The cut-throat competition of hagwon teachers intensifies as our leads team up to take down their enemy. But all that strategizing and planning means late nights at the office — where an undercurrent of romance is afoot, even if it looks like our heart-eyed hero and his overworked advisor are just going over their lecture notes.
EPISODES 3-4
I like that these episodes have their own mini-arc and we get to follow a project from inception to resolution — chalking up a point for our hagwon heroes at the end. With the competition between schools as well as individual teachers at the center of our story, I get the feeling that we’re in for more of these self-contained battles each week, ramping up the action toward the never-ending war for the students’ attention.
And of course, on the sidelines, we have our romance, which is a slippery, slow-moving thing that feels almost too fragile to mention. As of yet, it’s just a former student with a long-time crush, and his mentor, who has a tendency to tiptoe over her own boundaries. But now that they’re colleagues, it might be time to redraw those bounds altogether.
We jump in where we left off last week with Jun-ho suggesting that he and Hye-jin act as a team in the new ads for the hagwon. Rather than competing with each other, he wants to increase the number of students at the academy so there’s more work to go around. He even devises a plan to focus on a particular prestigious high school, Huiwon, since Daechi Chase doesn’t normally market to the students there.
To give a little context, the hagwons operate by understanding each high school, their curriculum, and their teachers, so they can develop prep materials suited to the students at a particular high school. This means they only target certain schools and then aim to get as many students from that school at their hagwon. It also means that specific instructors at the hagwon are experts about specific high schools. This is high-stress work that also results in heavy competition.
So, when Jun-ho suggests that they target Huiwon, it means they are directly going after another hagwon that already teaches most of the students at that school. Enter the GRAY WITCH (Seo Jung-yeon, with a full head of gray hair) who directs the Choiseon Korean hagwon. She’s had a stronghold on Huiwon for years, and taking over her territory won’t be easy.
At the same time (and totally independently), the Gray Witch has decided to target Chanyeong High School — which is Hye-jin’s specialty. This is supremely worrying to the director of Daechi Chase, KIM HYUN-TAK (Kim Jong-tae), who’s trying to keep their hagwon in the black. And so, Hye-jin and Jun-ho convince him to go forward with their risky plan to steal Huiwon students from the Gray Witch.
They make some strategic moves having to do with class scheduling times, but also, to give them more of an edge, they decide to give a free preview lecture for the new Huiwon course they’re offering. The idea is that Jun-ho and Hye-jin will be “tag team teachers” — utilizing her reputation as a star instructor and his history as her prize pupil (he’s a graduate of Chanyeong, which is how Hye-jin became the go-to instructor for that school). The new ads, which feature the two of them together, just might garner them enough attention to make this scheme work.
There are a couple of complications, though. First, they decide to keep the whole thing a secret — even from their own colleagues — and when the ad comes out, there are some hurt feelings around the office. Particularly upset is the other new recruit that got hired along with Jun-ho, NAM CHUNG-MI (So Joo-yeon), who has more qualifications than Jun-ho does, but didn’t go to a prestigious school like he did. To her, it reeks of favoritism (maybe classism) and, as sweet and even-tempered as she is, she’s not going to take it sitting down.
The backstory to Chung-mi’s plan is this: last week, Hye-jin got into a tiff with a new teacher at Chanyeong, PYO SANG-SEOB (Kim Song-il), who now has it out for her. He’s changed his curriculum so that Hye-jin’s lessons no longer work for his exams (I mean, this is the level of rivalry — screw the students whose grades are wrapped up in this, right?). As it turns out, Chung-mi successfully taught Sang-seob’s students when he was at his former high school and she was at her former hagwon. And so, Chung-mi decides to step in and offer her own course to Chanyeong students — to directly compete with Hye-jin. (That’s a lot of chess pieces on the board. Everybody still with me?)
The second complication is that once the ad goes up, the Gray Witch implements her own strategy to sabotage the free lecture. In the end, all the Huiwon students attend her supplementary class — scheduled at the same time — rather than go to Daechi Chase. With an empty lecture hall, Hye-jin gets physically ill and looks like she’s about to have a breakdown. And her bosses are irate. This was a huge risk — and it failed.
Except, one student shows up. We know that this student was sent as a spy by the school (who threatened his scholarship if he didn’t go) and that’s the only reason he’s there. But no one else knows this and Jun-ho’s got a lot of heart. He wants to go forward with the lecture as planned. So what if it’s only one student? It’s still a student.
In light of his optimism, Hye-jin pulls herself together and decides she’ll be the one to give the lecture. She think back on tutoring Jun-ho and says that teaching students one-on-one is her strong suit. He’s the proof of that. And when she enters the lecture hall and hits her stride by engaging the student directly, Jun-ho is also thinking back on her as a young teacher. How energized she looked. How he couldn’t stop glancing at her. How sitting close to her was too much for him back then.
We see flashbacks of their one-on-one study time together and how he’s been flirting with her since the beginning. She seems to find it cute, hitting him when he’s messing around, both of them smiling. Their closeness in age is much more apparent here than I realized before (he’s a senior in high school and she’s in college), and they look like friends more than teacher and student. When we see Jun-ho in the present, watching Hye-jin and remembering all of this, his face is total love.
This ending scene comes after a slow-mounting buildup throughout the episode of the two getting closer as they work side-by-side. They spend late nights at the office, drive home together after work, and even text all evening from their respective homes while Hye-jin can’t contain her giggles and smiles (we don’t get to see the full conversation, but we know he’s jokingly calling her by her name, instead of teacher).
One night, when their lecture plan is still a secret, Chung-mi comes to the office after hours and our OTP shuts off all the lights in the classroom and hides in a corner together. Chung-mi stays so long that they end up sneaking out and running to the parking garage, where Jun-ho grabs Hye-jin’s hand to slow down and she pulls away nervously. He continues to joke: “It’s not like we got caught holding hands.”
But there are also rifts. Hye-jin has become all business and isn’t the teacher that Jun-ho remembers. She made him excited to learn when he was her pupil and he’s disappointed in how she works now. But she defends herself, detailing all the pressure that’s on them to do well. Still, when he sees her light up at the single-student lecture, the Hye-jin he remembers has returned.
The episode ends on a high note with the spy student going home after the lecture and texting all his classmates that he’s switching to Daechi Chase. Since he’s the top student in the class, that’s a big deal. We’ve already learned that getting high achievers to switch hagwons is tough. Since they’re already succeeding, there’s no reason to change. So, this recommendation is high praise for Jun-ho and Hye-jin, and it looks like their risky move was a success after all.
This drama is a slow mover but these episodes won me over. Once our leads started working together their dynamic felt more real to me than it did last week. Hye-jin still acts like the teacher (since she’s still the mentor, even in the job) and Jun-ho is trying to earn his place at the table as a colleague, rather than a student. And the flashbacks helped lock everything in place. They’re close in age. They’ve always worked one-on-one. And they mutually benefited each other (he got into college and she got prestige as a teacher right after her first gig). It’s no wonder they’ve had feelings brewing for so long — and no wonder they had to keep them under wraps. I’m excited to see how it plays out now that they can finally start acting on them.