I think of a classroom in which the kids feel no stress. All they have to do is listen in a happy way to the French language. The room can be described by this line from Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage:
Là,tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté.
There, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace, and pleasure.
It is possible. Such a classroom surely can uncover the illusive road to the Pure Land, which is a place I would like to visit more often this year in my TPRS classroom (the term Pure Land is the word for heaven in Vietnamese).
Such a classroom represents a direction that Krashen’s work points to – if we do what Krashen suggests, we have a chance to teach, to provide our students with wonderful and compelling CI, which is so very different from the standard classroom tenseness.
In my view, Krashen is about making language learning actually easy for kids – I think he has used the term effortless. In a Krashen based classroom, there is less insanity and more order, less struggle and more unconscious absorption of the language, less ugliness and more beauty, less shaming and more honoring, less nervous fretting about what to cover next, and more trust in the flow of language for both the kids and the teacher.
I will again try for this kind of order and peace in my classroom this this year. All I have to do is go slowly enough, stay in bounds, make sure I get a loud group single word choral response from the entire class, and relax.
I just want to remember, when I think about teaching using TPRS, what Thomas Merton said in this regard:
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone with everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.