I have a major issue with these basic language courses and I have to figure out what all goes into it. I will do so in a fragmentary way as I do not have time to sit down and think about it. But this needs a solution.
1. I am afraid to think about them. If you are good at them, you will not get a real job, if you spend time on them, you will not get tenure, and so on, and so forth; I am always already phobic.
2. I have no control over curriculum. I could make some micro-changes, but I have so much else to do and it would take serious thought.
3. I have no idea what it is like to have any difficulty at all learning a foreign language, and this makes me a poor instructor except for students who are like me or who are interested.
4. It is amazingly tedious and boring, and it is a terrible practical problem since our program is technology dependent and we lack technology.
5. You have to interface with so many social work type problems when dealing with the population that takes these courses.
6. My department has wars over these courses, not solidarity, and this makes the whole atmosphere incredibly fraught. I have seen too many faculty abused over this by other faculty, and at this point even thinking about these courses starts my PTSD symptoms going.
7. The as yet unspoken. It is not about time and being too fragmented, although there is that. It is about authority and academic freedom, and also about walking into rooms full of people, hour after hour, who by and large despise the language you are teaching them and that is one of those you respect, who will be as hurtful about it as they can, and who are the ones who evaluate you about whether you knew how to teach it to them. In these situations one needs support, but in my departments this situation is used to demoralize people and torpedo tenure cases. The chaos is highly useful to some, so it is maintained, and this is why one spends so much of one’s time feeling one has been hit with a bomb: it is because one has been.
I do not care if it is pious to say your favorite course is an introductory course; I am impious, then. If it is true that one should love the introductory course in one’s discipline, what I have to say is that SLA is not my discipline nor is traditional Hispanism. But that is not the issue. My issue with these courses is my issue generally: I dislike enmeshed situations, and I am vulnerable to them; when I see one coming I am paralyzed due to fear of extreme violence.
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The best answer I can come up with now is to be aware and as I keep saying, remember one has more authority than one thinks, and one should take it, use it, stand in it, not negotiate, not react, remember that it is easier to be an adult than to allow students and instructors pull one down into a boundary-free world of melodrama, manipulation and abuse.
Professors, meanwhile, will probably say I should be grateful I only have to deal with violence on this level, and that they are dealing with it from much higher levels. So am I, I respond, and I am probably a more effective fighter than you, but at those levels I can handle it. What is difficult for me, really difficult, is violence from the ill and the weak.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
For number 1, don’t you have a job and tenure at your institution? So why are you afraid? I’m not trying to be flippant, this is a serious question.
For number 2, it might be worth the time thinking about it now to make your life easier in the future. I hate not having control over curriculum when it is backwards, but I have found in the past that there is a lot you can do at the classroom activity level to resist, especially if you are not micromanaged. There are many ways to cover “Drill 4”.
For number 3, this is actually a useful quality, if you just analyze why you are good, and how to teach this. Sure it takes time, but if it makes you less miserable teaching these courses, it is worth it.
I’ve got nothing for the rest, which sounds pretty miserable, except for this: I believe that what makes me good at research, makes me good at teaching, whatever the condition. This is not because my research is on SLA, because it is not on the classroom. So perhaps what skills you have that make you good at research in adverse conditions can also make you good at lower division language courses in adverse conditions if you can just apply them?
Thanks, Shedding!
On #1, it is a very long story. There are issues having to do with my childhood and all the professors, who were up for tenure, terrified of being tarred with the language teacher label; it was practically the first conversation I ever heard in life.
Then the battlegrounds here are incredibly bad and violent, it is a horrible experience, and my experiences were so horrible before tenure that tenure does not solve them, and I stayed terrorized. It calmed down under most recent chair but now the battlefield is open again. Fortunately since writing this post it turned out I did not have to be on central committee for this.
On the rest, the issue is the war and my high number of other responsibilities. I could handle this if I had fewer other total duties or if I did not have to interface with so many other people on it. But there are 8 other faculty teaching multi section courses and no information or goals or anything is shared except that there is a common textbook. So, much time goes toward training students to do your version of things.
It would be easier if I had fewer sections, or more, but I have just enough so that it is a serious part of my life, but not quite enough so that I can fully integrate it. Also, among faculty there are many old resentments. It used to be, people would organize groups of students through the high schools and so on to heckle each others’ classes at the university, so as to spook the untenured people, stress them out so they would have trouble working. This has been stopped but many are scarred by it.
In the 3d semester, after they have had 1 semester of 1 thing and 1 of another, they are confused as to what the system might be and the standards. Getting them to truly believe what I am doing, and that I really am doing what I am doing, is the difficult part. Someone said last week: “I get it now. You want to see some form of achievement, not just the fact of turning in work. And yet you are not asking for the moon on achievement.” It had taken 5 weeks for me to get this through.
Mostly it is having to have so much class time go to explaining bureaucratic things (it is on paper too, and in the CMS, but they do not necessarily read or have computers), finding out how little they really know (they cannot read instructions and I am not the only one to notice this), and GRADING. I have not figured out what to do about the GRADING issue, every student needs much more individual attention than they get. Most people teach 6-7 sections and they have multiple choice tests and autograde. I do not do this but I should, since I get behind on grading due to the other parts of my job and this is almost worse than being on autograde in some ways.
But mostly mostly mostly, it is that I am really traumatized. The most important thing about it all is to remember that I get to be in charge. In fact, now, I have almost as much freedom in these classes as I had as a T.A. before I finished the M.A. and moved out of language T.A.ing. I do not have the administrative backup I had then but I can be my own backup. But for so long the situation was so fraught with fighting and sabotage and so on that I associate it with the classes. I have trouble focusing on and in them because of fear, and this makes them harder, makes everything harder.
So it is the trauma primarily, and then fact of having so much else to do that I am not able to consistently take the time to handle this and put in proportion. It is *easy* in summer with only one intensive class, and *easy* in Portuguese. It’s Spanish during the year, with negative support, students bringing so many problems to the class, and too much else to do, that is such a problem. And my startle reaction, my impulse to run in the opposite direction, is a problem. These two are what I am trying to work on first.
P.S. Part of the answer above, which I erased because it was distracting, had to do with situation of students and extreme variety of students. But here go some more answers.
SK: For number 1, don’t you have a job and tenure at your institution? So why are you afraid? I’m not trying to be flippant, this is a serious question.
A: See above. Fear was long justified. Not useful, but justified. Then, I fear myself because I have been taught to mistreat myself over this.
SK: For number 2, it might be worth the time thinking about it now to make your life easier in the future. I hate not having control over curriculum when it is backwards, but I have found in the past that there is a lot you can do at the classroom activity level to resist, especially if you are not micromanaged. There are many ways to cover “Drill 4″.
A: Yes. I know these things in theory but I have to figure them out in practice in such a way that really works.
SK: For number 3, this is actually a useful quality, if you just analyze why you are good, and how to teach this. Sure it takes time, but if it makes you less miserable teaching these courses, it is worth it.
A: I find it only works reliably on interested students and in Portuguese, or other lesser taught languages. Or in programs where more people are doing that.
SK: I’ve got nothing for the rest, which sounds pretty miserable, except for this: I believe that what makes me good at research, makes me good at teaching, whatever the condition. This is not because my research is on SLA, because it is not on the classroom. So perhaps what skills you have that make you good at research in adverse conditions can also make you good at lower division language courses in adverse conditions if you can just apply them?
A: Yes, this is what I am kind of thinking. It is interfacing with so much wreckage from NCLB and the community colleges and so on, and being so incredibly busy, and having so many techno-glitches to deal with, and mostly having so many students with so many problems, that makes me just want to look away. I could be better with this if I took more time at the gym, I think, but the main thing, main main thing, is to get over the PTSD-like attitude. That is what this blog is for…
Well, I have the same problem with not being a good teacher of things that come easily to me, because I don’t understand where the problems with understanding lie. Grammar, in any language, “clicks” for me, but it is hard to explain how/why I know these things or how they work, or how to study them. And in English as well, students believe (I am never sure to what extent this is true) that all their professors “want” something different and they have to psych this out somehow rather than just following instructions in which I am very clear about what I “want” on their papers. It’s frustrating, and I can well believe that in different circumstances it is truly traumatizing.
Not knowing what you want is code for not knowing how to do it, or for having been asked to think instead of regurgitate.
I have had occasion to see some student evaluations in a technical department this week and it was eye opening. They apparently often do not need to acquire the text, they just memorize from Power Points. In upper division courses. This explained a lot.
Being good at grammar and this being an asset for teaching it to those who aren’t is actually what I was thinking of. If you are good at grammar, probably you are good at breaking things down, and thus you can break it down for your students, if you think about how you think about it. Or, for a more personal example, I find things like conjugations easy to understand because I see all the different letters in different colors. I know not everyone does, but I can still put them in different colors on my handouts/powerpoints whatever, and this helps.
If the only thing you have in common with the other sections is the textbook, you can do whatever you want in class. The lack of coordination, especially concerning goals, is still a problem pedagogically, for the reasons you list, but given the situation at least you have the opportunity for authority in your classroom.
Finally, the idea that there are “language teachers” and “tenurable professors” is utter crap, and this attitude is surely from the same people who give all the other academic advice you despise.
Ah, language teachers vs. tenurable professors, here is the deal: language teaching is something you can delegate and for that reason weak language teaching is the least important fault you can have. Your publications and seminars are what are truly needed. There is only so much time in the day, so err on the side of publishing and not on the side of having a perfect class. This *is* actually true and good advice for many places still.
For me it is not so much authority in the classroom as in the program. I am supposed to model, for the other research faculty, compromise with the approach of the instructors, so that the new research guys will learn not to make waves and the instructors will not raise holy Hell.
Under the last chair, it was finally determined that we could go solo, but now there are rules from above the chair’s level about common exams and so on. Which means the modeling of compromise again, and students “telling” if you are not following the compromise exactly according to their lights, and teaching to the test, and all the destructive things we had before.
That is a Peyton Place style situation and this is where it becomes dangerous to be anything, and that is how I lost authority — not over the students but with what I would allow myself, somehow.
Actually, if it’s possible for you to get control of the tests, you could solve your problems–teaching to the test is only bad when it’s a bad test (as it so often is).
That is a really good idea.
Also: French has a coordinator who is an actual SLA / FL education person and I like their approach and also tests. I could suggest that for the sake of departmental unity, we all move in that direction.
It is a great idea.
“Finally, the idea that there are ‘language teachers’ and ‘tenurable professors’ is utter crap, and this attitude is surely from the same people who give all the other academic advice you despise.”
This actually did seem to be true when I was a child, because of the gendered division of the workplace and the way people got cast. I have also often found that if a (white) man said something about methodology, he is believed in a way women are not.
My own view of it all is time — these classes take tons of time and another head-space, at least to me. That may be idiosyncratic of me. But I also think these issues are particular to Spanish: the programs are huge and staff is lacking, so classes are huge, everyone harried, there are not enough resources and not everyone who teaches is an expert. Because of that last, there are the language teaching wars. The problems disappear in Portuguese, for instance, and it is possible to have a normal class.
But you are right about the primordial idea, it is in fact also part of the bad advice and this is where the Issue really comes in.
For what it’s worth, the Spanish faculty at my university are all about games to deal with the engagement issue. Although it’s not really the same, because Spanish is very useful where I live.
I want more audio and video, much more audio and video.
Yes, because audio and video lend themselves to proficiency based, and you get it by putting it on the tests. The games have this because they are role-playing, problem-solving games, but this is definitely not for everyone.
That kind of game, I would do and like.