Clara Strong || STAFF WRITER
The week before midterms, 24 South Korean students came to Andover to learn about our language and culture.
These high school students arrived on January 8 and stayed for a week before visiting Boston and New York, and eventually flying back to Korea. While most of them visited Andover High School, eight students explored Wood Hill Middle School. The experience aimed to broaden their horizons and teach them about our culture, while also improving their grasp of the English language. They also held a few presentations for AHS students and our community about Korean language and culture.
Peter Hall, World Language program coordinator, said the exchange students were “bridging cultures, which is really the purpose of the whole program, to promote intercultural understanding.” He also said this exchange program is not alone in its goal: “The world language philosophy, the global pathways philosophy, and these organizations all have the similar goal of promoting cultural understanding.” Students invited veterans from the Korean War to a presentation for the community as a way of achieving this goal.
Korean student Sun You-Chan said that he and his fellow students learned a lot. With his American friends, he said, “I talk to them about Korean culture and they talk to me about [American] culture.”
While the program started over 10 years ago, it paused during the COVID-19 pandemic and only resumed last year. It is run by a group called the Academy at Harvard Square, which is part of a larger non-profit organization, Educational Divide Reform. This organization focuses on giving opportunities to students in Asia. The AHS chapter of Global Pathways, a program that creates opportunities for students to learn more about the world, collaborates with them to create this experience for students.
While the students were in the United States, they were all assigned students whom they shadowed throughout the school day. “During the school day, essentially the students visited classes and did whatever their Andover partners were doing, and after school, they had another two hours when they would meet and prepare for their presentation,” Hall said. Sun added, “We went to the museums or toured the universities, and we also have workshops.”
Although exchange students generally shadow kids from their host family, some students this year had no host family and instead stayed in hotels.
“The only reason the second group didn’t have host families was because last year we struggled to find enough host families,” explained Hall. The organizers were worried that the same would happen this year, so they planned for a hotel.
However, there are many benefits to being a host family, such as getting a more personal experience with someone of a different culture, and helping to open one’s mind to new cultures and experiences.
Armand Omelko is a sophomore at AHS and hosted two 11th-grade Korean students, Shin Chaemin and Jeong Seungwon. He said, “It was neat to have people visit like this, especially from a culture that’s actually similar to mine, because I’m half-Korean, so that was interesting. It was also interesting to see the difference between being in the Korean diaspora versus actual Koreans.”
Currently, AHS offers a French exchange program, as well as many opportunities with Global Pathways. Hall also hopes to send students to Korea in a reciprocal exchange, but he expects this to take at least a year to work out.
Sun lived in a city in South Korea, so he shared, “I like the countrysides in America… we tend to experience local things, and I like that.” Also, he explained a big cultural difference in our school systems: “Students move [around school] here, [but] to take their classes in Korea, teachers go around.” He means that teachers are the ones switching rooms each period, not students.
As for why the Koreans came right before midterms, Hall said, “That’s their best time for them to travel in Korea. I know it was not ideal for us. Some years they’ve come a little bit at the beginning of the new semester, which is a little better than right before midterms. But, that was their best dates… the way their vacation times fell.”
