Friday, a Simon Constable column appeared in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal (page A13, Friday, May 21). It was called On-the-Job Straining. It reviews a book by Tony Schwartz called The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. The entire first paragraph of Constable’s article is a grabber:
“Let’s not be coy about it. At times, life inside the modern corporation (read: school building) can be, well, less than a cheerful, uplifting, rewarding and dignified experience. Most of us deal with such a work environment as a melancholy fact of life, much as the ancient Greeks learned to tolerate a near constant state of war. We muddle through, or jump from job to job until we find one where we can survive or even flourish.”
Hello! But in our cases right now, with thousands of applicants for one job, we sit on our jobs, although they may not be full expressions of who we are and thus not in full support of our mental and physical well-being, and by extension, in full support of our students.
Constable’s paragraph above (especially the “constant state of war” part) describes my pre-Krashen experience perfectly – 24 miserable-ass years of it. However, since I have learned how to teach using comprehensible input, the opposite is generally true. Tough times in the classroom there are, of course – it’s part of the job when the job involves kids growing up in a sick society.
But, in general, teaching using CI is uplifting, happy, very productive (immeasurably more productive), and is an inspiring way to earn a living. My kids rock, and I am already looking forward to next year with them, because they have bought into storytelling/CI with me.
Back to Mr. Schwartz. He talks about our twisted belief that more work means better outcomes in the workplace. Are there really teachers who think that working harder means better teaching? That’s weird.
My own experience is that using CI involves much much less expenditure of time and energy in and out of the classroom. The difference is so extreme that it is laughable. Believe it or don’t.
Obviously this is a huge topic, but Mr. Schwartz is merely asking us to stop and look at what we might do to bring our lives more into balance in the workplace, and to stop struggling through our days so much. I’m certainly for that.
Concerning sleep, Schwartz says that burning the candle at both ends does little more in terms of work outcomes than making you “yearn for a nap.” Mr. Schwartz notes that “in an Ericsson study of violinists, the important point was that the top performers slept the most, too.”
So I suggest that we deserve to be happy all year in our work and in our play, and to arrive at this point in the year in one emotional piece, and not need all summer to recover. There’s something messed up about that.
Let’s stop buying into the idea that teaching is supposed to be a hard, frenetic way to earn a living. How can we impart knowledge to others when our freneticism clouds our message? We can’t teach languages when we are uptight.
Let’s recharge our batteries all year – CI allows for that! We can be in balance all the time in spite of the sometimes awful energy in school buildings. Those who may doubt that we can relax in our jobs are invited to attend a summer training and find out if all this CI stuff is really what it’s cracked up to be.
O.K. I just wanted to say “all that it’s cracked up to be”. But really, those who believe that doing CI in the form of TPRS or in its other forms is exhausting provide a good example of an instance when a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.