It’s funny – funny in the sense of weird, even unnatural – how we put kids down and then blame them (using our weapons of choice: grades) because they can’t do what we ask them. I’m referring directly here to our history of making languages inaccessible – let’s be honest – to our students.
First, in the last century, we foolishly put our kids down by – at the high school level – doing little more than forcing them to memorize verb forms. At the middle school level we made language instruction into a social studies class. Then, in the first part of this century, we did it by speaking too fast for them to understand, during the TPRS days. Thank God all those days – those shitty decades – are over.
Will we ever cease putting kids down in our language classes? I know we don’t do it on purpose, but is that really an excuse? We have the research now – it’s clear. And we are the professionals involved. So if we have the research and we are the professionals, then why aren’t we implementing the changes to align with the real research (not our own version of it) and why isn’t it happening faster? We are like drugged by the way we ourselves were taught languages.
I think we’re being kind of lazy and quite dull about implementing the research. We’re also being lazy about climate change. The two outrages aren’t all that dissimilar. People have information that will help others, and they don’t aggressively use it, apply it, to make it happen in people’s lives. They don’t get passionate about the change. Both failures are committed by adults and affect mostly kids. What’s up with that?
Will we build kids up now in the way we teach them languages? Or is it too late? Have we lost them? Should we just admit defeat? Are 90% of kids who ever “studied” a language really going about their lives now as adults thinking that they just “weren’t any good” at the language they studied in high school?
If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then what are we going to do now in 2020 about our decades-long failures in reaching them, in building them up, in making them feel competent in our classes, in making them look forward to coming into our classroom each day?
We could just quit. And many of us, let’s be honest again, have quit. Or we could retool. But we can’t retool with the textbook – it’s deader than a doornail. And we can’t retool with TPRS – it also has morphed so far away from Blaine’s original vision that it leaves most teachers cold, out in the cold, feeling relatively powerless, not to mention resentful about time and money lost, thrown at a false hope. It’s time to tell the truth now about what has happened. We can’t coddle ourselves anymore.
In the same way that our students think, as a result of our instruction, that they aren’t any good at learning languages, we now also have teachers who, because of the incredibly wide disinformation spread out about CI since the early 1990s (ref. the nuclear explosion image posted here in an article yesterday), lack the confidence they need to then bring real confidence to their students about themselves as language learners.
Those are the kinds of thoughts that New Year’s seems to bring. We should ask ourselves if we will continue to do the same-old same-old in 2020, or if we will finally break through the mud that has started to cake over much of Krashen’s thinking of late, burying it under a more twisted version of it caused by self-interest?
When are we going to realize that CI can’t be bought, and in fact is far more than just another method, much more, but is really a kind of meditation practice that can only be done individually by individuals, all of us in different, unique-to-us ways? How is this all going to happen? When are we going to fix this? When is the cat going to be let out of the bag?
At the bottom of all of it, there is only one idea: we have to make sure that at the end of the year we have (1) taught and (2) assessed and (3) enforced classroom management in a way that TURNS our kids from being the snotty little prigs that we have allowed them to become into happy, confident language learners for life who in our classrooms show us the respect that we deserve.
What will we do this year in that effort, to build kids up to a place where they can’t wait until next year starts to come back to our classrooms so that they can find even a bit of sunshine in their incredibly fear-filled current lives? What will we do?