Administrators play a big role in our job security, and yet they come and go in and out of our buildings with such frequency, sometimes yearly or even less, that no sooner does one leave than another arrives. Then we have to put the dog-and-pony show on again for the new one, and stuff our real feelings about not having a good working relationship with someone so important in our professional life. It hurts us because a person who should be helping us is hurting us, albeit unknowingly.
Administrators very rarely understand comprehensible input. I met one in St. Louis, Jeff Tamaroff, who does. Those teachers in his district are lucky, but admins like Jeff occur maybe 1 out of 1000. One of the most negative developments in the history of education is the ignorance of administrators about how people acquire languages. They end up throwing evaluation models at us that don’t make sense in terms of the research, models that actually support the fools (no blame, but they are fools) teaching in the rooms next to us. This cause us to suffer and then when that happens unnecessary conflicts arise and then we get stressed even more.
What to do? Let them walk all over us? I defend the right of people in any profession to choose how they do their work, but not at the expense of children. That is our area of specialty – what is best for children in a foreign language classroom. So how to deal with these uninformed administrators?