GUEST POST: For Pete’s Sake Cut Yourself Some Slack!

You might feel guilty because you didn’t hit 90% target language. You might second-guess the activity that you painstakingly set up. You might feel uneasy that your lesson may not be ACTFL approved. 

This, my friends, is what happens when teacher guilt gets to you.

I have seen a lot of this type of discussion on Twitter and heard in presentations at professional conferences. It is so easy to get swept up in the dialogue and be passionate about the almighty Best Practices, used At All Times, by All Good Teachers. 

I get it. I really do. I, too, am passionate about getting my students to learn as much as they can in the best ways I can teach them. I, too, love the idea of best practices. To put my money where my mouth is, I am actually working on PhD on this very subject. (Go tigers!) Best practices are not the enemy. It is the pressure we put on ourselves to adhere to them every minute of every day. Or worse, the pressure from our colleagues.

But you know what? High school students rarely get out of intermediate levels of communication on the ACTFL scale (Rifkin, 2005). Yes, it is true that a communicative classroom with lots of input and feedback and authentic resources will help set these students up for success if they choose to travel, use the target language outside of class, or take more language courses in college. 

But still. There is a ceiling there. And we all need to just chill out.

I’m gonna tell you a little secret. Some days, my students might do some *gasp* worksheet packets, play some vocab bingo, or maybe even do a craft and some coloring. Because there are days when I NEED A BREAK. Maybe I am up to my eyeballs in grading. Maybe I have tons of parent emails that I need to respond to. Maybe, I have a sore throat and just plain don’t want to talk a lot that day. And you know what? I do not feel bad about it.

I know that if I really wanted to, I could tweak my activities to make them more “worthwhile.” I get it. I really do. But if I am too tired to care that the kids did a worksheet packet, am I really going to care if I can MAKE IT COMMUNICATIVE? No. No, I’m not. But a burned out teacher who doesn’t care anymore isn’t going to ever want to make anything communicative. I don’t want to become that burned out teacher. 

I guess the thing is that I know and understand the difference between a great lesson and a poor lesson. But sometimes I just need to breathe and let it be a poor lesson anyway.

In college, I had an amazing methodologies professor named Dr. Morrison. She taught me all about how to make pretty much anything communicative. We learned how to best do a vocabulary lesson or scaffold a writing assignment. She was, and still is, one of my favorite people. Yet even she said that sometimes, we would feel too exhausted to go on. It was ok to give a worksheet on those days and we needed to give ourselves some grace. 

I’m gonna let that sink in a minute. A college methodologies professor is telling you to give yourself some grace.

I sometimes feel like I am the defender of the Good Enough teachers of the world. I don’t always hit 90% TL. I don’t always set up ACTFL approved activities. I regularly have classroom discussions in English about culture to be sure that all students can participate and understand what I believe are worthwhile topics, perhaps even valuing content over language (see what I did there?). 

But I do ENOUGH good things to make my class worthwhile. And I, little by little, gather new ideas from colleagues and conferences, and I slowly chip away at being a Good Teacher All Of The Time. 

But for now? I am Good Enough.

If you’re not feeling Good Enough–or even if you are–you can connect with @SraStephanie on Twitter and TeachersPayTeachers.