Here is a lengthy letter of mental support I sent out to a teacher who is doubting himself. It was a comment but I made it into an article. It’s a long pep talk at the end of the first quarter of this year’s game, when the weather is starting to turn and the October Collapse has had its way with some of us:
And I would add that we tend to overthink unnecessarily sometimes. We are in a very judgmental situation in schools. Judgment everywhere. Kids and admins and many parents are out of control with power over teachers. We’re pincushions for the needles of just about every unhappy admin out there, who gets some kind of weird power over us that they neither have earned nor deserve. We get to thinking stuff about our work that doesn’t make any sense. Just keep stayin’ with it. Think about your salary and then that really puts it in perspective. Think about how our kids don’t know enough to care and are in react mode in every one of their classes, have lost the will to learn from joy because they themselves are targets of teachers and parents, and you can see the impossibility of our situation. We want them to learn with joy and they don’t know what that means because they have never seen it. We cannot grow into the warriors whom we must become unless we see how completely broken the system in our nation is right now. A lot of what you are feeling is the imploding sound of a system around us, and, true to form, the system is programmed to make us think that we are the ones who are screwing up. We’re not. We’re just doing our best. Everybody needs to relax on that point. Or we really will think that we can be wrong and bad at this work, and each time we doubt striking out in a new career direction incorporating comprehensible input into this work of teaching a language – it can be such a beautiful thing – each time we doubt ourselves in those little moments in class, we prolong the inevitable crashing down of the old building. We prolong it because we fail to bring the change the overall system is now screaming for. The old way has to fall, it is falling, it is about to hit the ground, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Just don’t think it’s you. You represent the new and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, when there is such chaos and ignorance in just about every falling building. Those people around us are scared. They are witnessing the end of their dream about themselves as effective teachers. The kids are scared, the admins have no idea, as a general rule, of what is going on, the parents are out of the loop, and our traditional colleagues, raised to teach using lengthy explanations in English and having mistakenly chosen this profession because they were good at grammar, with no talent for CI, are freaked every time they walk down the hallway and hear even one kid enjoying our CI based class. Because they don’t know how to do that, they miss the entire point about what Krashen has really brought to the table (the end of the old way) and then we have the kinds of doubts you express above, and we waver on this thing. Wouldn’t you want to attack that upstart down the hallway who is a threat to your job? Doesn’t the attack from that sad colleague look real? It isn’t real. No. Stop fearing. Rebuke the idea that you are wrong when it crawls into your head during a lesson. You will get better at this. You will. It will take time. You are running at full speed down the CI runway trying to get your CI plane up in the air. Running on your legs. But the CI wings will bring lift off, unexpectedly in some class when you are trying a story or something. And then with that liftoff you won’t have to run so damn hard on your legs. You will be lifted off the ground into an entirely new dispensation of what teaching even is. You will feel the joy of a good story. Your initial efforts to become airborne with CI will finally work and you will know something. Just don’t break. Fly your freak flag as you gather altitude. We can do this. We will do this. A future generation of bored kids is at stake. Gear up. Fly high.