write a note on how koreans study(about10to15lines)
Answers
Rigorously. With vigor, passion, and drive.
At least, that was what it was like in my high school.
I won’t specify the name, but my high school is known in Korea as a ‘specialized’ school - meaning, we focus on learning languages and top the rankings in how many students go on to SKY (Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei University, respectively; think of it as the Korean equivalent to the Ivy League). Think of it as something like the Bronx High School of Science, expect we focused on learning a third language(in my case, it was Chinese).
Pretty much 90 percent of the people studied really hard. It’s hard not to, in my school, when the pressure to do great burdens students starting from year one.
We were in school by 7:50, had seven periods that ended at 3:50, then had extracurriculars for 70 minutes. But don’t be fooled by the fun-sounding ‘extracurricular’ activity - it was actually an additional, required class of Korean or math rotating by the day of the week. Then we would have dinner from 5:10 to six - then we would be back in class for study hall, until 10:30. At night.
All throughout my high school years, I easily spent about 14 ~ 15 hours at school each day. And it wasn’t a boarding school, either. So I would get home at around 11:10 at night everyday, and leave home the next day at 7 am. There was literally only time, when I got home, to take a shower and go to sleep.
I hated life, the monotonous quality of it, the fact that studying consumed all fiber of my very being. I had zero downtime during the week, and no way of letting out the stress or frustration. I had to resort to simple pleasures, such as going down to the school convenience store to get some sweets, drinking hot cocoa while I was in study hall… I tried valiantly to be happy.
But it didn’t really work. I wasn’t depressed, really - but I did consider jumping off the river crossing the Han river many many times. Sometimes I really did scare myself when I gazed up at skyscrapers gracing the Seoul landscape and imagined myself falling, falling, falling. Falling’s another way of flying.
Anyway, I didn’t even have the weekends free. Korea’s notorious for having hagwons(academies outside of school), and we all went to around four or five of them. I personally went to academies for Korean, math, English, and science. Each class was about three or four hours long, and since school ended so late on weekdays, I had to cram them all into the weekends and Wednesdays(the only day we didn’t have evening/night study hall).
Competition was indeed fierce. We were graded comparatively, meaning the top 4% were 1st rank, the top 11% were 2nd rank, and so on, with 9 ranks in total. Each class meant one corresponding rank, and the final rank(all subjects combined with different weight to ‘major’ subjects) determined which colleges we had a shot at being admitted.
One month before midterms/finals was crazytime.
We obsessed over the most miscellaneous of things, every utterance of the teacher’s analyzed. We were, in simple terms, paranoid.
The only thing that kept me going was the fact that one day, it would all be over, and I’ll be free. For three years I only dreamed of going to college and starting my life all over again. That’s when I also started unbelieving in Carpe Diem - everything I did, it was for the future.
Note: This took place at my private high school. Situations may vary greatly in public schools… I’ve heard that the majority of the class fall asleep/are on their phones/stare into space/make trouble.
specially Jimin.... awwwwwww