Did anyone get a slight stab of concern in the pit of your stomach when you read the title of this article?
Why beat yourself up if you don’t teach perfectly? I went to New Delhi to teach in the American Embassy School after my retirement to learn more about teaching from Linda Li, whom Dr. Krashen has called “the greatest language teacher in the world.”
It wasn’t that great. It was great, but it wasn’t that great.
We will perform at our jobs as well as we will perform, reflecting our own experience, training, and personalities. We’re all different. There is no best. Nobody is going to fire us unless we commit some sort of crime, since language teachers are almost impossible to find anymore.
Instead of beating ourselves up when we don’t teach a perfect class, with the kids rolling out of their desks with laughter and appreciation of how great we are, we should all question a culture that has conveyed to us that anything less than perfect means we’re lazy and not good at our jobs.
When we don’t have pin drop silence and supreme focus from our kids in class, we should question a culture that, like drug dealers, has pushed sugar and a questionable morality onto our screen-obsessed children for the past fifty years, to where if any teacher can make it through a language class unscathed emotionally they should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor.
We should question a culture that tries to convince us every day that how we perform for others is more important than what actually inspires us, and that how our kids score on tests matters more than what kind of person we are.