I’m on a roll with the prayers:
Dear God –
Please help us understand that teaching is not a competition, and that whether or not our students achieve high test scores does not reflect on our value and our worth as teachers.
Help us keep in mind that, seen through Your eyes (the only eyes that count), our real value has little to do with what we achieve as teachers, but rather lies firmly in our just being there with our students in a loving way no matter what we achieve together.
We ask you, the Eternal Jokester, this question – who’s kidding whom, right? The joke being that we can’t teach our students a language because of the massive amount of time required compared to the amount of actual classroom time we have. Help us always remember that we can’t even scratch the surface toward fluency.
You have made us teachers for reasons that only You know. You put each one of us in that particular classroom in that particular building not to get test scores (the Big Lie!) but rather to give our students something to hang onto in life, something that might make them feel happier than they would have been otherwise had they never taken our class.
We have spent so many years trying to become good language teachers and also so much time – some of it on our knees in despair – asking you why you have put us in this crazy profession where real tangible results are almost impossible to achieve.
As a result of all that time spent trying but not seeing any real results, we have come to learn, the hard way, that this lack of tangible results is not due to any fault or weakness in ourselves, and we have concluded, finally, that the only thing that counts in our profession is that we try to give our students hope in life and in themselves by making their experience in our classrooms positive ones.
Let us always remember that our real job is to teach our students in a way that makes them – all of them – feel that they are talented at languages – because they are, as we finally now know from the research. ‘
But we can only do that if we remember who our real boss is – You – the one we really work for. Help us make our students realize that we don’t have the time we need for them to speak and write at anything more than a very rudimentary level. Help us to remember to explain all this to them so that they don’t emerge from our instruction feeling like they are incompetent at languages.
Please guide our steps therefore to teach for our students’ overall good as human beings, in order to give them hope in life, via those fantastic things that you invented, so many of them, each one so beautiful, those pearls, those things that we love so much, Your miracle creation, languages.
Please help us to realize that teaching a language is about helping kids grow up, and that the test scores obsession is aberrational and temporary, one that has mushroomed into a tremendous wonky-ass distraction from our real work of building up kids. Help us always remember that the obsession with testing is nothing more than a deleterious factor that is a reflection of a sick society, and one that is unimportant in relation to our real role in the classroom, that of just helping kids grow up.
If we can keep all this in mind, and not buy into the testing culture, and also not succumb to the glitter of being known as a wonderful teacher in our buildings, which makes us work too hard, then we will never lose our jobs.
Why? It is because any real administrator will always know that our true value to the school lies in service to those particular children who are so easily damaged, and have been mentally and emotionally manhandled by too many people who call themselves teachers but are really not. Help us become forces in our building to keep that from happening, so that our students can through their lives with confidence because of the positive comprehensible input experiences they had in our classroom.
Help us always remember that no language teacher has ever been let go because of test scores, and certainly not in our field of language instruction where even really bad teachers are so hard to find.
Help us trust in You, and guide us to teach in ways that result in the kinds of thoughts expressed above.
Help us remember what counts, oh God. A lot of knees are just about on the ground now, Lord. So now it’s our chance to make a real change for ourselves and our students. In Your name we pray.