On the last weekend of July, four people from our school were sitting in a hotel ballroom in Teaneck, New Jersey — about nine hundred miles from the classrooms where they usually spend their Saturday mornings. Principal Demi Pysh (문동미), Vice-Principal Lee Owen (이지숙), and teachers Ko Hyun-i (고현이) and Lee Ji-na (이지나) had traveled up for the 44th annual conference of the National Association for Korean Schools (재미한국학교협의회), the national body our school has belonged to for most of its life.
Five hundred and eighty teachers came, from Seattle to Florida. The theme was "Growing Together in the Age of AI" (AI 시대, 함께 성장하는 한국학교), and over three days the program ran to more than seventy workshops — everything from vocabulary instruction and kindergarten textbooks to building lesson materials with AI, and Korean culture taught through paper folding.
Three moments in that ballroom belonged to us. Lee Ji-na was called to the stage for a long-service award — ten years of teaching Korean. Ten years of Saturdays. And Demi was honored twice: a certificate of appreciation from the Consul General of the Republic of Korea in New York, and a commendation from the Dokdo Foundation (독도재단), which recognizes schools and educators who teach Korean history and geography well. The Dokdo lesson our students sit through every October, in other words, was noticed from the other side of the world.
The keynote came from Professor Im Cheol-il of Seoul National University, who studies how AI is changing classrooms. His argument was not that teachers should be nervous. It was that AI belongs in a Korean school the way a good workbook does — a partner that frees a teacher to spend her attention on the child in front of her, not a substitute for the teacher. Students, he said, should learn to understand AI, then use it, then think alongside it — and build, along the way, the things no machine supplies: creativity, collaboration, judgment.
But the sentence our teachers kept coming back to on the trip home was shorter. It came from Kwon Ye-soon, the association's president: "Identity education is our purpose. AI is a new tool for achieving that purpose." That is the whole thing, really. Nobody in that room was worried a machine would teach Korean better than a teacher who knows a child's grandmother. They were there because the purpose has not changed in forty-four years — and the tools finally caught up.
What comes back to Huntsville is practical. Ways to make vocabulary stick. Reading materials built for kids growing up outside Korea. Digital tools that make a Saturday class go further. Ideas for keeping a ten-year-old motivated in week nine of a sixteen-week term. Our teachers will be unpacking all of it at the fall teachers' meeting, and you will start seeing it in the classrooms not long after.
The 45th conference will be in Seattle next summer. Between now and then, there are Saturday mornings in Huntsville — and a seat in one of our classrooms for any family who wants one. Preschoolers through adults, complete beginners welcome, and you can join at the start of any term. Come see what our teachers brought home.