Sunday nights after dinner during the school year used to be emotionally very difficult for me. I made this prayer to God one time and it helped. I reprint it here periodically:
Dearest God,
Your teachers down here are hurting. We know you know that. We just need to say it.
It seems like something has happened in education in general and we definitely know that something is happening in our field of foreign language education and we’re scared.
We’re excited, but we’re scared.
We’re not just scared. We’re tired. It just seems like there is lots of darkness in our school buildings. Not physical darkness. Your sun shines on every day in our students eyes, giving us hope like it always has. Of course that is true.
It’s some other kind of building darkness. It’s kind of a darkness based in fear. Some of us are afraid in our classrooms when we go in to teach – some kid, or two of them, or a self-absorbed administrator, might say or do something that hurts us, that hurts others, that derails our work, that makes us crazy.
Many of us became language teachers because, ironically, we saw it as a profession in which we could enjoy ourselves and provide for our families. Is not language beautiful? How can anything you made not be beautiful?
Languages are so beautiful, and you made up so many of them, all of them like beads on the string of a glorious and shiny necklace that you made as a special gift for us when you made the world to keep things interesting, just like you made all of us different for the same reason. Languages are some of your best work! I’m a big admirer!
Of course languages are beautiful. But, back to the point of this conversation with you, teaching some of those kids is not beautiful. This new way is hard and confusing and kind of scary, to tell the truth.
Comprehensible input has been a pain. It’s been a kind of wild game of tug-of-war between us and our kids and between us and our colleagues and the kids’ parents and a whole bunch of people who very frustratingly to us don’t know what we know.
It’s really been more than a game. It’s been kind of like a war, not like a game of tug-of-war. How a game of tug-of-war could become a war inside a school building, only you know. Only you know how it got this way. But get this way it did! What should we do?
Before it pleased you to show us how to teach a language using comprehensible input, it was really bad, but it kind of seemed all right. That was because the students from families with money memorized what they were supposed to, and those without the money just didn’t get into our classes, and it was all right at the time.
We didn’t think then about the equity piece. We weren’t aware. At least we had a job. We weren’t really thinking about what our country claims to be one of its core principles. We taught the few.
But now it’s pretty clear that you want this all to change for the kids. You want all of your children to be able to climb up onto your divine knees and reach up and grab that beautiful necklace and put it in their little hands and stare at the beautiful jewels on there and see all that light reflecting through it, all that light that there is in language, all that poetry, all that dance, all that love, all that human sharing.
You know all this, we just need to say it out loud here, to remind ourselves of things you never forget because you invented them.
The model for our work was always there – your Madonna and Child but we missed it and put this work, this crazy work we all do for you, up in our heads and we tried to teach your jewel-gifts, your languages, by making our kids think about it and that didn’t work and now we have comprehensible input and thanks for that but it doesn’t seem to be working for a lot of us and hence this supplication, this prayer, this need to just talk to you about it, to lay it all out, to tell you that some of us are really hurting, if for no other reason than just to say it.
So many of us are trying so hard to reach a lot of kids with our stories. We like the stories! The kids like them, pretty much. They work. Thank you. But they make a lot of us nervous, too. Just sayin’. Too often, that dang darkness creeps in.
Many of us have a fear of teaching this way, and it is very warranted, and then there is the classroom management issue, and the assessment insanity. First of all, years ago, all this crept in a little. Now it’s creeping in a lot to many of us.
The building darkness. It’s just sitting there, taking up more and more of our classrooms, it seems, each day, getting bigger each day, sitting there being ugly. It’s not the kids! They aren’t ugly and dark. But something is going on that makes it really hard for us to reach them. There is a wedge between us and your joy in our classrooms. It hurts so much.
And we keep trying to figure it out, because we know it’s the way forward professionally. So here we are just laying it all at your feet because we don’t know what else to do.
Oh, please help us Lord. We are scared and it’s dark and we are hurting and something has to change in our profession. We look around the battlefield and so many of us have taken big hits, have fallen, or are about to.
Our side, the language teaching profession, is down. We are led by prideful fools who place money and prestige in front of what is best for the kids. We are divided amongst ourselves. Enemies seem to be everywhere – ignorant administrators and willful students and envious colleagues and willful experts who lie.
Some of us are lying wounded with varying degrees of injuries, the mental kind of injuries that take so long to heal. It’s hard to get up and go to work when our minds don’t work as well as they used to.
Let your will be done in this and all things. Let us remember to trust in you. Just trust in you and things will be all right. OK we’ll do it! We have no other choice. Thanks for the reminder. We’ll just do that. No big solution here. Just a reminder that you’ve got everything under control.
It feels a little lighter now. Maybe we can really do it. Not win. All that is up to you. The outcome of every battle is up to you. But maybe we can just go back in there tomorrow and do our best for you. We know that that is all you are asking, but we just needed to be reminded of it.
It’s like the end of a sporting contest and we are down and beat up and hurting, lying in the mud, but not giving up hope, not giving in to despair. We can do that. But you have to help us. Maybe that’s what this prayer is about. Actually, that IS what this prayer is all about. Just help us. I know you can’t NOT help us as that is one aspect of your divinity, but we just needed to ask you again. We forget….
We started this prayer asking you to show us a possible way out of the darkness of what is going on in our classrooms, and now, having prayed to you, we see that perhaps what we need isn’t a way out but just the courage to stay in and fight, and most importantly, to trust that we are here doing this work – work that you have made clear is no game for the weak or faint-hearted – for a very good reason you know and we don’t have to know what it is.
So thank you for renewing our courage this evening, Lord. Thank you for reminding us to just put our trust in you each day and get up and brush off the wounds of the previous day and go to work.
Trusting in you is the motto of our country, after all. Thanks for the reminder! Thanks for helping us back this fear up and see it for what it is – nothing! Thank you for picking us up and brushing us off through the miracle of sleep, this night and every night this coming academic year so we can rest well each night ready to do your work the best we can the next day!
Please help us sleep well each night in 2020 so that we can be nice and rested for your little ones. Thank you for cleaning us up good so we can look good in our shiny CI language uniforms that you gave us that we love so much that we made our career out of that CI cloth you gave us.
We can continue to do our best for you. We can. But only with your divine guidance and help and by our remembering to talk to you occasionally like this. Remind us to do so often! And thanks for listening. It’s all about listening! You, of course, are the model for that! Who listens better than you? Who wants to help us more than you?
You will help us. We know it. It’s not about how good we are at CI. It’s not about how well we manage our classrooms. It’s about showing up for work and trying. Help us remember that this year. Your reminders aren’t always pleasant, but they come from you so how could they not be for our highest good overall?
Thank you, Friend. Guide as and protect us in 2020.
Amen