Now that I am retired and trying to grasp what that means, I see that the feeling of being under water and not being able to get anything done is just inherent to our culture of education in the U.S.
In schools, there is a feeling of being in a constant state of failure. At least, this has been true of my own career, throughout. It seemed as if chaos was in control of our schools. I could never keep up, I could never just relax without feeling as if I was forgetting something important, and about to screw up on something with some administrator or in some class.
I thought it was because of me, that I was really just not cut out to be a teacher. I always thought that some of my colleagues, especially those who always relied on prescribed language learning connected to a textbook, were somehow better than me, since my teaching, even when I was an AP teacher, was never connected to anything prescribed. I just always thought, “I can’t do that! I can’t teach like that!”
Now, I see plainly that I was never wrong. I see that the idea around me of what good language teaching consisted of was wrong. I see that, unbeknownst to them, bless their hearts, those “effective” teachers who always seemed to be strutting around putting out a vibe that they were superior teachers to everyone else in the building, were actually teaching in a very ineffective way. I should have suspected that, because their gains were always so bad.
I understand now why many of the AP language teachers with whom I worked seemed to cling desperately to their status as an AP teacher, for unknown reasons, because they looked so haggard. Their faces revealed everything. It was like they were sending out the message, “Look at me! Look at how much I am suffering to get this important work done!” But all they were doing was burning themselves out. I felt that a lot of those AP language teachers were just crying inside to be accepted as teachers of great merit.
Now that I am retired, I see more clearly. I see that I was never wrong all those years. This is a deep realization for me, a very deep realization. I should have trusted my gut more that every single one of those textbook teachers was really out of touch professionally.
They seemed so confident that they were right, and they had Helena Curtain backing them up, although Helena has now been debunked by many in the profession, by those of us who see another way to do things than teach using a textbook (see Helena Curtain category on this page for more on that topic). I guess Helena and Mimi and those corporate trainers were confident in their cause, and no blame, but their time is over.
I just need to state my truth here as I wrap up my career that I can now see that over all those years, when I thought I was wrong and all the language teachers around me were just better, I wasn’t wrong. How freeing it is for me to say that.
I can now embrace the frightened teacher I once was, the guy who never trusted those textbook teachers as far as I could throw them, the guy who wanted to throttle them for making kids feel so stupid about their ability to learn a language, for failing those suffering kids when it was they who were messing up. There were just so many of them, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t hurting kids.
It would be easy to deeply regret all those 24 years of intense frustration and professional sadness before I finally came in contact with my mentor Susan Gross in 2001 . It would be easy to wish that those years had never happened. But they were meant to be, and they prepared me to accept Krashen’s ideas and apply them aggressively to my teaching in a way that may not have happened if I had heard of Krashen earlier in my career. Those 24 years prepared the ground for real understanding.
I can’t wish away the past, but I can embrace the future with knees firmly on the ground in thanks for having been able to turn it all around, in thanks for Susie and Blaine and Krashen and the other leaders who saved my ass from a miserable final stretch in my career these past thirteen years. These past thirteen years haven’t been easy by any account, but they have at least been real, they have been exhilarating, and they have helped others. That is what I wanted. Thank you again, God.