2017년 3월 30일 목요일

Once upon a time

Writing sample started by: (use third person narrative)
Once upon a time, there was a small and intelligent boy in the tiny village. He was a special kids actually. His behaviors were basically different compared to other normal kids. He acted like a great explorer, scientist, historian, and even president. One day, when he became the middle school students, he decided to travels somewhere since the small village was too familiar and boring. He put some stuffs in his large bag and say goodbye to his parent. Since he didn't have a map, the continuous road was his only friend. At first, he visited the capital of the nation.
However, what had been awaiting him was not what he had been awaiting. As if a dramatic turn of a Greek tragedy had shocked an audience of five-year-olds with the boy being on of them, the boy's eyes were filled with immortal glare of sudden dizziness by facing the very first world of different color compositions. Never in his life he saw a man dying cringed at the corner of the street. never in his life he saw a mad man screaming "The apocalypse in near!" running around like a drunken ax. never in his life he heard such an uncomforting harmony of people talking with all the words spitted out with anger and dullness. Gray skyscrapers, gray steaming cars, gray pavements, gray breeze, and gray wild flowers spontaneously bloomed in the crevice of the pavements, He took his first deep breath in that world and the shade of gray drowned his everything. Into the deepest part of the ocean. Hard to breathe. It wasn't only the (acmplexions) at the people. The lights! God damn them! Lights at all colors and brightness that he wasn't need to. Everyone (two words) carry little flashlights except they kept touching the bulbs and the colors would shift and change. Everyone seemed to have a flashlight tethered to their head. And whenever touching their lights, they would stare in stand almost  (one word) They would (one word) good (scarecraws), he thought. They boy didn't stop, not even once. He kept on walking, passing through all the shades of grey and light. Liveliness in his face started to fade away.

P.S. Sorry, Mr.Garriock. There are some words that I couldn't read at all, so I marked them as blanks.

2017년 3월 23일 목요일

Revisionist History Ep.4 - Carlos doesn't remember

Carlos, who is the main character in the podcast episode “Carlos doesn’t remember” represents poor but highly intelligent students in advanced countries. In the entire lecture, Malcolm Gladwell points out a few things to help the students like Carlos by exemplifying the man named Eric. This episode described the educational inequality (or inequality of chance to have education) in U.S.A. very well. However, this unbalanced situation in not limited on the boundary of U.S.A. As I mentioned in the above, students like Carlos keep suffering and waste their superficial ability due to a harsh educational system in South Korea.

At the beginning of an episode, Gladwell temporarily mentions the policy in university for the poor. The system wasn’t actually effective to save students like Carlos, but the importance of having those systems was attested. However, that basic system for the poor but smart students doesn’t work well in modern South Korea. In fact, only a few universities offer the policy to help the poor but intelligent students to enter their school. Even the condition of the system is worse than the system in U.S.A.

Let’s look at the simple example. Seoul National University is the highest school in the world university ranking among the universities in South Korea. However, according to the 2017 administration policy in SNU, only 160 students can be the one who enter SNU by applying the policy for poor. Unfortunately, entire freshmen in the year 2017 was over 2500. It means that students like Carlos are the minority, even this amount refers to 0.6% of all freshmen students. Because of the limitation in the educational system of South Korea, students like Carlos must compete each other to become beneficiaries of that policy.


The next point is about the overall educational system in South Korea. According to the episode, 80% of the students like Carlos in U.S.A lose their academic potential at the age of teenagers. Despite that horrible rate, over 35000 students are selected as a potential one after becoming teenagers. Throughout this analysis, figuring out students in early ages, providing suitable education to students and leading them in the right direction is more important than other matters. Surprisingly, these two subjects aren’t existence in modern Korean educational system. Today, Korea’s educational system composed with the elementary, middle and high school. Most of the children get the same quality of education and they grew up similarly. During the period of elementary, students like Carlos should be treated differently. However, the education system in Korea strongly focused on the unification of all students. The problems are the lack of private institutions and wrong common beliefs of Korea: “Special isn’t special, normal is the best thing in your life.” Uniqueness and differentiation is regarded as useless and social maladaptive.

Unbalanced opportunity and limited freedom to be a special makes South Korea weaker than past few decades. To be a real advanced country and to enhance the aspect of civic awareness, South Korea must fix the overall modern education system.

2017년 3월 20일 월요일

Revisionist History Ep.3 - Peer Pressure

Sudden development of technology in last decade has been affected to the importance of peer pressure. Social networking service applications like Facebook or Twitter, forced their users to know the daily life of their friends, teachers and even the celebrities. Comments, likes, and reactions from the posts reflected the common reaction in the society. Not to be a stranger, not to be an outsider, each member of the society has started to consider the “Peer Pressure”, the social eye. 

This situation frequently happened in South Korea related with the students in teenager. In fact, few days ago, I read quite interesting article from the “TIME”. The link of the article is in the below. Amid of the article, the term “peer pressure” appeared to explain the harsh reality of Korean students. The phrase “All we do is study, except when we sleep” in the article surprised me and helped me to decide the topic of this reflection. Academic peer pressure in Korean society; competing each other, not helping.

Academic peer pressure caused the problem not only in the society of children but also in the entire economic circumstance in South Korea. Another link in the below and the chart showed terrible situations happening nowadays. Overheated competition between students forced themselves to go to private academy to beat and survive in the harsh school environment. Surprisingly, the term “prerequisite learning” is normally used by the person who learned pedagogy. But, in South Korea, most of the parents loved to use this word and even the students talked each other whether having a prerequisite learning or not.


Unfortunately, KMLA always suffered from these problems, the academic peer pressure and the private learning. At first, balanced academic peer pressure in elite school always regarded as a requirement. However, the most important point in premise is it should be “balanced”. In KMLA, few domestic students often have nickname started with “GyeonJae” (Translated to check in English). As you can guess, those nicknames came from their inhumane behavior. For those students, the test scores and overall reputation as competent students were considered for the first priority in their life. Every students in South Korea should keep in mind the dual-aspect of the academic peer pressure.

The next point is the private learning. Even though school policy tried to prohibit private learning of the students, most of the domestic students and even international students preferred to have private learning rather than unsupervised learning. Yet the writer of the following essay have refused to have AP or SAT private learning after entering the KMLA. For the case of international students, they normally decided to have private learning since SAT or AP tests are quite unfamiliar type of studying for them. However, to survive and to compete with other domestic students, private learning is more than recommended things to the students in domestic field. IT IS THE EASIEST WAY TO SURVIVE IN KMLA.

This is the story of my friends. Not the students lived in Gangnam, not the students who perfectly controlled by their parents. This is the student’s reality in South Korea.


http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427-2,00.html