Our ninth graders come to us after being broken into a learning pattern that represents a choke hold on creativity. We are being cavalier in thinking that a kid who has just gone through a process of being made to think in a certain way, the way the teacher tells them to think, can still think at the upper end of the taxonomy in creative and original ways.
We are naive in thinking that homework doesn’t drive grades in middle school settings. The homework and memorization wolverine takes hold in sixth grade and clenches down so hard during those middle school years that to ask them to feel comfortable in a CI setting is really asking a lot.
Many kids’ brilliance might take more than just the ninth grade year to come back into shine. Maybe we should teach traditionally for a semester or so and then play the CI card once we have placated the moms and convinced the kids that we are serious teachers first. Maybe that would take a lot of the confusion out of level one and ninth grade CI teaching.
One thing is clear – the “way things have been done” in the past regarding foreign language education is a much more imposing obstacle to the introduction of Krashen based methods into the classroom than we may think.