I didn’t expect much from Black Dog, but it gave me a lot to think about. I was looking for some seasonal dramas on Netflix, and I watched it because there are various social issues related to school, and I thought it was a well-made drama set in a school.
When I started watching it from the beginning to the end, I realized that it was a drama that aired in late 2019 to early 2020. It was aired on tvN, but it was in the early days of Corona, and I don’t think it got a lot of attention because there was not much talk about schools or school rights until then.
by Annotator
The drama stars four actors, including Seo Hyun-jin and Ra Mi-ran, who are members of the advanced studies department. Seo Hyun-jin is an actor who I was so fascinated by through “Another Ooh Hae-young,” so I felt the same fascination while watching the drama. I think his calm expression and the way he struggled and grew up was a good match for the character in the drama. I later found out that his parents were actually teachers. Maybe it was the things I saw and heard as a child that melted away.
Teacher is not a GOD
After watching Black Dog, my first thought was that it was a real-life version of the tvN drama Misaeng. Although the location and space is a school rather than a company and the protagonist’s situation is different, the message of the drama is the same as Misaeng’s: we can all live a life of imperfection, and anyone can live the life of a black dog.
In my case, I empathized with Black Dog a little more than Misaeng because of a memory I had with a teacher in high school. Misaeng tells a story that everyone can relate to as an office worker, but there were many parts that I couldn’t relate to because I lived a different life than most office workers.
In the case of Black Dog, people of my generation could relate to it because they experienced teachers directly or indirectly during their high school years. Looking back, my school years were either bright or dark tunnels, but I went through the same black and white time over and over again. As I got older, I realized that teachers are also a job and a way of life.
After watching the drama, I contacted a friend who became a teacher, which was my childhood dream. As we talked about the drama but close to reality, I couldn’t help but say, “I’m sorry for your hardships. Nowadays, schools are attracting attention for various social issues such as the collapse of the school system and the privatization of schools, but the people who actually live their lives in schools are only worried about them after many lives have been lost.
A school that feels too real
Black Dog was also a big topic of discussion among school teachers when it aired. This is because the drama portrayed the realistic school scene so well. Park Joo-yeon, who wrote the screenplay for Black Dog, is a former high school Korean language teacher who worked as a teacher for three years. Black Dog is her first feature film, and she started from her own experience and told the story the best she could. I think it’s amazing that she has created a work that exceeds expectations from her first feature film;
I am not a teacher, but I also remembered my early years in society. I remembered trying to memorize bits and pieces of common sense while watching Ms. Goh Ha-Neul taking the entrance exam to get into a private school, shaking in the interview room for teacher recruitment, and failing the entrance exam after failing the demonstration lecture in front of the teachers.
The scenes of writing a student journal, teachers gathering to discuss curriculum, and a departmental meeting in the principal’s office all seemed to overlap with the past. The morning scene of the school staff changing from combat boots to slippers seemed more realistic because it was a daily routine.
Banana's Rebellion
The next story I’d like to talk about is the story of “Banana Nan” from episode 8 of Black Dog. At first, I wondered if it was a story that made sense, but later on, when I read the reviews, I became more interested in it because they said that it was far from reality. Some netizens thought it was a ridiculous black comedy, but others wrote that it was something that current teachers go through every day.
After watching the banana episode on the drama, netizens often wondered if the conclusion was right and if it was a true story. In one community, more than 6,000 people voted, and the results were almost 5:5 in favor of “should be recognized as the correct answer” and against “cannot be recognized as the correct answer.
To summarize the episode, there was a question on the Korean language test. The question was to state three sentences that could be interpreted from the following sentence:
‘Sungsoon bought two bananas and a watermelon’
The original intent of the question was for the answer choices to be 1) buy 1 banana and 1 watermelon 2) buy 1 banana and 2 watermelons 3) buy 2 bananas and 2 watermelons,
The top students interpreted “banana” as a name, so the answer “Sungsoon bought two watermelons from a friend named Banana” was accepted as the correct answer;
This may seem like a “logical” argument, since the question doesn’t specify that a banana is a fruit. However, in the first round of test scoring, teachers incorrectly marked the answer as incorrect, and after asking the SAT examiner about the answer, Dr. Koh finally recognized the children’s answer as a multiple choice.
Although there are aspects of the story that portrayed the smart kids at the top of the class as being pushy, I thought that if the question was ambiguous, it was only natural that the correct answer should be corrected. In the movie, the date of the students’ objection is shown as ‘Teacher’s Day’, and I wonder if the nuance conveys the message that teachers’ knowledge and authority are weakening and respect is disappearing;
The banana incident is also a barometer of the current school climate. Teachers are very cautious when it comes to raising questions, and kids are very sensitive because it’s related to their college prospects. It shows that these kinds of situations happen all the time in schools.
For us, Daechi is
My child is turning 7 and is about to enter elementary school, and I’m wondering which school to send him to and whether to move. When my child was younger, it was practical to live near my mother-in-law’s house, so we settled in Dongdaemun-gu, Gangbuk, but now I’m having trouble finding a good school or district. In my head, I’m talking to my wife, thinking that he hasn’t even gone to elementary school yet, but I can’t help but feel worried.
Daechi High School in the drama Black Dog is actually a fictional school. However, the keyword ‘Daechi-dong’ has many overlapping meanings in our society. It is the largest hagwon in Korea, the center of educational fever, competition and entrance exams, and the place where all of Korea’s educational desires converge.
In fact, the social issue of school teachers has gotten a lot of attention lately. I’m so sorry for all the tragedies that have happened, but I think it’s necessary to put schools in the spotlight. We have been focusing on the phenomenon of entrance exams and forgetting about the people who make up schools and are the center of education. Sky Castle, a popular drama, emphasized Seoul National University School of Medicine and Seoul National University School of Law, while Ilta Scandal emphasized the meaning of the private education market. In the drama, university is the only purpose and goal. Is that really all there is to life?
Of course, having a child myself, I realize that parental greed is never-ending. They say that you should let your child do what he wants to do and at his own pace, but they compare him to other children and become impatient. The standard of comparison is so high, and I can’t help but think that gifted people on TV are already doing so much at this age. All parents, including me, are weak in practicing the ideal.
I want to experience more, have more fun, and be there for my child as he grows up. When I see schools reflected in soap operas and hear about the collapse of education in real life, I wonder if we can raise our children with this kind of heart and determination.
Students Hwang Botong and Ikaros
Special isn’t really special. I was in a special class in high school called an enrichment class. It was a private school, so they organized the classes based on grades. At the time, I didn’t realize that it was special or discriminatory. I thought it was just a difference of doing self-study at night, but I think kids who weren’t in that class might have felt differently. I think parents are so sensitive to placement tests and classification because they want to put their children in a better position and get a better education.
Watching the episode of Icarus (an enrichment class disguised as a club) in Black Dog, I thought about a number of things: the very idea of having a special class, and having a teacher give lessons to that class, could be a form of discrimination. In the episode, there were two scenes of sneaking into the Ikaros class and sprinkling milk on it, and the storyline was that the enrichment class had been abolished due to protests from students and parents and sanctions from the school board.
The idea behind the phrase “graduated education” is that only the kids who are able to do well are raised properly. And this is probably what happens naturally in most of our society. But I don’t know if schools should be investing their resources as efficiently as they are now, even in the learning space.
Through the characters of Ms. Ko Ha-neul and Ms. Park Sung-soon, the artist continues to ask us the question: what kind of place is school? This question becomes more specific when Hwang Bo-tong, a second-year student of Ms. Ko, is introduced. Aside from the cliché of being a dropout, Hwang is an ordinary, unremarkable male high school student. In local high schools, there are more and more of them as you go from general high school to vocational high school. They have something special about them, but in the name of school and curriculum, they can’t see the light of day. The school is a place where their abilities are measured by a few subjects. Neither the teachers nor the children want it.
In the drama, Hwang Bo-tong’s role is almost as important as Go Ha-neul’s first two students (Jin Yura and Koo Jae-hyun), who dominate the first half of the drama. While Jin Yura and Koo Jae-hyun chose to grow up within the existing school system, Hwang Bo-tong chooses to break away from it and think outside the box. Although slightly different, Hwang reminded me of someone I studied with before I started working. He got a job a few years later than I did, and he went through several companies before joining my former company. We were in different departments, so I never really saw him, but watching Black Dog, I suddenly realized that he probably experienced the world more broadly and walked towards what he wanted to do. Although the drama is over, I expect Hwang Botong will probably grow up to do the webtoon he wants.
Teacher and instructor
One of the main characters in the drama, Ms. Park Sung-soon, is a strong character. She is known as a mad dog at school and never loses her passion to realize her ideals as a teacher. She fights for what she believes in, putting herself in the middle of school politics to balance the power in the school. But at home, she is a normal mom and someone’s wife. Perhaps there is no one greater than Yeo Se-chang, the husband of Park Sung-soon, who hugs her.
It’s not easy to fill the void left by a working wife for more than a decade. It’s not easy to fill the void of a working wife for more than a decade.” It was a short episode, but there was a scene where Park Sung-soon met another teacher who quit teaching and became a teacher at a private academy and was ashamed of the fake luxury bag she brought with her. At that moment, she receives a text from the academy’s scout on her smartphone saying, “We are looking for a teacher with experience as an academic director. The drama continues to show that she is a teacher who is not swayed by money for the sake of children, but from Park Sung-soon’s point of view, you can’t help but feel sorry for her husband, sorry for her children, and sad for her meager living. What does it mean to her to have guided students for over a decade?
I’ve been in public life in some way for over a decade, and my former coworkers are still doing it as a mission. I’ve spent a lot of time watching and thinking about how some people take pride in their work, some are mired in mannerisms, and some are just getting by. Not for a richer position, not for a more prestigious position, but for my family to be a little better off. The question remained, do I really love this job, and I eventually strayed from that path.
It’s a talkative town, and I heard a lot of rumors after I made my decision. Some people felt sorry for me, some people said it was a stupid decision, but many people applauded me. I’m not sure how much of the teacher I see from the outside matches the image of the “teacher” I used to look up to, and I’m still not sure how much of the work I did was just air.
Park Sung-soon is probably the one who will stay at the school after the drama ends, returning to the school and taking on a key position. But will Do Yeon-woo, the teacher who teaches EBC in the drama, stay at the school and work with the children? Will she be able to make a meaningful difference within the school system? Will she be frustrated by the limitations? No one knows, and we can’t blame her for choosing a different path.
Let's summarize.
Watching Black Dog and thinking about the present. Recently, there have been many stories about teachers who have turned their backs on the world in online communities and in the news. They are frustrated and helpless with the reality of their school, unable to withstand the hostility of parents and the ridicule of children. The mood is polarized. From the opinion that our social system is wrong to the unfounded accusation that teachers are weak.
But when we think about the role of teachers as a profession, it’s time to stop and ask ourselves whether our society is in the right place to raise children. It’s time to stop revering the noble work of teaching children for the future, and start thinking about whether we as a society are creating an environment where teachers are healthy and not frustrated. Black Dog is asking what it means to be a school, what it means to be a student, and what it means to be a teacher. We can all be black dogs, and there may come a day when we will have to fight injustice with fierce determination.
