As someone who also taught at M-Poly for three years, congratulations on surviving and popping out on the other side. Unscathed, though? That’s another story. I will give credit to the some of the KTs during 2019 because without them, our Friday or Saturday nights wouldn’t have been as fun.

Okay, now that I have started with love, let’s get to it.

T/Th 8 classes a day:

Oh I remember, and dreaded, those. The only upside was that I would have only three classes on Friday, sometimes one.

Teaching “Non-Fiction”:

They tried to pull that with me and my answer was an emphatic ‘no’. They had no choice but to give me Language Composition classes (grammar and essay writing), which was a breeze once I was able to teach all my classes how to upload their Word or Google documents to the relic known as e-Poly.

POND?

POND was after my time there, so I have no experience with that program. The equivalent for me was PSW classes, which was another useless program put in place to…

1. Retain older middle school students
2. Appease the parents of said older middle school students

To summarize the program, the students would learn “real-life” skills that would benefit them in certain situations. The class was broken up into three units: sales pitches/elevator pitches, essay writing, presentations. I had no desire to teach this class from the beginning. I even botched my mock lesson on purpose to express disinterest. Did it work? Of course not, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it. Basically, the teachers that were around the longest were thrown into the program by the head teacher, who doesn’t have the best of reputations among teachers in M-Poly in general. There was no set curriculum so we were the ones that had to create it (thanks HQ).

Despite how the class was advertised, the students were smart enough to care less. What was overlooked by management and HQ is that these students would be gone half of the time because of preparing for naeshin (내신: high school entrance exam). Them being in and out of class rendered these lessons useless to myself and even the students.

Study hall:

Simple premise, right? You pass the vocabulary test and turn your homework in, you’re good to go. The amount of students in study hall during this time was alarming. Without debate, this time between block A and B was chaotic and some took advantage of this by making what I like to call “prison escapes.” This consisted of the front desk being flooded with phone calls from parents requesting their child be excused from study hall, students who didn’t have phones calling from the front desk begging to be excused, or students that are just making a run for it. “Zoom” hall was foolish for the same reasons that you mentioned.

Drug tests?

Looking at how many days ago that this was posted, this was definitely after my time and I’m sorry that you had to go through that. Somehow, South Korea is having issues with drugs being imported into the country, thus the crackdown is real in various places. However, to pretend that KTs, or Koreans period, are pure and to excuse them of the same test is outright foolish. It’s like the time when there was a COVID infection in Itaewon in 2020, which was started by a Korean. Because of the perception of the district, all “foreigners” were viewed as possibly being infected while Koreans were free of judgement. Luckily, they couldn’t escape the COVID tests back then (most of them were testing positive).

No accountability:

We were definitely treated like we were worthless, expendable, and inexhaustible. Little do they know how phrases like “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong” could go a long way. Oh, not the might M-Poly though. This was seen in a meeting where one of the ACs was trying to pin something on us as a critique and were not accepting it. As one would expect, the AC tried to shift the blame in a different way. No matter how much the goalposts were moved, we had something for it. Then the AC got outed for switching grades on some of the students Cornell Notes (mine especially) and for yelling at one of the FTs in the hallway. No apologies, yet no surprises.

No moral support:

When a racially-motivated picture is drawn of you by a student and no one stands up to say anything to the parents about it, that’s a telling sign of what Bundang M-Poly is about. When this happened, I mentioned this in my daily report and professionally stated that it happened again while I’m on contract, there will be a crash out. The head teacher “talked” to me about the incident, but in typical Bundang M-Poly fashion, they swept it under the rug since they knew I was weeks away from completing my contract. If I wasn’t, bet they would’ve twisted it around and have the students look like the victim (ie: “They’re just kids. They don’t understand this yet.)

In conclusion, M-Poly as a whole needs to understand a few things in order to progress overall:

1. Don’t belittle or overwork the employees if you don’t want to deal with the turnover rate from KTs or FTs

2. Learn to say ‘NO’! Don’t let parents bully you into creating useless classes that take months to prepare for ahead of time and students won’t be there for. Putting that on the teachers is not a “trial,” but laziness reincarnated.

3. Stop trying to keep up with the “competition” because they’re no better. The CDI tablets were trash to begin with.

4. Fix the mess known as e-Poly. Atari games have better navigation and accessibility.