On the first Saturday in August, while most of Huntsville was still asleep, three of our teachers were on the road to Atlanta. Vice-Principal Lee Owen (이지숙) and teachers Cho Seung-yeon (조승연) and Lee Sun-ok (이선옥) were headed to the 35th Southeast Regional Teachers' Workshop at Sugarloaf Korean Church — a one-day gathering of Korean school teachers from across the Southeast, hosted by the NAKS Southeastern Chapter together with the Korean Education Center in Atlanta.
Before the sessions began, Cho Seung-yeon was called to the stage for a five-year long-service commendation, presented by Deputy Consul General Kim Dae-hwan. Two names from our school were on that screen. Jang Yu-hee (장유희) earned the same award for the same five years of Saturdays, but she could not make the drive — so her certificate rode home to Huntsville in someone's bag, and it goes in the mail this week.
The day's theme was global citizenship education, and the opening lecture came from Professor Ahn So-hyun of Kennesaw State University. Her starting point was simple: knowing yourself and your own roots is where respect for other people begins. From there she placed Korean American history inside the larger story of Asian America — the long record of solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and other immigrant communities, and, honestly, the prejudices that have run between minority communities too. It was not a comfortable hour, and it was not meant to be. It was a case that our children will live in a country they share, and that a Korean school is one of the places they learn how.
Then the teachers scattered into workshops. The one that produced the most notes was Park Jin-hee's, from Bethel Korean School, titled "Picture books: the secret weapon of a Hangeul class." Her argument is that a picture book is not a read-aloud filler — it is a whole lesson. One book stretches across vocabulary, grammar, speaking, writing, and art. Publishers give away activity sheets for free if you know where to look. And from a single story you can build two different worksheets, so a child still sounding out letters and a child reading fluently can work from the same book in the same room. She walked through titles her own students loved — 「괴물이 나타났다!」 (A Monster Appeared!), 「나는 나예요」 (I Am Me), 「똑똑해지는 약」 (The Medicine That Makes You Smart), 「김치가 최고야」 (Kimchi Is the Best) — and finished with the unglamorous, essential craft of reading a book out loud so thirty small people actually listen.
The afternoon split by level. One session took on the first steps of Hangeul and made the case that age changes everything: a four-year-old meeting 한글 for the first time and an adult beginner meeting it for the first time need different roads to the same place. Group the consonants into families — ㄱ, ㄴ, ㅁ, ㅅ, ㅇ — and older students stop memorizing shapes and start noticing that Hangeul was designed, that it follows rules they can find themselves. Another session rebuilt grammar around games and role play, on the theory that a student who is not afraid of making a mistake will make far more sentences.
The session on advanced classes made a point worth carrying home. In an American Korean school, many students in the upper classes are not learning Korean as a foreign language at all. They are heritage learners — children who grew up around the language, in a house where it was spoken, long before they ever sat in a classroom. Understand that, the session argued, and a teacher stops cataloguing what a student is missing and starts finding the language the student already has. Our own rooms hold both kinds of learner — children who hear Korean at home, and adults working through the alphabet for the first time — which is what makes that a live question here rather than an abstract one.
Our fall term is coming, and some of what was in that church outside Atlanta will show up quietly in our classrooms — a picture book on a Saturday morning, a worksheet built two ways, a question asked instead of a correction given. New families are welcome at the start of any term, preschoolers through adults. Come see.