2014: Unleash Your Superhero!

Yesterday I was feeling depressed and out of sorts, but today I've awoken to a new day and I've decided to embrace a new philosophy: Unleash your superhero!  This slogan caught my eye and my imagination today.  The more I thought about it, the more I like it so I decided to bring it here to the blog. 

The FLANC conference, which I attended last October, was exciting and exhilarating, and the theme of the conference was superheroes.  The keynote speech was a clever talk likening world language teachers to superheroes, which I loved!  And at one point during the conference, the lights went out and when they came back on, one teacher at each table had donned a mask and was posing heroically.  I got such a kick out of that!

So I'm focusing today on that superhero spirit that dwells within me and sometimes makes its way to the surface.  You know what I'm talking about, don't you?  It's that part of you that decided to become a teacher even though you knew you were never going to make a lot of money, but you took that path anyway because you wanted to make a difference.   It's that part of you that learned a foreign language just so you could bridge the cultural gap and bring people closer together.  It's that part of you that stays up until midnight creating an awesome lesson because it means so much to you to get it right.  And it's that part of you that grades like a madman so your students can get their test results the next day.

My super powers list isn't long or impressive, but it's full of heart!  I speak multiple languages, I make creative and fun lessons, I can link Spanish vocabulary to SAT words, I make the most complicated grammar structures simple to understand, and I bring culture into everything! 

I bet you can do the same things too, so hooray for us!  We are Super World Language Teachers!  I might just show up in a cape and a mask one day this week . . . really, the kids would get a kick out of it. 

My new year's resolution this year is hard to define, but it is closely tied to this idea of unleashing your superhero.  Basically, I'm not going to diminish myself because others are uncomfortable with the fact that I'm smart, creative or talented.  I don't like putting it into words because, when I read that, it sounds wildly arrogant.  I'm not arrogant, but all too often I find myself among jealous and petty people who make everything about themselves, and I'm not going to play those backstabbing games.  I'm going to let my light shine at full wattage and I'm going to unleash my superhero. 

I hope you will do the same thing, amigos. 

Hasta pronto,

--AnneK