When Annick Chen and I presented to our school’s math department on comprehensible input/gesturing the other day, I was circling “Annick wants candy”. After a few minutes, a sour member of the math department said in French, “Je veux dormir” and kind of put her head down in an attempt to get a laugh that never came from the rest of the group. Obviously a 4%er in college.
This was a little lead pipe, the worst kind. If a kid openly and directly throws a big lead pipe into the spokes of the comprehensible input bike and knocks it onto the ground, that’s an EERP moment and of course we have to put that machine into action immediately.
But the real difficulty in our work is always going to be the little insults, the little messages that “I’m bored!” or “This sucks!” (when it doesn’t suck at all!) from dumb ass kids who need to be muzzled. Those behaviors really need our attention. Our work with comprehensible input depends on a feeling of good will in the class. What do we do when confronted with those little lead pipes?
I say we keep our reactions to little lead pipes out of the general flow of the class. We let it go. If we address little lead pipe behavior in class, we can really get stung by certain kids, who know exactly where the line is and how to artfully fly under it, so that the entire class has just seen the teacher insulted, they all know that it happened, and yet it was thrown out into the general flow of the class conversation in such a way that the teacher can’t respond to it. Those are seriously dangerous moments, because they are sample lessons by the offenders in how to undermine the class.
So we avoid any kind of public contact with the little lead pipe wielders. But, privately, we can say to the kid, “Hey, you seem unhappy in class. Can you tell me what’s going on?” (In both cases – with big lead pipes and little lead pipes – we always address the behavior, not the kid.)
The usual answer we get then is evasive. This is where we can let it go for the moment, but we then bring it up again. If the kid continues to be evasive when confronted, but sulks in class, we must call the parents and arrange a meeting. But we won’t get a meeting if the kid has an A. So we have to hit the kid where they live in order to bring them to life in class – at the level of the grade.
This is where Robert’s attention to the three modes of communication comes into play. It is where we, who believe that using comprehensible input in our classes is the best way to teach languages, must grade kids in terms of what the kids actually do in class as human beings, which describes the huge topic that has dominated this site for the past year now.
When this site was public, people used to argue in favor of letting a kid have a good grade just by doing well on the quizzes and showing that they understood the material, regardless of their level of actual human interaction. I disagree with that. I don’t care if a kid’s mode of participation in class is very quiet or very active, I feel that their grade should be characterized by the rules and now the metacognition poster and not by how many questions they can get right on tests.
I don’t see any of those folks on this blog, however, which makes me very happy. I really am devoted to this kind of uplifting of the human in spirit in our classes via the rules, which, the way they are written, require a kind of uplifting behavior from the kid. This is called civic and social responsibility. I honestly don’t believe that a child should be rewarded with a good grade in a language class by working in a robotic way. That is not what we do.
So we try to draw the sulker out of their little world where memorization dominates their learning style (really it’s just a scared little kid whose memorization toys have been taken away from her). We do that by working at the level of the kid’s grade. We make the kid show up in class.
Either we are going to follow our approach or not. Pep talks don’t work. I wish we would all get over that. Giving a kid a pep talk, lots of warnings, etc. – all of that is just stupid. When are we going to get that words mean very little to kids, and that by the time they are in high school they have become adept at playing teachers for grades?
Usually, kids who wield these little lead pipes are usually the ones who are concrete sequential learners and have never had to show up as real human beings in human situations where reciprocality and back and forth verbal play is required like in our classes. This absoulutely freaks them out on some level. It means that they have to grow.
Can you imagine? The teacher makes it crystal clear that their grade depends on how much they show up to play in class and not on how much they can memorize? That’s a tough one for some of these little robotic middle school memorizers who just spent learning over the past six years that the school game is played via memorization.
Anyway, I missed it. What? The pipe was that small. What pipe? The math teacher’s little lead pipe. My biggest fear is that we don’t even recognize when an intervention is needed, as I did when the teacher casually said during my presentation of circling, “I want to sleep”.
When that sour math teacher said that she wanted to sleep during my little twenty minute modeling of CI, which was well received by others in the group, who were “getting” French and laughing, she was conveying a ton of information to me and I missed it all. She was saying:
I think this is stupid.
I don’t want to be here.
I don’t see how this relates to math.
Where is the verb conjugation chart?
etc.
Then and there I should said “Thank you, I’ll let you go now”, and stopped teaching. Or something. I’m not sure what the best response would have been. Any ideas? That is what I feel is needed now, a discussion about how to deal with the little lead pipe wielders, since we did a good job of coming up with at least something for the big lead pipe wielders.
We need to talk here before school starts next year about how we get our radar in shape for ALL sizes of lead pipes, how to recognize those subtle comments that weaken the class (you know what I mean by that) or openly threaten to destroy it all together. Otherwise, the thousands of instructional blog articles posted here over the years on how to do comprehensible input amount to nothing.