I started reading Part II of Man’s Search for Meaning today. In it, the author argued that what is really an existential crisis is often misidentified as mental illness. In this way, people’s search for meaning is not elevated but rather pathologized. The author gave an example of a patient who couldn’t find meaning in his work, and what he had really needed (and ultimately found success with) was a change to a new career field.
I had always lumped together my having mental illness with my inability to find meaning in my chosen field (ESOL or English for Speakers of Other Languages). I had not, until today, considered that most of the jobs in my field might actually be unsatisfying to me, and maybe that was why I longed to change fields even though it would mean taking a significant pay cut.
I still recognize the conundrum that I’ll probably never make as much money in anything else as I would in ESOL, because that’s what my degree is in. But this is a blog about existentialism, so allow me to describe the frustrations that I constantly faced at work.
As I mentioned, I always just kind of assumed that my not being able to hack it in ESOL was because I had a mental illness, and wanting to do something else, like work in a daycare, was just a sad result of not being able to stick to my first chosen career path. I never considered that I was not finding meaning in my job because there really wasn’t any way I could have found meaning even if I had been approaching it from a different vantage point. That the problem was the job, or that the problem wasn’t me.
As background, I was trained as a language teacher. One thing I was taught is that there’s a difference between “BICS” or “basic interpersonal communication skills” and “CALP” or cognitive and academic language proficiency. It was drilled into us that students can have really good BICS without CALP. So a kid can present with absolutely no accent and seem to be communicating well with their peers, and basically seem to be able to do everything, but they’re still missing a lot of academic vocabulary. So my job as it was presented to me in grad school was that I would unlock the skills that the students already had in their first language and help them learn to also use the same skills in English so they could be successful in an English speaking country. So for example, a kid might come from China and know how to write a five paragraph essay in Chinese, and my job was to teach them to do the exact same thing in English.
But when I actually got into the job, it wasn’t what I had trained for. I understand the difference between BICS and CALP, but the kids really, really seemed like they were English dominant. Almost all of them had been born here. They were on my caseload because of the way that you get into the ESOL department in a public school in the first place. The procedure for that is basically two steps: first, they do a “home language survey” on every single kid who enrolls in the school. If they discover that that there’s a language other than English being spoken in a particular student’s home, they give the student a standardized test. If they test below a certain score in their English language skills, they go into the ESOL program. In grad school they said that the students would take the same test in their home language for comparison, but come to find out, in real life almost no school districts can afford to translate the test. Conceivably they could do it for one or two languages, but that would cost money and also be discriminatory toward students whose first language is Hatian Creole or Yoruba or Gujarati or even some sort of pidgin that happened to be invented by the street children in some unfortunate slums somewhere and was intelligible to zero adults in the whole world (which actually happens). So, everybody with a home language other than English got the standardized English proficiency test and that was it.
This left me with almost an entire caseload of students who were only in the ESOL program on a technicality. The vast majority of my students were born in the United States and were English-dominant and at least half of them used English almost exclusively at home despite their caregivers communicating occasionally in another language. The only useful contribution I could make was to try to get parents to speak the “home language” with their children at least a little bit, since being bilingual is good for language development, opens up job opportunities in adulthood, and has innumerable other advantages. Other than that, the theoretical nature of my job had almost no overlap with what I was actually doing. The reason the kids on my caseload didn’t have the skills in English was not because they only learned the skills in their first language; the reason they didn’t have the skills in English was because they never learned them in the first place. They had been to school exclusively in the USA, but had the misfortune of having been enrolled in inner city schools where they didn’t learn the skills on the standardized test. Some of them had SpEd issues as well. The fact that they had another language on the home language survey was entirely irrelevant.
The problem with this was that my training was useless. When kids actually were born elsewhere and did have any kind of education at all in their first language, I was pretty good at helping them transfer skills to English. But the vast majority of my kids were simply remedial. Some of them had SpEd issues that were either identified or not identified, and most of them had been failed by the US school system. But the fact that they spoke another language at home was totally neither here nor there because they really weren’t actually speaking that language at home anyway; they just had an abuelita that spoke Spanish with them sometimes. I wasn’t dealing with an ESOL issue. I was dealing with limited or interrupted formal education, (aka SLIFE) which is usually grouped in with ESOL, but it’s a completely different thing and I had never heard of it until after graduation. I know that school is never the same as working and most training is on the job, etc, but I might as well have gone to school to be an electrician. Sure, the folks in grad school warned us (after we were halfway through the program and past the point of no return) that our students were going to have to learn about twice as fast as all the other students in order to catch up by the time they finished high school, but it wasn’t emphasized and they certainly didn’t tell us HOW to make that happen among a population that was simultaneously dealing with a million other issues including the trauma of growing up in the inner city or even a refugee camp somewhere in the most horrible imaginable corners of the world. As it turns out, the plight of true SLIFE students is basically hopeless. They get here at age 17 and the school helpfully places them in ninth grade so they’ll have time to catch up. But they’ve spent the entirety of those 17 years fighting for their lives so they’re not doing too great in Algebra. My job is to help “modify the curriculum” with additional graphic organizers and less “unnecessary language” so they have equal access to the material as mainstream students. I can’t figure out why they can’t add and subtract negative numbers until I give them a worksheet with just positive numbers and they can’t do that either and, in fact, they don’t know what a plus sign means. This is the first week of Algebra I. The kid refuses to stay in school past age 18 so we figure the best we can do is teach them enough math that they can figure out what time to catch the bus to make it to work on time, but “common core” says that we’re violating their civil rights by not getting them to pass Algebra. Adding and subtracting positive numbers is not “rigorous” enough for a ninth grader, even when we’re trying to teach all of kindergarten through eighth grade in a couple of weeks and the kids are distracted by auditory hallucinations of their deceased mothers back in Wherever screaming and crying for help.
In no way am I exaggerating.
So no, I didn’t feel like my job was meaningful. The handful of kids who were legitimately learning English as a second language were effed no matter what. The rest were learning kindergarten through second grade in an hour a day in my pull-out group and were spending the rest of their days as third graders with their classroom teachers and were also probably effed, but it really depended more on the classroom teachers than on me, the specialist.
I recognize that entering the workforce is disillusioning in a lot of fields, but I hope it’s not as bad for most people as it was for me. I didn’t feel that I had been adequately prepared for what I was actually facing, which was mostly a whole bunch of like inner city kids who hadn’t learned the skills that they needed to be in their grade level and the school wanted to claim it was because they had a different first language. Then there were the extra-sad cases.
In addition to the second-hand trauma I was undergoing on a daily basis, how was I supposed to describe what I was doing to those above me? My job was to teach them English. They spoke English. Or at least they spoke it as well as any other underprivileged kids. The problems they were facing (like poverty) weren’t the problem I was hired to solve (which was English proficiency). So my kids tested poorly and bombed their core classes and I was supposed to have prevented all that with graphic organizers and vocabulary-building strategies in English when they never actually had another first language. If I had been trained as a special education teacher, I would’ve been a lot better equipped than having been trained as a language teacher. What I really needed to be was a psychotherapist.
So although I had poor classroom management skills, the reason my jobs weren’t meaningful to me really was because no matter how good I had gotten at what I was doing, I could never really do much for the kids. Nobody could. It would have been better for me to have gone into politics and tried to create an alternative to school for students who had aged past the 21-year deadline.
I don’t know what all this means. Maybe I’ll be disillusioned no matter where I go and the problem isn’t with the field, it’s with me. But it wouldn’t hurt to find out.