Milford High School diversifies!

For some students, the end is near!  In just a couple months the sky will open up and the Earth will be swallowed along with many of its inhabitants.

The day I’m talking about is the dreaded graduation day. For many students, senior year is stressful and filling out form after form just to look for a job or a university can be exhausting. But imagine trying to do all this when you’re not even fluent in the language these forms are presented in.

Gyubin Lee, who often goes by Kyle, is a foreign exchange student from South Korea who has entered Milford High School as a senior this year. Kyle came to the US to finish high school because he was interested in American culture and he wanted to immerse himself in it. 

Kyle said that the biggest problem he’s faced being in the US has been the language barrier. He can get through a conversation but certain instructions still require repetition for him. He is also taking regular classes like everyone else, so he doesn’t have much assistance in trying to decipher what the teacher is saying. Although he told said that it’s still much better than going to school in Fiji (where he lived for 4 months) because “the teachers don’t answer questions there. If you ask them a question they keep directing you to someone else.”

Kyle says his favorite thing about US school is the extra-curriculars like dances and sports and clubs because they don’t have school dances in South Korea and for sports “there’s usually just one big game that everyone goes to, but nobody goes to any of the others.”

Kyle says that sports aren’t very big in South Korea, especially football. “Nobody plays football. Soccer is very popular.”

English is said to be the most difficult language to learn, but it seems like non-native speakers are still expected to have the extensive amount of slang and dialects learned and memorized almost immediately. Kyle is still learning, but he’s getting help from the friends he has met here and he is looking forward to making many more.