A repost from 2011:
This is just a standard rant. I’m due for one and here it is:
We are already there. What we did, how we did our jobs today, and how it adds to our stature is not what determines whether we will be successful or not as teachers. We are successful because we dare do a job and challenge a way of thinking that must be challenged now because it is so set in concrete, never a good think in education.
It’s time to get that only if we come from a place of joy and allow our classes to be spontaneous expressions of language in a fun environment. Look at little children. They have a natural propensity for joy. They don’t care what others think and we can’t either because at the root of what we do is play.
Heeding the opinions of others is not the way to do this. But, these days more than ever, we get very clear signals of what others are thinking and of how we are supposed to behave. This is the worst aspect of the criticism we get from traditional teachers, who don’t even understand what we do. They send us very clear signals, in the invisible world usually, that if we don’t do as they do, then things won’t be all right for us.
However, things are all right for us because we have vision. The same district leaders who say that their district is the district of reform are the same ones who make it very difficult for people with vision. Who are we kidding? This society makes it very difficult for anyone to disagree at core levels.
And yet disagreement, as we experience it with our traditional colleagues, is what happens when we follow the way our heart sees it. When we see it the way our heart sees it, that way that resonates through every fiber in our bodies, then we are revolutionaries, because we are bringing change to language teaching at the very deepest level.
But how can we do that if we don’t follow our own vision in our classrooms. This goes back to my point made in my last post here that it is worthless to learn the skills of CI unless we are willing to be free in our delivery of same. We have to be able to think that we are completely o.k. in what we are doing to have the audacity to speak our truth in these hostile buildings we are in now.
That is almost impossible to do when so many of our colleagues don’t share our vision. Their implied threat to us is that if we aren’t careful and if we stick to our vision, then they won’t love and approve of us and our jobs may be in jeapordy. This is their message. So I suggest that we just love ourselves and follow our revolutionary vision even if they don’t love us.
Do we really want to be torn between how we see it, how are heart sees it, and how others see our vision? So, unless we have the faith to teach as our heart sees it, to live that life of spontaneous joy in our classrooms, and are not working as teachers merely to earn a living, but to find joy in our work, then who is going to do this for us?
We must follow our heart’s vision, and we must not allow anything resembling an affective filter to invade our minds while we are teaching (it cannot invade our hearts). Together we can replace the shabby smallness that has described our profession until now. We can’t be afraid.
This is the message of the movie Ground Hog Day, is it not? We are going to have to keep waking up and going to work just like Bill Murray until we can go into our classes with open heart and no fear and to look for and to allow to emerge joy and spontaneity. The method is completely set up for this, it allows it. It’s an opportunity for real growth. We don’t have to fake it anymore.
O.K. rant over.