The way I figure it is that when we don’t include and encourage every single student, regardless of race or background, we will end up hating our jobs while at the same time trashing a lot of kids’ belief in their ability to learn a language, and that in exchange for a small monthly paycheck, hard hours, a lot of frustration topped off with semi-shitty health benefits and astoundingly bad proficiency gains by most of our students, given the wonderful ability levels that the research has identified in them, but that we just don’t see, bless our traditional hearts.
Perhaps it is the ubiquitous and invisible favoring of white, privileged kids that causes language teachers to suffer so much in our field. Too much? But think about it. It’s a lot like being in a rock band where only a few people in the audience listen. How, indeed, can we expect to succeed at our jobs when most of our students don’t really want to be there, are not actually engaged in our classes?
We have traditionally blamed the students, but I think it has become fairly apparent now that it’s us. To put it simply, our instruction is boring and our awareness of what our kids are actually experiencing in our classrooms is limited. We don’t believe in them. We blame them when it’s all about us. We might want to consider learning how to teach in a way that actually speaks to our students. Too much? Not for me. I’ve read the research far too much to come away from it thinking that my students are stupid except for the white privileged ones who make their livings on memorizing things in their classes, which may be fine in other subjects but not in ours.
Not too much for me. In all the time I’ve been teaching, my heart was weeping big crocky tears in an ardent wish to reach and engage them, those young men and women whose hearts – they as well – were searching for a teacher whose heart might be open to them, a teacher who considered them more important than their ability to conjugate verbs. After all, what is the standard? Oh yeah, communication. Doesn’t that involve the heart quality?
Teaching a language using the old way is like trying to get a choral group to sing beautifully together with 80% of the singers not singing, 15% of them singing, but without any effort or heart, and only 5% singing well from their heart, and those few drowning out, silencing, the 95% with what is truly some shitty singing to have to listen to every day. If it were like that for choral directors, there wouldn’t be any choral directors, but when it applies to language teachers, we stay in our jobs in spite of such a serious level of what can really only be described as a form of frustrating insanity based on lack of pedagogical imagination on our parts.
In this way, we have painted ourselves into a corner in our profession. Our mental health these days for many of us has hit rock bottom.
Here’s my point: we can change it. But in order to do so, we have to not only learn how to teach using CI in an effective way, a way that really does reach out and engage the kids and yes in an online setting. But we also have to address the unconscious biases and racism that have been hammered into us when we were growing up that caused our hearts to close off to ALL of our students. (Again, no blame….)
Including everyone in our classroom instruction via a combination of CI – and now as I am starting to rip the wool from my eyes, the principles of BLM – is where the hope I have left for my profession lies.
So I now see that CI and the BLM movement are the only pedagogies/strategies, when mixed together, that can bring about reaching our students in real ways. This applies to teachers who work in both urban and suburban schools. It applies to all teachers in the same way that BLM applies to all of us. Too much? Go scroll somewhere else. I mean this and I want to find and work with teachers who want to teach from their hearts as well.
45 years in a profession and suddenly 8 minutes, and 46 seconds on May 25th last summer in Minneapolis shock me into rethinking everything I ever thought about teaching. Those 8 and 3/4 minutes have solidly convinced me – without a doubt – that if we can’t find a way to teach languages in a way that reaches all the students in our classrooms, we will fail in our endeavors to teach using CI.
Education is a social justice issue….
- (Kareem Abdul Jabbar in a an interview with MSNBC’s Alex Witt on her show on January 31st, 2021)