This semester will end three weeks later. Wow, already! I took one online course, the Internet in K12 Instruction, and one traditional course, Literacy, Family and Culture. Both courses are very interesting that they opened my eyes into the world that I did not know before.
My online course just finished last weekend, and now I have one course be finishing soon. That course requires me to write a response to reading every week, so this is an ongoing assignment. In addition, the synthesis paper is awaiting that should be turned in by Dec 8th, which kind of worries me.
Believe it or not, I have never written a synthesis paper before in my college years in Korea. Perhaps because my major was physics so the assignments were mostly about solving the questions rather than writing papers. Or perhaps because writing was not emphasized in education at that time. I don't know.
It has not been long since I learned academic writing because I had not learned until I came to the States three years ago. My college never taught me a college-level academic writing even in Korean. In my high school, I just learned ABOUT writing, but never actually wrote. What a ridiculous! Also, academic writing in Korea and in the States would be much different. For whatever reasons, my lack of prior knowledge on academic writing in English made me sometimes embarrassed with writing assignments. My first writing assignment in the master's program at the university was to write a response to reading an article. I was not sure what to write: write my thoughts, my opinion to agree or disagree, or my summary?
Anyway, to my surprise, my papers got all As so far. I just did my best not to be left behind.
As time passed by, rather than complaining differences between two countries' education, I began to blame my prior teachers or schools in Korea for not teaching me well. What did they teach me? What did they let me write? What did they let me THINK?? What chances did they give me to read? What freedom did they give me in learning?
Although cultural and educational difference shock me from time to time, I enjoy learning everything new here. The courses here make me think and think and think. (Now my brain found its work to do. ha ha.) Even though the synthesis paper is a little daunting, I am pretty sure that it will teach me something in writing and thinking at the end. How lucky I am!
Last week one of the American students in the classroom asked what Asian students think about education in their countries to compare to education in the U.S. It was a pretty tough question to answer, but it is true that something wrong is going on in Korea as the Korean education do not teach students to think, and makes the smartest students become just average.
I wanted to ask back to the American students what they think about their education. But time was running out, so I couldn't.
This book that I have read in the Literacy, Family and Culture course is about school experiences of people from diverse ethnic groups, such as African American, Asian America, biracial America, European American, Latino American and Native American. Twelve stories were written by different authors having different races, background, and school experience. Many of the writers in the book speak from socially subordinate positions. 
