Angie sends a startlingly honest bio. It echoes my own experience at East High in Denver with traditionally trained upper level kids.
Hello Everyone,
My name is Angie Dodd and I have had an ignominious beginning to what I thought was going to be a new career as a language teacher. I grew up in Roxbury, MA, which is part of Boston. I was a minority anglo kid among Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican people for a lot of my childhood. When I was 13 my family moved to Vermont and I have lived here ever since, except for studying Spanish in college and traveling in Latin America. I fell in love with farming and so my language ambitions got sidelined for many years. I was a long-term sub at the local high school back in 2005, and that’s when I discovered TPRS and took a workshop with Blaine Ray. 2 years ago I turned 40 and hurt my back and decided to pursue teaching Spanish as a career. I did student teaching, got licensed through the State peer review, covered a maternity leave for a grammar-based teacher, and spent the summer at Middlebury College studying at their language school. While there, I broke the language pledge to follow this blog and get as much TPRS training on line as I could in preparation for my new job. I got a position at a local high school and figured that my future was bright. The principal gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted with language instruction. Now, 2 months later, I have resigned from that job, fortunately with no overt hard feelings. I jumped in to the deep end of the pool and I was drowning. My classroom was chaos, but the thing that really sent me over the edge emotionally was the bitterness of the upper-level students when confronted with having to interact with me. They felt they were too smart for one-word answers, but they also refused to interact, and the more goodwill I brought, it seemed, the more they turned against me. I was not prepared for the depth of animosity and disrespect I encountered. I get it, and I don’t blame them, I really needed to approach them more carefully. But I completely lost confidence. There were a lot of beautiful things happening in my level 1 classes, but even there I felt I was drowning in the lack of discipline. I couldn’t handle the pressure and the relentlessness of the schedule, and I was beginning to lose my sanity. So here I am. I don’t know if I’ll be a teacher after all, but I’d like to stay on the blog a little longer while I try to figure it out.