Mental Health

This is a response to a teacher who is at his wit’s end about uninformed administrators requiring him to do things in his classroom that don’t make sense in terms of the research:
Well then if this problem will lead to you just surrendering and being yourself, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Surrendering, in my view, is really all we can do. There is no administrator, and there are no right people. There is just us as we try to do an impossible job in a temporary time of imbalance in the world that only seems as if it will never end. Things will get better.
Why is ours an impossible job? Because in my opinion there are just too many people these days who claim that they are right. No one is right, and everyone is right. We need to adjust to these people and not just tolerate them with low grade fear and loathing. We must regard them with love and openness.
Inayat Kahn, the sixth plane Sufi master in the Chisti lineage who has influenced many of my ideas on education, defines true spirituality as “right adjustment to other persons”. He is buried in Delhi near where I used to live, where Dana lives now.
Openness, tolerance, love, lack of judgement. We can do it. We can’t miss the opportunity to stand strong in our beliefs and yet live happily in the difficult worlds that admins inhabit.
Some people see us, with our passionate views on non-targeted comprehensible input, as thinking that great academic gains will come from the hard work we are doing in changing the way we teach. They will, but as I see it that is not the real goal.
For many of us, instead of placing our eyes being on greater academic gains, we see non-targeted instruction as a road to something far greater in our classrooms – peace. Peace for us, and peace for our students. Isn’t that why we really do this work?
Just know that that administrator who has attacked you cannot bring you down unless you allow it. There is absolutely no substance to those criticisms and lame suggestions, because they are not based in the research. I find each one of them comical, really. You have real substance in your teaching. I have seen it. It is because there is real substance in you. What we need now is exactly how I made it through the last ten years of my career: supreme acceptance. There is no other way.
Or change schools? Find a school where admins get it? Failing that, pry your heart open every day just as you have been for so long with such bravery. Admins come and go every few years. Wait it out.