From the old blog, here is a message from Phoebe that is worth sharing as we start another year:
Phoebe’s Point
I like this blog site and have been reading it for several months so far. I am encouraged and relieved quite often when I realize about the higher end of teaching and how it is explained here. I am still in the gap of transitioning from the ‘old’ way with lots of plans and activities to the ‘one word and have at it’! Part of me feels guilty about feeling so calm about it – it’s as though I SHOULD be torturing myself and agonizing about all the details of my plans.
Thanks for providing all this important information. I’ll keep reading and learning!
I responded:
“Phoebe I am hearing you say that we are not even aware when we torture ourselves with lesson plan details and the nefarious multifarious fear-based planning of myriad activities connected to traditional teaching. We think it is normal. Thus, we cannot heal from it because it has become like breathing air to us.
“What a blockbuster thought! If we could but realize how complicated we make our lives in our classrooms (cf. the Merton quote in the previous article here), and how truly little effect our freneticism has on what our students actually acquire, then we might be able to muster the courage to do something about it.
“That’s the hardest thing of all, isn’t it? It is not so much about learning the new method (CI is not that hard) as much as it is about letting go of the old. We can’t keep one eye focused on CI while the other remains fixed on what we used to do.
“Thanks for your comments. It’s simple: if we can’t stop torturing ourselves in needless activities, burning the days of our careers away amidst a vague sense of binding frustration, then our embracing of CI might never happen because we’ll always be tied up in planning, which never works in our field."
“Maybe this explains why so few people do CI even though, as intelligent professionals, they see its merits. They miss the overriding point that infuses the research on CI: that the more you plan languages classes, the more ineffective they become, because of the nature of language learning.”
Ben, this post is spot-on and very timely. It's a message that we need to share, bellowing out from the hilltops!
Agreed, timely - all the ‘forces’ still stacking up to make learning explicit miss the point about how language is acquired. We don’t need to torture ourselves or our students. The One Word Image, The Star, the Square and the Triangle are the most effective in our classrooms. Period.