Greg said:
…it certainly seems like an impossible task sometimes to bring my kids out of the boredom mode school has doped them into….
I share this dilemna. Those kids, our kids in America, have become cyborg like. The more they interact with a screen, the more like the screen they become. We become what we focus on. When we focus on each other in CI classes, we become more like each other. We become more human.
When we focus on machines, we become more like machines. Becoming fully human, as we are meant to be, is no easy process. What we are doing is not just a method for teaching languages, it is a process of becoming. Those kids have every reason to resist, bc it is so much harder to be real than to be a machine.
What is unique about Greg’s reaction is that he seems to know and accept that. That’s huge. Many people just don’t see anything growing after their initial efforts and conclude that the seeds from Krashen Seed Co. don’t work. It takes careful tuning and long hard work, but we can do it.