A repost from a few years ago:
I went over to Lincoln High, from which I just retired, on a bike ride two days. A new principal and a new assistant principal were there. I felt the management style. I got the vibe. It was old style. You know what I mean by old style. Where you don’t feel good about yourself. Where you have to pass some kind of test before they accept you. Congeniality vs. Collegiality.
It made me think back on my career as having been not just about my passion for language education, for doing the right thing for children, but also as having been about the fruitless wanting to share that passion with the administrators in the six buildings I worked in during my career, but failing. Anyone who has felt as if they were not heard by someone in life knows what I mean by that.
My job description was not only that I had to do all I could to make sure I reached my students in the real way but also secondly to deal with the power plays and top down “I’m looking at you, you better work hard and do a good job!” vibe I got from every single administrator I ever worked under, with no exception. I get that they also were being looked at in the same way by their own superiors, and that that is how the game is played, but why? When are we going to lose that model in favor of one based in unconditional positive regard and professional respect for each other?
I can’t say I worked for those people – I worked in spite of them. I worked for the kids in spite of all the useless, incredibly frustrating, ego based meetings and skewed views about what teaching languages even means, should look like.
The marked inability of all those nowhere administrators to see what was really happening in my classroom erupted as a kind of daily sadness for me professionally. Whenever I walked into the building to work another day, there was this sadness about not being on the same page with all those people, even my students. Brainwashed is not too strong a word to describe the mindset that those kids brought into my classroom on a daily basis.
The students seemed to have a pre-formed opinion about how they were supposed to be taught, and it didn’t include CI in a lot of cases. And then there was this pockmarked, dull and empty leadership approach by the administrators that, when applied to what I was doing with CI, just didn’t jive with the research.