This work is so multi-layered. Peeling the layers of an onion is truly appropriate to describe what we do. John made reference to this idea once in this comment:
…there are SO MANY THINGS about CI that my head wants to explode. The depths will not be plumbed….
Yes. The TPRS/CI onion is many layered. It is full of potential to honor other human beings in the real way. It is targeted to human beings who are under as great a level of stress than anyone on the planet right now – children. When we teach using Krashen’s ideas we reach those kids. Why not explore this work, then?
Language is beautiful. Look at Shakespeare, Hafiz, Flaubert, those guys. Language can be such a powerful force. It has transformative powers. Of course, language can be pummeled and misused, and that occurs so often these days that we have forgotten its capacity to uplift. It has been misused by language teachers to make many kids feel incapable, but those days are rapidly coming to an end as we increasingly see that comprehensible input is not just a passing fad, that it is not an oddity, but that in it lies the potential to completely transform the current miserable state of foreign language education in the United States.
Once I was coaching a teacher in a workshop setting. There were some other teachers – all new to CI – sitting around watching. I could sense that they thought that I was one of the experts. But there are no experts, really. There aren’t. It’s not about experts painting a new picture for people. It’s more about clearing the road. Clearing the road. What does that mean?
The road we all have chosen is covered with debris/old thinking. Fallen trees, trash, potholes, you name it – all those old ways of thinking, it’s all in the road. We have to drive down the road, stop our CI trucks, remove the debris, shove the trees off to the side of the road, get back in our trucks, drive a few miles further, move part of an abandoned car, get back in our trucks, teach some crappy classes, teach some good ones (picking up some hope along the way), and do stuff like that for a long time. It is scary to drive down a debris filled road.
There are no experts in this work. We are all just doing this together. But when enough of us drive far enough down the road, and we all remove enough debris, the road will be less full of debris for those future teachers who are driving down the road, with hope in their hearts, after us. Is that not a good reason to get psyched up for our return to work next week? By going to work every day, we are helping people. We just can’t see the extent of it now. But we will later.
It will become a normal thing, not an odd thing, to teach using comprehensible input. That will be a great day.
But for now, we have to keep moving trees. Nobody gets excused from that work. If we want to feel the happiness that this work brings, and guarantee that the road be less cluttered for those coming after us, we must remove junk from the road and replace it with a smoother surface that gets our students more efficiently towards fluency, so that their hearts are less heavy. I have had tastes of the happiness that this works brings, and it is fantastic.
An image comes to mind of a man proudly pointing to a car with the hood up, pointing out all the cool things that make the car run like the fuel pump and all the other parts of the engine. The teenager next to the car, however, is saying to the man, perplexed, “I just want to drive it!”