration? Quiet reflection or a warm dinner would do as well, and in fact may be more valuable.
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