Ours can no longer be referred to as the “red-headed stepsister” of the field of education. Au contraire, we are poised now, with the advent of CI as it becomes more each day accepted as the way people acquire languages, to reform life for a good percentage of our students. Why?
It is because, unlike most of the other subjects in schools, our students are 100% equipped with the machinery to succeed in school (vs. math or chemistry or those other fields which actually require a kind of intelligence that not all people have). All students without exception can acquire a language. After all, they already have acquired at least one language.
Our field is unique among school subjects because language acquisition functions in the way that Noam Chomsky has described:
…language is acquired by everyone, effortlessly…merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure and care…
So the next time you want to give up, think about how, if you just tame the CI animal and build community in your classroom, you can make a difference in the lives of hundreds if not thousands of young people.
So don’t give up.