It’s not about us worrying anymore. That part is over.
There is no method. There are no skills to learn – we already know how to speak slowly, to listen to those we speak with, to check for understanding because we are the adults, to point and pause at new things, to stay in bounds. Those are natural things that we can do without any training.
Skills? Those are not skills. They are natural things built in to us that we forgot about long ago. We think that there is some technique or strategy. There isn’t. There is only the need to relax and guide the conversation artfully, since we are the only one in the room who speaks the language.
I increasingly am able to give myself permission to let go of the need to be a really good language teacher. All those years when I thought that if I could just learn how to do storytelling I would be happier in my classroom, and people would like me more. Now I see that I never had to learn how to tell stories, or to ask them (the phrase storyasking has always annoyed me).
I never had to learn anything new. It was all there within me. And I blocked it because I tried so hard. The more I learned to just sit with my hurting blocked kids, waiting for us to trust each other more, the better it got.
This idea that we don’t have to do anything is kind of new to me. I don’t have to write any more books to figure it out, and I won’t. I can let go of my fears that I am not a good teacher. I can let go of my fears that my students won’t like me. I can let go of my fears about storytelling. I can let go of my fears about reading. I can let go of all of it.
More and more, I mistrust those who say that there is a certain way to do it that I should buy into. Who say that I should be a proponent of their way of doing it. There is and never was a certain way to teach a language and the best language teachers in the world are mothers. Yes, we have PQA and CWB and all the other stuff, but they are not the answer to our learning this way of sharing our language with others.
All of the strategies on this site, and there are many, will come and go, but the act of sharing languages lovingly will stay. That is what counts. The strategies, the acronyms that identify them, all are just guideposts. They help us, they keep us on the road, but they are not the road.
There is no road. There is just a heap of hurting kids and we can act like that isn’t happening if we choose, but it would be the wrong choice. They don’t need us to be snappy TPRS teachers. They don’t even know what TPRS is. They only need some kindness. Some compassion. They are children.
The good stuff, the loving sharing of language so that our students leave our classrooms each day feeling uplifted instead of beaten down, the good stuff, is free. But we block it thinking that we have to learn how to do it, how to do it, what strategies to use when.
We don’t have to learn how to do it. We just have to grab a guidepost like OWI or the Three Steps or R & D or Reading Option A or dictée and follow those steps and get out of the way and let the fine force that is comprehensible input happen, in spite of our desire to “teach”.
Each class will thus be different. Don’t fear that. Just bring the comprehensible input. Don’t worry about planning structures so much. Krashen has show us that when we plan structures we are trying to do something that just happens naturally if but allow it to happen. Why reinvent the wheel?
Perhaps we plan structures and fret so much because we feel that we need to be a good teacher, to have others tell us that we are “doing a good job”. But when we plan structures we just mess it up because we don’t know what the order of acquisition is. We don’t and we need to stop acting like we do.
It’s not about the strategies we use to contact our kids.
More:
https://benslavic.com/blog/we-must-be-comfortable-in-our-classrooms/
https://benslavic.com/blog/teaching-in-a-natural-way/
https://benslavic.com/blog/how-i-really-feel-about-language-competitions/
https://benslavic.com/blog/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
https://benslavic.com/blog/work-smarter-not-harder/ (for those in the group who still think that taking work home is a good idea)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRhq-yO1KN8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VCwBzGdPM