When Your Kid Says Their Native Language Teacher Is Making Them Miserable: What I Learned
The garlic pasta was still bubbling on the stove when Lila slammed her backpack on the kitchen counter, kicked the leg of the table, and said, “My native language teacher is actually making me crash the fuck out.” She’s 13, so swearing doesn’t faze me anymore—what caught my attention was how red her knuckles were where she gripped the edge of the counter. She’d been quiet about Korean heritage school for a month, but this was the first time she’d spelled it out that clearly.
We’re a Korean-American family in Portland; I’m white, my husband is first-generation, and we signed Lila up for weekly Saturday classes when she was 8. The goal was simple: we wanted her to chat with her grandma in Seoul without me translating every other sentence, read the old letters her great-grandpa wrote, and feel connected to that part of her she only gets in small doses at home. I speak conversational Korean, but I’m not fluent enough to teach her, so the classes felt like a good investment.
For the first few years, it was fine. She complained about it being early on Saturdays, same as any kid complains about extra school. Then Mrs. Park took over the middle school class last fall. That’s when the slow spiral started. She’d come home and skip homework, say she forgot it, or hide her notebook under her bed. When I checked it a week before her outburst, I saw why: a paragraph she’d written about her favorite K-pop dance creator was covered in red ink, every single spelling error circled, and a note scrawled in the margin: “This topic is not appropriate for Korean class. C-.” Then the week of her outburst, she’d left her textbook on the bus, and Mrs. Park made her stand in the hallway for the entire 40-minute reading block. No pass to the office, no letting her share with a friend—just stand outside until class was over.
I didn’t immediately email the principal to complain, didn’t tell Lila she just had to tough it out, which is what my parents would have done. Instead, I emailed Mrs. Park and asked if I could volunteer for the class’s end-of-month snack day, said I wanted to see how the class ran to better help Lila with homework at home. She said yes, so I showed up the next Saturday with a tray of fish cakes and a bag of orange slices, and stood in the back to watch.
It was 12 kids, all 11 to 14, all second-generation like Lila. Mrs. Park called on kids one by one to read a passage out of the textbook. When one boy stumbled over two words in a row, she sighed loudly and said to the whole class, “His parents work too hard to pay for this class for him to not practice at home.” When a girl used the English word “hashtag” because she couldn’t remember the Korean equivalent, Mrs. Park stopped her mid-sentence and made her sit down, said “That’s why you’ll never be fluent if you keep mixing English.” By the end of the first hour, half the kids were staring at their shoes, not raising their hands even when they knew the answer.
I get where Mrs. Park was coming from, honestly. She’s a volunteer, she’s been teaching Korean for 25 years, that’s just how she was taught. She thinks tough love pushes kids to do better. But what I realized that day is that shame and native language learning don’t mix, especially for teen heritage learners. Most of these kids already walk around feeling like they’re not “Korean enough” for the Korean side of the family, not “American enough” for their friends at school. When a teacher shames them for every little mistake, for being less than perfect, they don’t try harder. They just check out. They decide the language isn’t for them, that it’s just a source of stress, not something they can use to connect to the people they love.
After class, I stayed to talk to Mrs. Park. I didn’t yell, I didn’t accuse her. I started with what we both cared about: “All of us want these kids to leave here able to use Korean, right? Lila really wants to talk to her grandma, but right now she’s so scared of getting something wrong that she doesn’t want to speak it at all. Can we try three small things?” I listed them clearly: First, when kids write personal essays, mark only 2 or 3 big errors instead of circling every single one, and leave one positive comment about what they wrote. Second, if someone forgets their textbook, let them share with a neighbor instead of sending them out. Third, let kids mix English words when they’re talking, instead of correcting them mid-sentence. You can correct errors at the end of the talk, if you need to, but don’t stop them from finishing their thought.
She surprised me, actually. She said she’d never thought of it that way. She’d just been told to make sure the kids passed the yearly proficiency test, so she focused on perfection. She agreed to try the changes.
We also adjusted things on our end at home. I stopped making Lila do an hour of Korean homework right after school on Wednesdays. Instead, we do 10 minutes a day of whatever she wants: we watch cooking TikTok together, we text her grandma silly emojis and short sentences, we talk about the K-pop songs she likes. No correcting spelling, no quizzing her on vocabulary. It’s just low-pressure practice.
It’s been two months now. It’s not perfect. Last week, Lila came home complaining that Mrs. Park yelled at a kid for chewing gum in class, and she still says Saturday mornings are too early. But she doesn’t slam her backpack anymore when she talks about Korean class. She got a B+ on her last paragraph about our rescue dog, and the comment said “Your story made me laugh” and she taped it to the fridge, right next to her soccer trophy. I still don’t know if she’ll ever be fully fluent, if she’ll be able to have a long conversation with her grandma about anything other than her grades and her dog. I don’t know if Mrs. Park will keep up the changes, or if we’ll end up pulling Lila out and trying a different online class next year. But I do know this: the point of learning your native language isn’t to get an A on every paragraph, or to never make a mistake. It’s to want to use it. If your teacher is making you hate it that much, nothing else matters.
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