We need to stop thinking and working under the crippling aspects of fear. We can work rather in a sense of trust that all will be well. The method demands that. It demands courage.
Nobody is going to come in and discover that we are seriously flawed and summarily kick us out of the building. Many administrators and colleagues have recently awakened from their sleep. The reality of the changes we are now in towards comprehensible input methods has woken them up. So let’s get over the fear. We are not the ones who need to be afraid right now.
Nobody is going to say, “Oh! That’s all wrong. That’s not how you do it!” We are all going to do this work in a way that exactly reflects who we are and our own personalities and there never will be a right way and a wrong way to do it.
It’s a process and not a method. Our furtive attempts to speak to them in the target language and to get them reading in the TL, our focus on input, are good enough. We are good enough. We make a mistake when we are afraid of not being able to do this work, because it is a fact that there is no right way to do it. It’s all new. Nobody is an expert. We are all just trying. That’s enough.
It is enough to try to communicate with our kids over 90% of the time in the target language we align with the ACTFL 90% Use Position Statement and with the current move towards communicative competence and away from memorization.
In so doing we align with the Three Modes of Communication of ACTFL. We then begin to enjoy a process of much greater job satisfaction then we could have ever thought possible. We also experience much greater enrollments. Even if we think we are messing it up, we are good enough and we will get better over time.
We begin to enjoy our days, ourselves, our kids, and the fear begins to go away.