This was a comment that I just felt like making into a blog post:
I was filming today my heavy hittin’ 6th pd. level 2 class (I’m trying to get as much video as I can for this blog). I noticed something. Whenever I would fire out something (way too fast, because SLOW is still not what I do best in CI), many of the kids would get it. I would be like firing a 90 mph fastball at a little league hitter and watching them catch it. Dude. The comprehension checks, one every ten minutes, brought up all 8’s and above except for the one girl with attendance issues. Dude again. My point here is this – rocking and rolling in the target language with kids who are clearly loving it kicks ass. I know that “kicks ass” is not a very professional term to use, but I gotta say it anyway because that is my kind of research. The kind we gather by the sweat pouring off of our backs in the middle of our struggles to make Krashen’s research have real life in real classrooms. The kind of field hand sweat research that only we can know about and therefore bears more truth than any dry research from some think tank university professor who couldn’t begin to hang with the intensity of 35 vastly different kids just challenging them to reach their hearts every day and prove to them what they may not have learned from too many other of their teachers that they are intelligent and that they can acquire another language. On the other side of the visible research moon of language acquisition there is some pretty far out middle of the night partying going on. Again, not a lot of formal measurable research there, but when I am just loving my job because my kids and I are laughing it up around three structures, I’m a happy guy and damn the grammar torpedos. I was talking to Meredith Richmond about this today and we agreed that this method really does require an absence of thought about what others think and especially no fear and a desire to actually party in our classrooms. The looser our goose, the more L2 honk chanting we get done. And that is a good thing! I have thought for a long time now that what I need to do in my life is relax. Who would’ve thunk that I would learn how to do that through my job!