A repost from 2008 that fits in with a recent thread here:
There were so many great strategies. There were so many that I couldn’t keep track of them all. It was like a wagon loaded with too many bricks. The bricks at the bottom got lost over time, and the wagon kept getting heavier!
That extra weight led to extra daily planning, to a sense of being weighted down in trying to move on down the road of teaching. With that weight came a concern that I was “missing” something, that there was some special brick that I needed THAT DAY to teach a certain “concept”, but I couldn’t find it.
I forgot that I could only do one thing at a time in my classroom. I forgot that the research says that speaking in L2 in an interesting and meaningful way that my students can understand is the best way to teach a language.
Give me stories. Give me my fine, well-tuned, weekly schedule. No bricks there. No extra weight. Just stories, dictation, reading, music, and all that good TPRS stuff, in a holistic, streamlined form that has made my professional life a heaven, when it was once a hell.
Strategies. What a bunch of bunk.