Dear Teacher, you’re free to just do your job.

O say, can you see, by 2024’s bright sunlight? O’er the schoolyard’s chain link fence, we watch another school day unfurl. Saintly teachers never glare, lest they hurt children’s delicate sensitivities. Bubbles don’t burst in the air, because everyone is too busy evaluating opportunities to use AI.

Friends, buckle up for a Sara-Elizabeth post on fire.

I am so frustrated about the current narrative around teachers. To hear some talk, we’re all so terrible we’ve failed the children forever. To hear others, we’re all so good we deserve sainthood. We’ve heard how schools (and often families and society) often expect us to be therapists, drill sergeants, conflict resolution specialists, nutritionists, and experts in every subject, none of which we were trained to do. But it’s not just what our schools are asking us to do. It’s what we’re asking each other to do.

If you don’t feel like reading, well… try anyway. And you can scroll down for a pledge from me to re-commit to keeping ineffective, stressful distractions off my blog.

Are you tired yet? The professional publications, the online communities, the blog posts (yes, my blog posts!) give us an unending litany. Here’s how you should be using AI, and don’t forget to revolutionize your grading practices. You must incorporate social emotional learning into world language class because it will solve everything. And above all, don’t forget that you must make sure your students– all of them– see their skin shade, hairstyle, gender, family type, and sexual preference in all your curriculum materials. If those materials don’t exist, make your own. Because if they don’t, they will not be okay.

I’d like to offer a hypothesis that actually, they will.

Professional education organizations, especially national ones, are dominated by PhD  college professors. I’m not sure if they’re the ones with the time and motivation to participate at that “high” a level, but go to a national education conference and you will be inundated with every philosophy imaginable from consultants, supervisors, and university researchers.

Remember that famous Ken Robinson TED Talk? You know, the most-watched one of all time, Do Schools Kill Creativity? He comments on this phenomenon. Here are some of the quotes pertinent here:

If you were to visit education as an alien and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top.

There’s something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.

Point taken, Sir Ken (who was a university professor, actually). When I come away from big conferences I often feel disembodied, living in my head and slightly to one side, convinced that I should be convinced that if I could just incorporate the right acronyms then my students would rise above a less than ideal life and live their true selves and become… university language professors.

Come now, let’s stop pretending 1) that kids can’t survive the crap in life without us and 2) they should aim to be nerds like us who can’t get enough degrees.  The fact is, college enrollment peaked in 2010 and there’s no evidence for more people being able to afford insane tuition costs to end up in crippling debt for an education that trains them to over-analyze everything and play the victim at all times.

You can do hard things. So can the kids in your room.

The fact is, generations who didn’t know anything about SEL or DEI or AI or even CI grew up and faced hard things and then built one of the most successful countries on earth. There has always been abuse in front of us, real anxiety, hunger, people fleeing war, and all the other things that confront you every day in the newspaper and in your classroom and make you feel like you could scream for the justice you cannot find.

Let me ask you this: what if, just what if, your classroom was a space where it wasn’t your job to make the unjust world behave, it wasn’t your job to convince children and young adults that they cannot learn unless they feel validated in everything they see and do– what if it was your job to just, well, teach?

One of my current students is homeless. His and his brother’s father lives in another state, their mother has custody, and her second husband told them to leave a few months ago. They’re caught in an incredibly difficult web. Do we have emotion check-ins in class and excuse him from the final presentation? No, we don’t. We applaud his presentation and encourage him to make his essay metaphor more prominent throughout. Do we discuss that they’re coming to my house to do their laundry and ask classmates to weigh in on their trauma? No, I accept the compliment on how much he likes my lattes and tell him they’re welcome anytime. Their mom, church, and counselors help them deal with the other adults in their lives who can’t get it together, but I’m not one of them, and that’s not my job. And they’re better off because I know the boundaries. Because someone in their life dares to act like crap happens, and you can still be okay, and you can still learn and get your work done.

Remember when college professors canceled finals during COVID for anyone who felt like their mental health couldn’t handle it? How many times in the last several years have we been told that because life gets hard, it’s okay to skip out on the commitments you’ve made, rather than just get it done and re-evaluate what commitments you can handle in the near future?

Maybe the real problem isn’t that life got too hard and you aren’t able to quite meet all your commitments. Maybe the real problem is that your field over-committed you. They’ve made it a commercial enterprise to convince you that your job is something more than “just” teaching.

Does anyone else feel like you’re staring at the emperor and he’s stark naked? Like we’ve been sold a pack of lies and we’re all afraid to say something, lest we be the only one and get buried by cancel culture?

It’s a funny thing about having a midlife crisis of career and health with not much to lose– you stop worrying so much about cancel culture. And so, you stiffen your spine and speak your mind.

Here’s my mind. There are often not enough work hours in the day for you to do the things that are your job. I’d like to encourage you to stop trying to do things that are not your job. Can I gently suggest that our learners would be better served if many of us spent more time improving our own TL proficiency and less time feeding our outrage addiction on social media and in online teacher communities?

After years of professional development adventures, I’ve identified this brief list of tempting professions that distract us from our real job: teaching language well.

Teacher, Not Entertainer

I’ve blogged about this quite a bit, so I’m not going to elaborate too much here. I just want to reassure you that your job is to teach, and not to entertain. I’ll reiterate (and you can follow this link to read the brief-ish post) that in the end, whether or not learners pay attention is entirely their own responsibility. Part of functioning in this world means buckling up and accomplishing something even when it’s not flashy, funny, amazing, amusing, or even fun.

Your job: Plan and present language input that is comprehensible in an environment that is reasonably pleasant.

Their job: Listen, watch, and try new things with the language, every day, without expecting class to be a constant SNL skit.

Teacher, Not Therapist

No one denies that there’s a mental health crisis in this country, but a growing number of unqualified voices are applying well-meaning but ineffective efforts to it. It’s become a cult phrase to throw around: Check on the kids, they are not okay. Watch this video, the boys are not okay. Look at this post, the girls are not okay. Do more of this, the students are not okay.

Any therapist worth her degree will tell you that you ought to help kids run from ruminating, not embrace it. What if instead of encouraging kids to focus on how not okay they are, we helped them see that they can do hard things? I do not mean to imply that it’s good to sweep actual trauma under the rug. What I do mean is that perhaps you are not the person to identify actual trauma, much less deal with it, especially in a society when people use the word “trauma” to describe seeing a dead animal on the road or being called a name they don’t like. I have friends who watched their family members get murdered by African warlords or tortured in a Nepali prison. I drive some boys to school who watched their mother, my friend, die a slow and excruciating death from breast cancer in her bed in their home.  I have become very careful about how I rate pain and throw around the word “trauma.” People who are actual experts are ready to caution you that you are not one (an expert, I mean), and that’s fine.

Your job: Plan and present comprehensible input that fosters learning and inspires real thought without demeaning people. Assign tasks and expect them to be done. Leverage the experts in your building to address issues outside your expertise.

Their job: Listen, watch, and think about how to use this new language to do the work that’s been assigned, because not doing it is not going to help the matter of whether there was enough breakfast this morning or the family pet ran away.

Teacher, Not Friend

In my undergraduate training, I was at a very strict school quite focused on traditional education. Education happened with kids following a strict dress code, seated in rows, led by the teacher. Accordingly, I was taught to dress and act 100% professionally, especially because I was so young (and looked younger). My first year teaching, I was 3 years older than my oldest student. I wore a blazer almost every day and never participated in blue-jean Fridays. And you know, it worked. My students knew that I cared about them at the same time I was not looking for new friends among them.

I was stymied the farther I got into the teaching community at being encouraged to act like things would go better if we were pals with our students. Just don’t. Your students can learn from you even if they don’t like you. They don’t have to like you. They have to respect you. You don’t have to like them. You can accept a compliment without telling them where you bought your earrings and for how much (they’re only asking about it for the distraction, anyway). Get your validation elsewhere. And for the love of all that’s holy, you don’t have to see them outside of school hours, not in your classroom, not in your home, not in your car. Just speaking in general terms, think of how many issues crossing those boundaries has caused. You can refer them to the school counselor. You should recommend they be honest with their parents, religious leaders, and friends. But none of those positions is your job.

Your students belong solidly in the realm of acquaintances in Robin Dunbar’s social network theory, at least until they graduate. I have a handful of students whose weddings and other events I have attended, and I follow them on social media. But while they were in my classroom, the teacher-student relationship was usually well-defined. When I strayed beyond that, I always ended up regretting it.

Your job: Plan and present comprehensible input and activities that encourage a pleasant environment. Earn and demand respect. Find your friends elsewhere.

Their job: Respect the work and expertise you have put into the class. Listen when others are talking. In a good year pass along a teacher appreciation gift, maybe even a senior photo if you’ve had them a long time and helped them a lot.

Teacher, Not Magician

When a new teacher learns about proficiency-based teaching, the natural question that arises is this:

What level can I reasonably expect for my students at the end of Level X?

If you ask this question on social media, you’ll get all kinds of answers. ACTFL cites the Foreign Service Institute‘s research and experience on how many class hours it takes to achieve “General Professional Proficiency” in a language. Depending on your language choice, they estimate this time as little as 600 class hours and as many as 2200 class hours.

To this and every other recommendation you see, you should ask some good questions: What is a “class hour?” Does it involve taking attendance or writing up a referral slip? Does it go up or down depending on class size? Is it more or less for a student who already knows 2 other languages? More or less for a student who is dyslexic, or always hungry, or bored, or wishes he were anywhere else but here?

Your teacher friends will tell you they have students at intermediate by the end of Level 2. Advanced by the end of high school. Novice High in the fourth grade. Again, ask good questions: what percentage of your students? What background did they have when they got to your class? My daughter scored Intermediate High on the AAPPL listening and speaking at the end of fifth grade in her dual immersion school. It would be easy to use her as a poster child to champion dual immersion and make you feel bad about your own elementary program. But she was only there for one year, and she’d heard Spanish spoken to her every day since she was born. Her proficiency, quite honestly, came from me, not from the immersion program.

In my upcoming ebook, I’ll help you ask questions that help you select a general proficiency goal for your specific learners. But you should know this: we can set goals all we want based on an ideal scenario, but you are not a magician. You cannot wave your input wand and have learners speaking in full-length conversations by the end of the first year. There’s no magic spell to compel attention. There’s no comprehensibility potion. Relax– that’s not your job.

Your job: Use what you know about second language learning and acquisition to set realistic expectations. Then, present comprehensible input and tasks designed to foster that proficiency. If you don’t know enough about it, keep learning. Be content with their progress, even if it’s not what Mr. Peacock is seeing from his eight learners at the school that costs $45,000 a year.

Their job: Listen and watch and trust that the teacher knows more about proficiency and language learning than they do, and trust the process. Accept the grades and feedback they earn based on the effort and attention they put into it.

Teacher, Not Victim

Are you familiar with the phrase “external locus of control”? It’s a psychology term that has to do with what you believe about cause and effect in your daily life. If you’re stuck in a mindset that the locus of the control is external, you believe that forces outside yourself determine outcomes.

In common everyday function, a person with external locus of control talks a lot about bad luck, karma, Murphy’s Law, and the like. A person who moves through life this way often feels like a victim. Some teachers’ unions and mainstream media are excellent at getting teachers into an external-locus-of-control mindset. They tell you you’re a victim. Society has turned against you, the administration is too demanding, the pay is not enough, the parents are obnoxiously meddling. It’s not you, it’s the weather, the season, the sports, the textbook or lack thereof, the voters, the legislature, the funding, your undergrad professor’s failure, the virus.

Any one of those things may be true in a given situation, but with an external locus of control, you just wallow as a helpless victim of such circumstances.

On the other hand, if you have an internal locus of control, you do something about your circumstances. You can influence your own journey. A person with this perspective believes that there’s no such thing as “fate,” and you are responsible for your own actions. You can take steps to improve a bad hand.

Be encouraged, dear teacher. You may feel stuck, but you probably aren’t. It’s likely within your power to change something about your lousy circumstances, even if it’s just your attitude, response, or expectations. Think about this. It will make a huge difference. People with a higher internal locus of control are more satisfied with their careers, among other positive effects.

This isn’t an either-or proposition. It’s a spectrum, and it’s something you can work on. You can choose to turn your locus of control around. Two years ago, my curriculum development job turned into something that I wasn’t willing to do. So I quit. Internal locus of control. But I’d been in that job for 11 years, and then I floated in time, wondering who I even was now, waiting for some even more amazing opportunity to magically appear. When it didn’t, I just floated lower. External locus of control. Eventually, I decided to get up and do something, fill out some paperwork, return to ACTFL, start getting back in the classroom from time to time as a substitute. Internal locus of control.

It’s possible your job isn’t what you expected, or it was, and then it turned ugly. You have the power to make your job more like what you want it to be. Try it.

Your job: Be ready to put in an honest day’s work for the pay that you were promised. If it’s not enough, or your administration is making your life hell with its lack of support, then quit, or advocate for yourself and realistic job/wage expectations through your faculty meetings, union, and/or legislative advocacy.

Their job: Listen and watch and do the tasks assigned without making your life hell, because no one pays you enough for that.

Teacher, focus

I hope this post is both encouraging and challenging. I hope it nudges you that if you’re on TikTok for 2 hours a day, you might not be doing your job. That if you think belonging to ACTFL’s new DEI community is a better use of your time than getting better at your target language, you might not be doing your job. That if you suspected all along that the push to be an entertainer, therapist, magician, friend, and/or victim was pushing you beyond the limits of your job, you were right.

I may burn bridges with this post, but please know that I have the best intentions for our profession. We’re hemorrhaging students and the teacher supply isn’t that high either. Something about our focus is off.

My point is simply that it’s okay to show kids they can have a good day and learn some Spanish. It’s okay to be the kind but firm adult in the room, who doesn’t feed kids’ worst feelings about themselves and the world. If I’ve offended you here, please know that I always appreciate respectful dialogue and I’m more than willing to explain further, re-evaluate, and converse. But also, if you find this message unforgivably offensive, your avoiding my corner of the internet is probably better for the both of us. We’ll both be fine. I promise.

If, on the other hand, you appreciate my honesty, help, and materials, I’d love for you to stick around. Because now that you’ve made it all the way through this post to the end, I’d like to recommit to something for you. I’m excited to get back to the basics on my blog, and help you do your actual job. From now on, look here for posts that help you do the things I’ve described above as what I see as a language teacher’s job, and nothing else. If you spot something that distracts from or adds to your job, call me out on it. My skin is getting thicker all the time.