I’ve always been cautious in the use of the word should. If we tell a student, in our capacity as a teacher, that they should be able to do something, it implies that they won’t or can’t or that somehow this thing that they are supposed to be able to do is not a natural and joyful thing and frought with the need for effort. This is just my own interpretation of the word. I don’t like the word should.
The word is all over the place in schools. As teachers, we not only tell our students that they should pay attention in class, and if they listen to us and do what we tell them, they should be able to meet a number of benchmarks that mark progress in the acquisition of a language, and thus they should be able to get the grades they should want.
We, likewise, are also told by our superiors that if we do certain things correctly that we should be able to:
- implement a way of teaching languages that is vastly different from anything that has come before it in the history of language acquisition, a way of teaching that is intensely difficult in the way that riding a bike is intensely difficult in the beginning stages of learning how to do it.
- do so in a setting that is far from the culture and language being studied, in what amounts to a huge box which sometimes has windows.
- keep our students in restraining devices inside the box and have a thought-out plan to control the flow of kids in and out of the room if they have to go to the bathroom or for other reasons, while at the same time keeping a creative and interesting lesson going, and all this even if the kids’ moods are being controlled by drugs, if they are depressed, if they honestly don’t think that they want to learn what we teach, etc.
- have a thought-out and effective policy about cell phones in this already unnatural setting, a setting in which our lone positive and cheerful voice becomes the sole wall separating us from possible chaos in what can be and is often, let’s admit it, full of so many depressed teenagers that it makes our job seem completely impossible at times.
- use computers to teach languages, because it seems like it makes sense, even if it really doesn’t.
- come up with a fair and intellectually honest way of assessing the kids in the class, even though our subject matter – languages – is an extremely difficult thing to assess via testing. (Rather, we know that a person can understand a language when they can understand it and that they can read it when they can read it, etc. since such skills cannot be quantified, but we should be able to do quantify them nonetheless because our job demands it.)
- deal with increasingly large, some would say impossibly large, groups of students.
Those and many other expectations have been placed before us this year as the screws continue to turn down with more and more pressure on the American system of education. Using comprehensible input to teach a language, restraining kids inside desks and inside rooms for long periods of time (unnatural for kids who want to interact with the world around them) , dealing with a problem that cannot be solved in the cell phone issue, using technology even though we teach languages and robots don’t converse, grading kids in real ways that are based on actual human interaction and not fake (memorized) work, handling numbers of students that defy all research about what can actually be handled in a classroom, this seems to be the fate of many of us this year.
What can we do? The Zen part of the answer is nothing. These problems have been handed to foreign language teachers in the United States by the people who run schools, by the system, and there is really nothing to be done about it if we want our jobs. The most sensible people would quit if they could afford it, realizing that what is being asked of teachers is now impossible and could easily blast away good teachers from our national teaching core at the rate of about one hundred per day, as a minimum number.
Now, we could try to fix those problems of bathroom passes, of cell phones, of creating seating charts that actually work, of the use of technology, of assessment, and of stupidly large class sizes because we are great teachers (everybody knows that the faculty of our school is the best in town because our principal told us and the superintendent told him) and, if we work hard enough and think hard enough, we could come up with answers, which is what we should do, solve those problems ourselves, as if they have real answers.
But the problems of cell phones, computers, bathroom policy, and extremely, ridiculously large classes, etc. don’t really have any answers.
I felt an immediate sense of release when I had this thought that I really don’t have an answer to these problems because there aren’t any. Cell phones are from hell, bathroom policy is really merely a euphamism for “get into to a mental battle with a teenager who hasn’t yet formed a sense of civility in her mind and heart”, and seating charts can never work perfectly because it is such an unnatural thing to cram a bunch of people together in a small space and teach them anything.
There is no real answer to the other problems listed above because, if they were, we would have found them by now.
I don’t have any answers. Whatever responses I do come up with this year in reaction to these impossible shoulds that the system tosses with such nonchalance onto my lap, by those scared people for whom I work, the system, will not be answers that work but merely attempts at answers. I pray that I am given the strength this year to do my job in a way that my students and the people I work for don’t notice how inept I am at actually solving all these problems.
Too often I receive private emails, and I know Bryce does too, from teachers who want to learn and implement comprehension based instruction in their classrooms it in the last few weeks of the summer. I get anxious questions, usually from younger teachers, that nobody can possibly answer because our world, not just in education but, it seems, everywhere, is out of balance right now, and that the imbalance is so pronounced that some of us think that we are going crazy.
We are not going crazy. We are simply given more than we can do. We can’t solve all the problems, even if we should be able to. We can only solve some of them. All we can do is our best. Perhaps, instead of trying so aggressively to find answers to the problems, the shoulds, listed above, it would be best if we chose a solution from those offered here this week, and try it and run with it, and just keep checking back here for newer ideas that may work better if what we chose before doesn’t quite work out. The kids will see the lack of consistency, but what can we do?
Perhaps we should embrace the hopeless and helpless feelings of being a teacher in a world that can be arguably described as verging on insanity. Perhaps we should pray to whatever higher power we want. I suggest this prayer by my brother Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury,pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen