Crashing with Krashen

No job is all blue skies and sunny days. In fact, as a teacher, I have come to expect unpredictable weather and learnt how to keep from being blown off course. It takes some steady steering sometimes. Today I had to hold on and steer for dear life.

Teaching-wise, actually it was not such a bad day at all. I added more to the modifications I had made to yesterday’s first lesson, and the third and final class went remarkably smoothly.

What went wrong was based not on teaching, the core of my job, but on the accumulation of several non-teaching tasks which, despite my well-reasoned appeals to distribute them evenly within the department, continue to be allocated to me. This is as unfair to other teachers, who feel left out of decision-making, as it is to me, who completely forgot how to execute the breathing process today. I shall omit the tantalizing details regarding more than one last straw that broke this camel’s back today. Fast-forward to this evening.

It all left me wondering what goes wrong: in every workplace there are struggles, but my own experiences, and others I have heard of, seem to suggest that TESOL (abroad) workplaces are exceptionally dysfunctional. Is it because the industry is not really- if we are to be honest- professionalized? Is it because cultural clashes are par for the course? Is it because no self-respecting, sane person would ever consider packing up to embark on an Anglovangelism mission? All of the above? Surely, the sheer lack of professionalism I have seen tolerated here would get a MacDonalds clerk fired. And we are educators?

Suffice it to say that my affective filter is on double-glazing this evening, and I am finding it very difficult to focus on my studies- or anything else, for that matter. What did help was flipping back to the goal sheet I had the rare prudence of drawing up before I started this course. It reminded me that I am going somewhere with this. I can, at least, aspire to be the lotus flower rooted in the mud.