The Koreans are hardcore when it comes to schooling.

At the elementary school where I work we have a group of Koreans who come and take classes from about 3pm until 8pm. They're international students, sent away from their parents in Korea to learn English and experience our education system.

From 8am to 3pm they're in our school, then until 8pm they're in "Korean" school. They also go to school Saturdays.

These kids are young - 10 years old. Wow, that's hardcore. But apparently it's the norm in Korea. The children there apparently have 12 hour working days. After "regular" school, their parents send them to academies at night where they learn even more.

Apparently there's immense, cultural and parental pressure to succeed in school. If you don't get top marks, you don't get admittance to university or good jobs. Your station in life is directly correlated to your marks and your academic success.

I heard tests are mostly multiple-choice and there is very little teaching and promotion of creativity.

Nice to see our Korean overlords are building drones to one day rule over us and ensure we conform.

Schools don't teach this anymore.

One great thing about working in a school is that I get to talk to teachers about problems in the school system. Today I learned that schools in this province no longer teach printing or handwriting.

This means that there are many grade 5 kids who literally cannot write basic sentences or paragraphs. Because they never learned how to form letters, their brains are busy thinking about letters rather than thinking about what to write.

These are called "output problems". The cure for these problems is to teach children how to properly hold a pencil and form letters. Schools don't do it anymore.

Good to know. We'll add this to the list of things we need to teach Jake.

Elementary school now and then.

Now that I have to work in an elementary school, I've noticed the differences between elementary schools today and elementary schools when I was a kid. (Based on an extremely small sample size!)

Here are the main the differences I've noticed.

1) Announcements. When I was a kid announcement seemed five minutes long. They started with the national anthem and concluded with the Lord's prayer. Nowadays, there aren't really announcements anymore. It's just a five second bulletin about which teacher is on recess duty.

2) The Recess Bell. When I was a kid, my school actually had a bell that would ring. This school has an annoying buzzer.

3) Classrooms. Today's classrooms are much more sophisticated. They have built-in cupboards, supply closets, sinks with running water, cable Internet and blackboards that move up and down like shades. When I was a kid, classrooms were just rooms with a closet where you could hang your coat.

4) More Happening. There's much more happening in today's schools. For example, not only does this school have regular classes, they also have a Korean school, a day care, a homeschool program and probably lots of other things I'm not aware of. There also seems to be a lot of staff doing one on one work with certain kids. I'll walk past a classroom, glance in and see a teacher working one-on-one with one or two students. I don't recall this ever happening when I was a kid in elementary school.

5) Sophisticated Alarms. When I was a kid schools did not have burglar alarms. Today they do. This school requires me to phone the alarm company, give them a code, turn off the alarm, tell them how long I plan on staying in the school, phone them when I'm about to leave, and set the alarm again. If I don't do any of these things the alarm company will send out a "runner" and I will be charged between $30 and $50.

6) Half Days. The schools in this district go half Fridays. This is becoming a provincial trend - half days, four days school weeks and soon shorter summer holidays. It comes down to money, and it's much cheaper to operate schools this way.