We must be aware of the invisible though vital web of connectedness that exists between our students. Of course there is the entire web which includes us as teachers, but there is also a web between the kids themselves.
It is a web that potentially houses mistrust or positive relationships between the individuals in the class. The degree to which we get good cute answers from a class during any L2 discussion must be seen as dependent at least in part on the chemistry that exists between the particular group of students in any class.
That is why, as the year begins again, we should spend time building trust between individuals. How can there be lots of cute answers if there is no trust? Most of us take specific time to build trust via various team building activities in L1 during the first week, but we should always be on the lookout for ways to build trust among the team all year long.
Just last week, toward the beginning of class, a quiet superstar kid cracked a joke in his native Spanish and everyone started laughing. I just sat back and didn’t say anything as this boy cracked another one, this time eliciting an even larger round of laughter from the class, all of whom have Spanish as their first language. I have just enough Spanish, and I know that the boy is of very high character, that the content of his jokes was not inappropriate.
It kept going. A few other kids started egging this boy on and the laughter continued. A party of mostly Mexican humor ensued. Even the quietest, most shy kids were having a wonderful time. I sat listening in envy wishing I could understand all the shades of the humor. After fifteen minutes, I asked the boy to just take the “stage” area of the room and sit on an actor’s chair and keep going.
He kept going. All period. It was an amazing tour de force and after class I told the boy that he clearly has a future in stand up comedy, since he was making the stuff up on the spot, largely feeding off of information provided to him by about three or four other class leaders. I myself got some good comprehensible input that day, but the kids got something better – an even greater level of trust in each other than we had as a class before!
The next day, not by chance, we had the best story of the year and one of the best stories I can ever remember being a part of, a Matava story I had chosen for Valentine’s Day called “He Wants to Get Married”. The smiles, the total focus, the looks of happiness all around the room, the pointing out of certain kids to me during the CI to play a certain role in the developing story, the threatened insults between the kids that hid love for each other, all of it was off the chart.
I had forgotten to what extent stories depend on high quality cute answers provided by the class. I am certain that the success of the story that day was very much connected to the comedy of the day before.
Both days were fantastic, and the best thing about them was that I got paid for just hanging out with these awesome young men and women, laughing and feeling happy – we all felt happy just being together.