Last month Martin quit because he was in pain. I love the honesty. For some reason we’re not allowed to speak plainly like that, even here. Everything is supposed to be wonderful. We are happy and our kids are learning. Bullshit. The chaos is real, the leadership is in shambles, and language teaching is in deep, authentic change and we may be in the worst part now.
So what Martin says about the pain of teaching a language is just so normal and healthy to express. I don’t know about Germany, but many in our PLC and everywhere else are drowning in many new insane initiatives in our buildings, initiatives that cannot possibly be completed by anything but some kind of robotic super teacher.
Martin I thought about it and I do believe that yours was the right response to all the stress you were feeling. I wonder how much of what was causing you stress were the administrators. Probably not much because you work in a Waldorf school and they want what is best for the kids, right? In regular schools many of us on a daily basis have to deal with weak and uninspired politician types who are not really educators in the true sense of wanting what is best for the kids.
Administrators these days in regular schools are a bunch of misinformed (on languages) semi-fools who have nothing better to do than intimidate and judge the real natural teachers among us who may have made the critical error of believing them and their grasping for power.
A paranoid person would say that they are doing it on purpose to wreck public education by getting rid of bright and inspired teachers. That is the folly of young teachers in education – they believe that all of their superiors know something, when only a few do. Most don’t. Most don’t know about what we do. Don’t listen to them. Don’t believe them.