What we do is a mental and emotional exercise in realizing that our worth does not and never has and never will come from teenagers who, for the most part, don’t value our work at all. They don’t.
And yet we spend years trying to get them to not only value our work, but us as people, and everything about the subject we teach them as well.
This can lead to great stress, as we wonder all the time “Why don’t they like me?” and “Why don’t they work harder?” and “I wish they would pay attention to me in class more!” and “Why don’t they pay more attention in my class?”
They won’t. And it’s not because they don’t like us or because we don’t know what we are doing and are bad teachers. If we are even TRYING with comprehensible input then we are good teachers.
If we are to continue in this profession, we have to realize that teens are just like that and it has little to do with us. It’s how they are wired. Deal with that fact.
How absolutely crazy it is for us to take this on – trying to get a group of kids to be in love with our classes all the time! It is never going to work. If we don’t get how crazy it is to expect them to stand up and cheer about how great our instruction is, we won’t last long. We won’t.
Stop seeking approval from teenagers. Do your job. Enforce the Classroom Rules. Enforce the jGR honestly and with high integrity and do not lie to the kids about their classroom performance. Deliver comprehensible input. Grade them in a simple way.
Then relax. Go home with no work. Enjoy yourself. Ease off the gas pedal, everybody. We teach teenagers and their iphones are a heck of a lot more interesting to them than we and our subject matter are. Bless their hearts for that! They are normal kids.
And let us not even mention how we try so hard to get the approval of administrators who just don’t get what we do. That’s pretty dumb too. That’s real dumb.