I’ve given up hope. Our profession is broken and useless. It pretty much always has been. That is my conclusion after being in the field for 45 years.
If you disagree with this statement, if you feel that your life as a teacher has been a meaningful series of positive contacts with dedicated colleagues and happy students and parents, with admins who just love you, then stop reading. My statement doesn’t apply to you.
I taught my first class in 1976 – I remember every detail of the weather that day, a hot August day in a private school built in the middle of a vast soybean farm, and I remember making eye contact with the first of thousands of students I would teach in my career. In that moment I remember hopefully thinking that Jay (the student’s name) was interested in what I had to teach him, that he wanted to learn French.
He probably did, he may have, I don’t know. He had his student face on. Now I know, 35,000 classes later, that I didn’t teach him much French that year because I used worksheets and the textbook in the same way I had been taught growing up.
Actually, I would not teach much French to any of my students for the next 24 years in Columbia, Myrtle Beach and Charleston, SC. I would only reach a very few kids, favoring them, ignoring the vast army of those who didn’t count so much. The few kids I reached became experts in French grammar, each year winning the top ten or so places in the National French Exam in South Carolina, fulfilling my raging need for approval, but I literally did not attempt to actually communicate in the TL with my students, not once, not really. I didn’t know that that was part of the deal!
What was a very long history of frustration and sometimes clinical depression – and I don’t use that term lightly – as a French teacher for all those many years has been the subject of many posts here over the years. Then one day in 2001 I heard about CI and Blaine and Susan Gross and comprehensible input based language instruction, but CI didn’t work for me either, in spite of what I can authentically call a herculean effort on my part over the past 20 years.
Even writing books about CI in an attempt to understand it didn’t help. Now it’s 2021 and I finally have an anchor for my work. What is that anchor? It is the BLM movement. Again, if all this doesn’t make much sense to y0u, as they say in the TikTok community, scroll on.