Yes. For most of my career, I can say that I, as a teacher, was more focused on myself and getting my own emotional needs met through teaching than trying to actually increase the acquisition of my students. It was all about me. I thought that I wanted to help my students learn French, but really I just needed approval. No wonder I hated teaching with such a passion – I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Maybe some people can relate.
I started out at the very beginning of my career in 1977 – 43 years ago – thinking that I would be able to share my deep love of French, its culture, its poetry, and all those things. That wish, that desire to uplift my students and myself via the greatness of France and its culture, along with God’s personal protection, got me through my twenties and those early crazy-as-shit days, but there was always that fake mission statement lurking in the back of my mind, that need for approval that I mentioned in the first of these posts yesterday.
I just wanted to have a job working with something I really love, and if it meant putting up with a bunch of spoiled and disinterest selfish and entitled little rich kids (my first job in 1977 was at Heathwood Hall Episcopal in Columbia, SC.), then I guess they were part of the professional package I had set up for myself when deciding to become a teacher, and my mission statement didn’t mean much, so each year at those back-to-school meetings I rubber stamped the fake mission statements we submitted to the admins, who never read them anyway, and my mission statement each year continued to be a lie.
Why? I was because I found out very quickly after teaching my first class in 1977 – it was a very rude awakening – that because my students really didn’t care about French that much, they just needed the AP credit, nor did they share my passion for it, the entire career I had chosen was, seen in the light of the orange text above, pretty much nothing more than a lie.
(à suivre)
