Well, second language acquisition isn’t my field, so doing it means preparing something out of field. Any time management expert can tell you that that is a huge distraction from the real work. Then there are the politics around it; the personalities one has to deal with are often very unpleasant.
Next, I’m not the teaching type, I’m the research type. I have excellent presentation and discussion leading skills and I am a brilliant teacher for all kinds of students in other kinds of courses. But even in these courses I do not create “exercises” and “activities” for students; there are no quizzes and no games. I am so bored with the kinds of things foreign language programs have one do, I cannot even begin to say.
My student who was having trouble, and whom I told to go ahead, dump the book, and just start listening to the radio and watching tv, now speaks and writes at arguably the highest level of fluency in the class, and it has only been a couple of weeks.
*
Mostly, though, there are four reasons I so dislike teaching foreign languages, and they all have to do with serving the resentful and the unwilling.
1- Students who hate it. They are forced to be there and feel that it is torture; no amount of pleasantness and fun can convince them otherwise because they are committed to the idea that it is torture. I do not like to be placed in the torturer role, trying to elicit responses from people, I really do not.
2- Students who are really rough characters / are mean. In foreign language classes, these students haven’t flunked or dropped out yet, so they are in the class and as you try to make things nicer for those who feel they are being tortured, the mean ones see a chink in the armor and stream in to pound on you.
3- Having to be such a fortress of authoritarianism. If you have people willing to play the language learning game then that is one thing but if what you have is people pulling for a D semester by semester, knowing or believing they will get these Ds by appealing to higher authorities than you, then you are carrying dead weight.
4- The informality and intimacy of this struggle to carry people, to show them that what you are telling them about the nature of the language they are studying is true, to insist that there is no way to pass except by knowing material, to show them they can do the work. Some people feel that being in the gym with their students, or at lunch, is too much personal contact but for me it is foreign language study which is too intimate an activity.
It is like being expected to fuck just anyone, and having to deal with it if they also want to hit you.
a- I have more comments and theories but notice how I associate foreign language teaching with torture, and assume that to survive academia you must become a compliant enough abuse victim.
b- Another idea I have had lately is about the non usefulness of the image I acquired early on of the proper academic: someone who was barely making it; others were ignoble somehow. This is such a cliché and it so goes against my beliefs that I can hardly believe I absorbed the image. Yet I did.
Axé.
