I’m a high school English teacher. What the hell am I supposed to teach when I can’t teach pronunciation and grammar anymore?

Our administration recently sent out a list of guidelines for teachers regarding the Florida bonkers ban on gender pronouns, drag, and wokeism. The list was super vague, so everyone at my school is just winging it.<br><br>One weird thing that stuck out to me from the list mailed out by our county was that we are now not allowed to teach students how to pronounce words. Where I teach we have a good amount of ESL (English as a second language) kids and immigrant kids. I’ve had kids from places like Nepal, Brazil, China, and Saudi Arabia. They like to get the right pronunciation for certain words and will usually ask me for feedback. Obviously I tell them how to pronounce words because I want them to be able to learn and do well on the pronunciation section of the SAT and ACT, but now it seems like I’m not allowed to do that.<br><br>For pronunciation, I could get around it by just pulling up a website or a pronunciation guide from a textbook. But it’s the grammar that’s a problem. I don’t know what I’m going to do for grammar. I’ve usually relied on pronouns and gendered grammar to help kids learn. But now that’s all out the window. I try my best to just use they/them in my explaining, but I’m not sure how long I can keep doing that without it feeling super repetitive and weird. It’s hard to explain subject-verb agreement when you can’t use the pronouns that you are supposed to use. <br><br>It’s like I’m just going to have to stop explaining anything and just be like “good luck kids! Maybe you can figure it out!”