What is so awful about teaching beginning Spanish is not having the power to do anything interesting with it. If I were in power I would have innovative programs such as conversation partners outside of class, more structured grammar exercises, and greatly stepped-up cultural programming. But SLA is not my job or focus, either … it is just that, if I am to work in an SLA program, I would like it to actually be a program, and have someone up-to-date and clever directing it. As it is, I wish I could escape Spanish and teach Portuguese instead, where I do have power and am allowed to do interesting things. I would like to go rogue in Spanish but the administration wants us to go in get-them-through lockstep even more than before, and to the administration this seems to mean just stuffing verb conjugations down students’ throats. I totally see why students are miserable in this regime and do not see the point of it; I wish I were allowed to do things in a more interesting way. I may have to take power and go rogue, regardless … aren’t I tenured faculty for a reason? Why has my expertise been so mistrusted here from Day 1? (Is it because I am modern, and have a Ph.D., and have experience elsewhere, and am not Cajun, and am not married to a Cajun?)
What professors and academic advisors are deluded about is the idea that the alleged life of the mind is worth sacrificing your life for by moving to an awful place at an untenable salary, to teach something you could teach anywhere and could teach better in most places–all for the purpose of saying you are a professor, and satisfying those who feel threatened by the idea that there might be more interesting and more intellectually stimulating things to do.
#OccupyHE.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I must have just felt your pain. OUCH!
Yes. The language program situation is bad enough in itself. Add to this that I sacrificed a lot to it and was traumatized by it in the past, and by the same thing at another school, and that I also transfer onto it the pain from other abusive situations — it’s quite a toxic cocktail.
What I have learned observing and do not have time to post about: this anxiety state/pain state I go into is actually anger, and underlying that is fear that these abusive people will actually kill me. So I go into this reptile-brain rage but it is not appropriate, so it becomes and anxiety-pain state.
The answer is to take power. Lead.
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, lead.
You are so right!