From John:
Last week, in an email exchange among our little Latin CI cohort, Bob wrote this:
“Breathe. Enjoy what you are doing today. Make sure (Dave also reminded us) that laughter has a chance of happening in every class. It really doesn’t cost much, but the dividend is huge.”
I would add, not only is it huge, but it is all-important. What is the use of putting on a serious grimace, and plowing through the subjunctive, just to say we “covered” it while 90% of our students don’t succeed on the test (and justifying it with the bell curve), and no one enjoys themselves? Rather, we could say that a FL class is a waste of time any day students do NOT have some sort of pleasurable or at least lighthearted experience of the language. Of course, discipline comes first, and students need to interact in as human of a way as possible and be held accountable when they don’t, but it’s kind of a chicken-egg question: They do not enjoy themselves because they have not been allowed to enjoy themselves since Kindergarten, and now any attempt a teacher makes to create a pleasurable experience and be human and vulnerable in front of the class is met with scorn, derision, etc. But how will they ever learn to really learn a language if we don’t break the cycle, even in whatever little ways we can? This is not about being a doormat. But it’s not about giving up on our students either. As Ben and others have repeated recently, we need to preserve our energy, sanity, and our jobs. But we do this IN ORDER TO keep our sights on that priority of real human communication in the classroom. We all are walking different paths, different tightropes, between the extremes of doormat and drill sergeant. As long as we don’t give up on the ideal of human communication, we can’t do wrong by our students.