There is a thing that I call the October Collapse, where the reality of the year sets in and a lot of new CI teachers begin to collapse under the weight of what they are trying to do, and the students’ interest often collapses too.
The teachers often think it’s them. We can’t let that happen. It may be a lack of training in the basics of CI instruction, perhaps. No matter, what we have to do, certainly a mental health focus for October, is to make sure that teachers new to his kind of teaching don’t give up.
For some, the goal is just making it through the month, or the week, or the day….How to even do that? More to the point, how to keep you from feeling like it’s some kind of personal failing on your part, when new things are always hard in our profession?
I would bet that more teachers – perhaps thousands of them over the past few decades – often emotionally abandoned this new way of instruction in the period of time from late September to late October than in any other month for these reasons:
1. Having a weak CI curriculum with too much vagueness in it. (I have the solution to that in the StarChart).
2. Lack of setting in place the Classroom Rules early on (especially re: Rule #2).
3. Failure to build community via Card Talk before going into OWIs and ICIs.
4. Not using WBYT or the Jesus Rule in an effective way.
5. Not reading the Ultimate CI Book 1 carefully enough.