Tag: enrollments

In two previous posts, I’ve addressed structural aspects of the language enrollments issue as well as some ideas on what language teachers can control. In this post, I want to address a final aspect of this issue: energy, and the energy-draining nature of being asked to justify a central part of one’s existence.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on structural aspects of the language issue, and promised a future one on things that I think are within language teacher’s control, and that we can work on. Today, I’m back with that post. I have to admit this one was kind of a struggle, as most of the ideas I think could be effective are still difficult to implement in institutional settings (or at least the ones I’m familiar with). I’ve also divided this up into three parts: ideas I think are terrible, ideas I think could be effective but struggle to implement, and ideas that I think are more likely to be successful (sort of). I guess you can see already what I think about this topic 🥲

In response to the problem of declining enrollments in language classes, the message given to teachers is “get your enrollments up!” While this may seem like an obvious solution, it actually creates even more anxiety and frustration as it is a request for overloaded language teachers to take on additional work, in which they have no training, in an environment in which many structural factors are out of their control.