I wonder how we get to know more about the world. Hmmm. Maybe through all the language teachers who work so hard in very rough situations in schools but are now beginning to see real results? But those teachers often think that their work has no purpose, not really, because the kids aren’t interested. Hmmm.
The kids haven’t been interested bc of the way the language has been taught. What has been an extended result of this situation? Isolation and mistrust between nations. Does our work as teachers have any real purpose in the world? Yes, it brings greater knowledge between peoples. But it hasn’t, because we haven’t been effective, because of the approach we’ve taken for a hundred years.
It’s the good version of the Domino Effect. When we learn languages FOR ACTUAL ACQUISITION, walls between nations must come down. This has happened in a very dramatic way – rent the film “Searching for Sugarman”. Societies learn about and respect each other when language/culture are shared. Our work with CI brings that.
Our work as next week we begin another Monday in the trenches, and we are all so tired, has purpose bc kids are now sitting up in their desks and getting the language, and when they get it, once some kind of tipping point is reached, humanity will have a much greater awareness of who is really over there in the next country and what they are REALLY thinking because they will be able to talk to them.
Susan Gross, whom we never mention enough here for her astounding contribution to this work, used to alway talk about the healing the world part of our work and I was always a bit skeptical. But now I can see that I just didn’t share her vision. Languages open doors. One of my students in SC years ago got into Harvard partially on the back of a brilliant essay in which he drew a door on the front of his paper with a key in it labeled “language”.
So what we do is no joke. It used to be, but we were thinking small then. Now look. Papua New Guinea, as Sabrina has said, has all those dialects. Those people used to fight. Probably still do. Like we in more civilized countries don’t, right?
They don’t have knowledge of each other. Having a way to teach that actually brings that knowledge via the key of language represents a significant and most remarkable uptick in the slow curve that we are all moving on towards the humanity of the future, which is not doomed, just in transition.
The curve is bending toward goodness. I am certain we will still be people, with all of our problems, but we will be happier people when we can talk to each other instead of being isolated from each other bc of the failed language piece. What country can afford to buy $157 textbooks for all their students anyway?
Big textbook corporations are you reading this? You can only sell so many books. And we offer a better product because your books don’t really have the desired effect, which you know already. We have a standard to meet – Communities. We used to not even TALK about that standard bc it seemed so impossible to do. Because of textbooks.
But now look. Judy, who is American living in France, and Sabrina, who is French living in Chicago, USA, are working with kids to bring them together via skype and shared stories and could that not be the first of millions of such shared ventures into the Communities standard and perhaps the first shared LOW COST cultural exchange events in the world?
Again, large corporations produce textbooks claiming all sorts of impossible things about bringing cultures together bc of the wonderful ideas in their books. Other large corporations actually move kids around the globe to that end – organizations like AFS (I had 43 different nations represented once in SC on an AFS “bus stop” years ago) and Youth for Understanding. Really cool, right?
Not really, the one shared quality about those kids was that their parents could all afford the exchange. Nice. All the kids of monied people in the world get to share culturally. If you’re poor, forget it.
I need a millionaire reading this to give me money for my Pd. 6 French class, a group of kids who almost every day ask me what we are doing for a fund raiser so they, many undocumented, can go to Paris. It is their heart’s desire. They just want to go. But they are too poor. So send me the money.
No, I won’t try to take the undocumented ones. I guess they get to stay in their poor little houses around the high school off of Federal Boulevard, with the gangs. They have already been international travelers, anyway right? Shot at international travelers, but international travelers nonetheless.
Back to the point. We must raise the question, are only the people who can afford it going to continue to be the ones who get to travel? Or, at least through the Class Competitions we are doing here, will poor kids be able to visit with kids from other countries or at least other states via free technology that we don’t have to pay a book company to use?
Languages getting the fresh breeze of CI instruction breathed into them. Do you see how this connects to the failed textbook piece? Is this not exciting? Could it be an exponential language acquisition curve world wide that we are on and we are now just down on the flat smushed down part of the curve now? Keep on teaching, y’all!
And we’re not just working on these class competitions to please some dumbass administrator who has been made to work by his bosses as a robot who makes me adhere to the Communications standard. No, not for that reason. Rather, for a greater reason. To make language classes real.