NYTimes: In South Korea, Questions About Cram Schools, Success and Happiness

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reason for that: it’s a country that has very little resources, a large population, not enough good jobs for everyone.

US is different.

This is true, and a lot of the recent immigrants don't realize this.

In Korea, your life is set if you go to one of the SKY univs and then get a job at one of the chaebols. Here in the US, we have so many paths to financial success.

There are people in the US who either didn't go to college or went to a T50 or below and can get jobs at a FAANG. That would be unheard of in Korea.

This is so helpful. I'm embarassed by how little I know about the Korean economy and how it drives social and financial standing, values around education, and day-to-day behavior.

Keep it coming!

[Anonymous]

It's only been recently that SK acknowledges the mental toll this is taking on its youth. This is part of what made the group BTS famous - they spoke about society issues that no one else would bring up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my mind - maybe it's because I'm from the international relations sphere in DC - I see this trend as something that has been tremendously powerful in developing into modern economic powerhouses in several countries. It's amazing that we could see Japan dig out of war devastation in a couple generations, China climb out of middling/struggling country status in 40 years, South Korea move from middle income to high income in a generation. But the question of sustainability is really a big deal.

Workforces can break if they are worked too hard. People need family life. You can't have success only happen for the people at the peak of the mountain.

In the U.S. we have a social compact around economic success relatively commensurate with your willingness to work, and some ability to set boundaries and get out what you're willing to put in. It has some major failures, but at least the premise isn't entirely wrong.

These cultures where you have to offer total commitment to school, then to work, have to find a way to dial it back and offer 'some commitment, at least better than subsistence' if they're going to allow people to thrive outside of work.

I think big picture that's what the modern world really needs to be humane - the ability to do better for oneself without having to gamble or make herculean efforts - just keep working in good faith and things will turn out for you, in keeping with how hard you try.

I think we walk around with this as something like unspoken natural law, sometimes honored in the breach, but what we see as one kind of justice, and I think it would be better if we said some of this out loud and tried to make it possible.

I love how you phrased that: 'setting the boundary.' In fact, that's a big reason why I left Japan—to reclaim my freedom. I’m a firm believer in the 'work hard, play hard'.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m genuinely curious—does getting ahead really help?

What does getting ahead really mean?

It means you never walk into any class needing to rely on the classroom instruction. You could get an A on the final day one. More importantly, you never trust the US public school system to teach math or science. You learn it outside the system so that at higher levels you don’t struggle with gaps.

In the Bay Area, it is not uncommon for kids to start taking DE courses in 8th grade and have their GE, and DE major prerequisite courses complete with straight As along with the APs in high school to get the most rigorous check box by the end of junior year.

It also means that kids in public are competing with kids who have a second set of credentials. As it’s low cost to do this, they don’t trigger the pay to privilege box that other programs signal.

The problem with those Bay Area cram schools is that they’re not really teaching the material. They’re helping kids get high test scores by drilling them on old exams they’ve gotten from different schools. That’s basically another version of pay-to-play.

Are Bay Area cram schools really that much worse than DMV area cram schools?

There are literally dozens of cheap DMV area cram schools that leverage free things like Khan and AoPS with great results. I don't think those are what you would call pay to play.

Which cram schools do you mean? I’ve seen Kumon, Russian Math, AoPS, and Mathnasium, but I’m curious and apparently oblivious.

Mathnasium is not a cram school. It doesn't have any homework. That's partly why I picked it. It's center based tutoring with an instructor working with multiple children at a time but on homework from school and assignments individually tailored to their gaps from a Mathnasium curriculum. They share diagnostics and testing results but none of the curriculum material or in-center work is allowed to be removed from the center. It's similar to about half of a typical public school math class. The part after the direct instruction.

Kumon is more of a regimen with takehome work that parents need to enforce. And it's less about ideas and approaches.

From what I understand the other programs you mentioned are for kids who like math and are willing to do more. They are "stretch" oriented vs. remedial.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reason for that: it’s a country that has very little resources, a large population, not enough good jobs for everyone.

US is different.

This is true, and a lot of the recent immigrants don't realize this.

In Korea, your life is set if you go to one of the SKY univs and then get a job at one of the chaebols. Here in the US, we have so many paths to financial success.

There are people in the US who either didn't go to college or went to a T50 or below and can get jobs at a FAANG. That would be unheard of in Korea.

This is so helpful. I'm embarassed by how little I know about the Korean economy and how it drives social and financial standing, values around education, and day-to-day behavior.

Keep it coming!

I watched a documentary on why it's difficult to create start ups in Korea.

It's because the chaebols stifle competition, and the politicians are in their back pockets.

The culture is also very hierarchical (this was one of the reasons why that Korean airplane crashed into the mountain - the jr pilot was afraid to say anything to the sr pilot even though he saw that something was wrong).

It's a terrible system, and very shortsighted.

I love Korea and can't wait to go visit. I'd even consider spending a year there, but I would never want my kids to grow up in that kind of atmosphere. I'm super grateful to my parents for immigrating to the US. It was incredibly hard for them to leave their family, have no education, and not speak English when they came here in 1970 when the Korean population here was miniscule. But, they worked really hard to give us a better life, and we in turn are giving our kids a better life.

My dad always says how happy he is to see how well we are all doing and that the sacrifices they made have been worth it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m genuinely curious—does getting ahead really help?

What does getting ahead really mean?

It means you never walk into any class needing to rely on the classroom instruction. You could get an A on the final day one. More importantly, you never trust the US public school system to teach math or science. You learn it outside the system so that at higher levels you don’t struggle with gaps.

In the Bay Area, it is not uncommon for kids to start taking DE courses in 8th grade and have their GE, and DE major prerequisite courses complete with straight As along with the APs in high school to get the most rigorous check box by the end of junior year.

It also means that kids in public are competing with kids who have a second set of credentials. As it’s low cost to do this, they don’t trigger the pay to privilege box that other programs signal.

The problem with those Bay Area cram schools is that they’re not really teaching the material. They’re helping kids get high test scores by drilling them on old exams they’ve gotten from different schools. That’s basically another version of pay-to-play.

Are Bay Area cram schools really that much worse than DMV area cram schools?

There are literally dozens of cheap DMV area cram schools that leverage free things like Khan and AoPS with great results. I don't think those are what you would call pay to play.

Which cram schools do you mean? I’ve seen Kumon, Russian Math, AoPS, and Mathnasium, but I’m curious and apparently oblivious.

Mathnasium is not a cram school. It doesn't have any homework. That's partly why I picked it. It's center based tutoring with an instructor working with multiple children at a time but on homework from school and assignments individually tailored to their gaps from a Mathnasium curriculum. They share diagnostics and testing results but none of the curriculum material or in-center work is allowed to be removed from the center. It's similar to about half of a typical public school math class. The part after the direct instruction.

Kumon is more of a regimen with takehome work that parents need to enforce. And it's less about ideas and approaches.

From what I understand the other programs you mentioned are for kids who like math and are willing to do more. They are "stretch" oriented vs. remedial.

My DC tutored at Kumon and said it was awful. Just worksheet after worksheets. I guess it was just to drill math problems into the kids. They said there were kids as young as 4 there, and the kid was not Asian.

[Anonymous]

75% of young people are in college or have college 4 year degrees. A society can't function effectively if everyone has a 4 year college education. A bank teller doesn't need a 4 year college education. A society needs skilled trades people and unskilled workers as well to function.

Germany has a better model where many students study skilled trades.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The thing I keep thinking over and over again is that I was foolish to have trusted my pretty nice public schools to teach math K-5. They did a bad job though I don't blame teachers. Our teachers did what they were told as best they could. By which I mean showing all those model diagrams, encouraging math exploration with manipulatives, doing small group differentiated instruction with all levels in one class, experimenting with math video games.

Drill and kill would have worked better. I should have worked with my kids on IXL. I don't think they would have liked Beast Academy or RSM. I personally don't like Kumon. Mine did Mathnasium in middle school and high school. And it was okay but expensive. And my older lacks math intuition. Just like me.

So Asian/Asian-American parents make their kids do this stuff. I just wish I had. You don't need to go all the way to cram school to foster more comfort with elementary math.

Your post doesn't make any sense. You say drill and kill would have been better but then you say you don't like Kumon, which is drill and kill to get down the basics of math. It is like practicing scales and the fundamentals when learning to play an instrument. You wish you had made your kids do more math but then weren't willing to put in the time to make your kids do Kumon. You can't have it both ways.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:75% of young people are in college or have college 4 year degrees. A society can't function effectively if everyone has a 4 year college education. A bank teller doesn't need a 4 year college education. A society needs skilled trades people and unskilled workers as well to function.

Germany has a better model where many students study skilled trades.

What society are you talking about? In the United States only about 62% of high school graduates go to college, and only about 85% of people graduate from high school. So that’s barely over 50% of Americans who even start college.

[Anonymous]

Don't take this the wrong way, but I have one kid who doesn't study and everything comes naturally to, a self learner with innate math ability. He never studies, doesn't need to. My younger has inate verbal/written ability. They are very different but NEITHER study a lot, my son, really never. I don't get all this studying/cramming, really. How is it possible to study for hours and hours and hours and still not understand a concept? Then, if it doesn't come naturally, maybe the European system is best, sort early and avoid the torture for kids it doesn't come naturally to? I'd wait until high school.for late bloomers but this has got to be rough if you struggle constantly.

[Anonymous]

I don't think these math schools we have count as cram schools. My kids do math outside of school but it's not like high pressure or stressful or anything like that. It is just another thing they do like soccer or baseball.

The main reason to do extra math is because they can and the school curriculum is too slow.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The thing I keep thinking over and over again is that I was foolish to have trusted my pretty nice public schools to teach math K-5. They did a bad job though I don't blame teachers. Our teachers did what they were told as best they could. By which I mean showing all those model diagrams, encouraging math exploration with manipulatives, doing small group differentiated instruction with all levels in one class, experimenting with math video games.

Drill and kill would have worked better. I should have worked with my kids on IXL. I don't think they would have liked Beast Academy or RSM. I personally don't like Kumon. Mine did Mathnasium in middle school and high school. And it was okay but expensive. And my older lacks math intuition. Just like me.

So Asian/Asian-American parents make their kids do this stuff. I just wish I had. You don't need to go all the way to cram school to foster more comfort with elementary math.

Your post doesn't make any sense. You say drill and kill would have been better but then you say you don't like Kumon, which is drill and kill to get down the basics of math. It is like practicing scales and the fundamentals when learning to play an instrument. You wish you had made your kids do more math but then weren't willing to put in the time to make your kids do Kumon. You can't have it both ways.

Did you read the part where I said I would have used IXL? IXL is adaptive and I only really learned how to use the parent controls when my kids were older and I paid for it myself. By that point, I couldn't make them do the program so going to Mathnasium was my best option.

IXL is cheap. Kumon Centers are not. And I don't like their worksheets or their price/value relationship or the inflexibility on parent expectations. Using your music analogy, I don't want to do scales alongside my child (family involvement Suzuki) and I don't want to get scolded because my kids didn't do X scales in a week.

What I needed was a whole different Common Core math curriculum that was digitized and under my control. While my kids were in elementary school and still biddable. Then I could have done what their classroom teachers did not have time to do and focus on correcting gaps. IXL is good enough for a few hundred dollars a year.

My kids were in the advanced track for our district (reaching AP calc). Some of their shocking gaps:

-poor speed at math facts
-did not understand and apply PEMDAS correctly
-could not remember how to do long division due to being taught lattice method or "do whatever method with several poorly demoed"
-bad at doing operations with fractions. Converts them mentally into decimals and approximates the answer

All of the wandering around math centers, coloring pictures of squares, paragraph-long word problems, allegedly differentiated small group instruction that rarely got administered to the top kids, and Prodigy were destructive in my view. Similar to Readers' Workshop and "Sold a Story". My district was told what the best practices were and they invested in them, trained the teachers, and the curriculums did not work as advertised. My district has discarded both the reading curriculum and the math curriculum that my kids had K-5.

Drill and kill to me does mean more worksheets and memorization. More rote fluency. My foreign friends have this background and I do not. And they are better at math. In part because I went to a rather lackadaisical 1970s Bay Area elementary school. My grandma, a trained elementary teacher, spent a summer catching me up around 4th grade. I just thought my own kids had a better school and learned more. Until we got midway through the pandemic and I realized the wheels were coming off the metaphorical bus. Mathnasium still required face masks when they started there.

It's true that I could have invested more of my own time teaching my kids outside of school. But I didn't really realize I should have until too late. I partly fixed it but it cost about $650/mo. for Mathnasium for quite a while (middle school and high school enrollment costs more than elementary). Still cheaper than living in a "better" school district.

[Anonymous]

+1 on the IXL start them young vs Mathnasium catch up. Had to do the latter but wish we did the former.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don't take this the wrong way, but I have one kid who doesn't study and everything comes naturally to, a self learner with innate math ability. He never studies, doesn't need to. My younger has inate verbal/written ability. They are very different but NEITHER study a lot, my son, really never. I don't get all this studying/cramming, really. How is it possible to study for hours and hours and hours and still not understand a concept? Then, if it doesn't come naturally, maybe the European system is best, sort early and avoid the torture for kids it doesn't come naturally to? I'd wait until high school.for late bloomers but this has got to be rough if you struggle constantly.

Sounds like AI bots than human beings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reason for that: it’s a country that has very little resources, a large population, not enough good jobs for everyone.

US is different.

This is true, and a lot of the recent immigrants don't realize this.

In Korea, your life is set if you go to one of the SKY univs and then get a job at one of the chaebols. Here in the US, we have so many paths to financial success.

There are people in the US who either didn't go to college or went to a T50 or below and can get jobs at a FAANG. That would be unheard of in Korea.

I never quite understood how a smart hardworking family like the one in the movie Parasite could be so financially unsuccessful. But now I see the movie was about how success in SK was locked in for some people and unattainable for others.