Teacher’s Experience
Starting out in November as a French teacher was interesting...like many new teachers, I had a vague idea of what kind of environment I’d be put in. School seemed far out enough to be safe, students seemed somewhat polite, principal somewhat as a beacon of light around campus. Her only request of me was to meet the kids where they were because they’d had a sub up until me and that only meant one thing for a French class: google translate!
Nonetheless, it seemed easy enough. And aside from all the behavioral stuff and having a nemesis and the lack of accountability the school held the students to, it was a good job. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers have had this thought that if their job was just teaching, it’d be a lot easier, and the kids would be a lot more successful.
Being a foreign language teacher is a lot less stressful than core subjects in the way that we don’t need to prepare our kids for a test at the end of every year. This is both freeing and sometimes exhausting for the students and the teachers themselves. I often had the kids say that they’d never go to France and that there was no point in them taking my class... fun.
However, from working in a school, you see how kids are failed. Even the kids who were deemed smarter still found tasks like writing and infusing it with evidence and reasoning difficult. So many of our kids were below grade level, and district professional developments were just theories thrown at teachers totally doing a disservice to how teachers have to be disciplinarians in their classes before they can deliver the material itself. A lot of kids are failed by being passed along, and then are expected to make something out of themselves as if they hadn’t been told indirectly (and sometimes directly) that they weren’t worth their teacher’s time.
To take a step back a bit, when I was in high school, I went to one of the “better” schools in Louisiana and had to do a research paper every year. We were reading full books and quite a few a semester at that. Now, it feels like that was so far away even though it was just 4 years ago that I graduated. Kids are not reading full books anymore, they are doing “excerpts,” because that’s what the curriculum is now. Even as I prepare for a new year's teaching in ELA, we will be reading mere excerpts of a book... what a disservice. In a literacy crisis, we are declining the chance to make kids more resilient against intimidating and sometimes unknown language which continually reduces the value of books. If we are instilling in kids that they are only meant to take “parts” of whole things, they will never get the full picture. They may join a crowd of people that are ignorant and loud about what they “know,” contributing to a culture full of incomplete ideas, and untapped potential.
Nijah Viltz
Viltz is a 4th grade ELA teacher currently obsessed with The Hungry Caterpillar. Graduating from LSU with a dual degree in French and English Lit, she is passionate about preserving Louisiana culture and supporting her public library. In her free time, she is bothering her mischievous dog and painting.
