We must often revisit our motives for going into teaching in the first place. It will keep us heading down the right road. We spend a lot of time doing this work in very difficult buildings with lots of opposition, so we should know why we do it.
Do we do it for the following reasons? –
(1) the money? Probably not.
(2) the job security and the benefits? Maybe…because it’s better than a minimum wage job (though some could argue that) and it’s hard to get fired.
(3) for the fun of it? Probably not. Language teaching is not inherently a fun job, although in recent years we are finding out that, if we include all of our students in it, it can be made so.
(4) for the social status? Probably not.
(5) because we meet all sorts of interesting people? Probably not. The kids are often rude, no blame, but they are. And the colleagues are often narcissists. In my opinion, school buildings are filled with a much higher percentage of self-absorbed control freaks than in the normal population.
(6) because we can work with something we truly love – our language? Yes.
(7) so our students learn the language? Not really, depending on the level. Elementary kids still can learn it, because their innocence and motivation are still there, but by middle school a lot of what is required in learning a language is already gone, namely genuine interest, a victim of the testing virus. And, by the time the kids get to high school, teaching them a language, depending on the school, is often almost impossible bc of screens and tests and the genuine darkness at that level. That is the dirty little secret about fl language instruction at the high school level for the past twenty years or so, if not longer. The kids learn almost nothing and everybody acts like that is normal. And there is yet another reason why our students don’t really learn and a big one that we seem to always forget, if we ever knew it in the first place – it takes thousands of hours to learn a language and most of us have only a few hundred available to us even in a four year high school program, with far less hours available at the elementary level. And yet some of us almost kill ourselves working bc we aren’t aware of that fact. Teachers of languages in grades K-12 can only (a) whet a child’s appetite for the language, and (b) instill in them the confidence they need by going really easy on the testing virus, which destroys confidence in most kids. We need to get real on these points!
So far we have one maybe (2) and one yes (6) and one yes/no (7) and the rest are not reasons why we teach even though we might lie about that to ourselves and others. We probably do teach for the job security and the benefits and most of us, I would assume, DO teach because we love our subject matter, and also for the love of instilling knowledge in young people in the right schools at the right level, where the darkness hasn’t set in, but all the other reasons to teach listed above can be called somewhat bogus.