With the proliferation of all the new CI sites, there must be hundreds of them by now, our little group gets to hide even better than before, when it was only one of about two or three such sites, 5 years ago or so.
Before, when the PLC started as my personal blog about 15 years ago, it was public and had a wide readership. The opinions expressed here were often wonderful, and very open, but over time some of our discussions became negative and attacking as various people starting vying for intellectual control of the blog. It often got ugly, so I made this into a private membership space. Even after it became private I had to kick some people off because they were trying to push their agendas too hard here.
The effect of it becoming a private space was fresh air and honesty and some incredibly honest and soul-baring discussions. A lot of teachers made it through some very tough times emotionally with the help of the insights offered here by the great group of professionals that make up our PLC. That is the best thing that this blog has done: it provided a safe place to talk about things that people don’t normally talk about online.
So I see two points of focus for us now, since so many other sites are covering a lot of things that we used to. Now we can focus on: (1) strategies, as always, and (2) our mental health. To be blunt, I have always wanted this space to be one where teachers who felt like it could just come and speak honestly about the pain of this work trying to get CI to work for us.
The mental suffering is considerable and has broken more than one teacher. It broke me many times. It is because I am no expert like the others. I’m just a teacher. Implementing CI in our classrooms has brought a kind of mental stress to me that has been unbelievable. It has seared my brain caused me to wake up at night far too many times, worrying about some school-related problem or another, or wondering if I was even good enough – I have always wondered if I was good enough – and has worn me out like few other professions might have done.
So my thought is that we can do here what we can’t do on FB – we can get deeper into what we are really experiencing during these tough times or transformation and renewal on behalf of and for the kids. That is my idea for where this site should go in the future.
I want us to experience a high degree of emotional honesty when we share our ideas together here. People whose voices typify what I want here are Jen Schongalla, Steven Ordiano, Sean Lawler, etc. You know who they are. They make the site real. They don’t bullshit around.
We no longer need to have the arguments we used to have about the research, all those unnecessary mental gyrations and incessant posturing that we see on so many sites, about how kids learn languages, and even about non-targeted vs. targeted instruction, so based in ego and a lack of professional respect and courtesy. We need to talk about our emotional and mental health as we push the boulder up the mountain.
Let’s just think of our PLC now, in these new times, as being a place where we can of course talk about strategies and putting them into our instruction, of course, but mainly I want this to be a place to which we can go when the weight of the school buildings bears down on our minds and hearts and all those weird colleagues make us think that we are crazy and sometimes not want to get out of bed in the morning.
I repeatedly stated over the summer to the groups that Tina and I were working with that we should put our own personal mental health over all other aspects of this incredible work we are doing – this life changing work. My mental health is good now since I am no longer teaching. But I remember the pain, It is a kind of pain that is due very often not only to some administrator or parent or kid but also has come online in jabs since I went to non-targeted work. I just want to feel safe and not alone.
So send your successes and failures to my email address at benslavic at yahoo dot com and I will post them as generic and anonymous. Or you can just pick any open comment field and write stuff about what is going on with you there. That’s where I want this site go, to the mental health piece. We can’t do this work alone. It’s too hard. Honestly, where else are we going to talk about what this work can do to a person’s mental health?