I don’t want to get all philosophical on anybody here but yesterday was the Columbine shootings’ 15th anniversary and I went by the school about fifteen times yesterday. (I live a short block from it and I have to go right by the front of the school every time I want to get anywhere.)
So the thought I keep having is that one of the certain things I have learned after nearly four decades in teaching is that everybody wants and needs and craves love and approval. That is what I have learned in my career. But in most schools, most schools, those things are not readily available to every student. They aren’t. Far from it.
That last sentence describes the basic culture in Columbine at the time of the shootings, and since, with the same principal and the same student population – South Jefferson County hasn’t changed, with it’s really competitive suburban schools (Columbine’s football team has continued to win state championships) – and kids in the building keep getting bullied.
I have done two TPRS trainings with their ten teacher WL Department over the years and they still have zero CI presence there. I don’t think it’s an accident. It may be similar to the school teaching culture that gave Angie the (quite wrong) impression about her own ability to teach last year. We must choose the schools we teach in well – this work is hard enough without being in a WL department where everyone is still entrenched in 1950’s methods.
The CHS culture remains that you have to be cool, good looking, smart or athletic to be get the approval in that building. I know that because I removed my son, now sixteen, from Columbine a year ago, and that’s the short version, but as an example he was bullied by athletes in one class for athletes – yes, a class for athletes. He was bullied for real in class by the teacher and the students as he sat in the back of the room trying to be an invisible ninth grade skater in a roomful of upper classmen jocks.
Anyway, yes, I was saying that humans, especially humans who are still growing up, crave and need and want and long for approval during their day, whatever they do. They want approval so much, but, unfortunately, those things don’t seem readily available in most areas of life on this planet including life in high schools. The person who came into my mind as I wrote that last sentence is Laurie Clarcq, because she is a teacher who in fact is a fountain of giving out love and approval to her students, as a first thing, and not as a last thing, and as a real thing, and not a fake thing.
I think that one reason Laurie does that is because she knows that her students need a lively and active but not false kind of approval during class in order to learn. She knows that she needs to teach in an approval-rich, non fake, setting, and I think that THAT is why she has chosen to teach using stories.
She just knows that her students need more than just food and shelter and a book, that they mainly need love and approval and she knows that those things never were really available in the old grammar based classrooms, which separate kids so that there is always a group of haves and a group of have nots, like the entire Columbine HS culture to this day.
Laurie embraces TPRS/CI and she embraces her kids and they are ALL INCLUDED and that is the difference between how she teaches as a teacher who uses comprehensible input with stories and the traditional teachers around her. That right there is the difference. Laurie is not a fool. She does not condemn students with low grades when they can’t learn things that don’t help in language learning anyway. Laurie brings her kids success – she doesn’t make them grovel for it. For more on Laurie’s way of teaching see:
https://benslavic.com/blog/teacher-of-the-month-december/
Laurie’s generosity and her courage to use and develop CI instruction, by herself in upstate New York (just as most of us are alone in our buildings) exhibit a way of teaching that can generate big handfuls of love and approval in schools so that the Columbines can stop happening, so that cultures in which kids feel stupid and not good enough can go away. Maybe if Adam L. had not felt so useless in maybe just one of his classes, a language class, he wouldn’t have shot up those kids in Connecticut.
So in my opinion we are not just bringing stories in because they align with the research and with what ACTFL wants. That is just the surface level of what we are doing. What we are really doing, in my opinion, is much deeper than that – we are learning to level the playing fields in our classrooms so that all kids can be successful. That is something worth working for, something worth getting up for now late in April when some of us can hardly get one foot in front of the other to get up and out of bed to get to our schools every day.
Those are my thoughts on the anniversary of the Columbine shootings this year. I am thinking of how we can be part of the change in American schools in a very real way. God bless Columbine High School.
May God in His infinite mercy bring the real change to our schools, a change that is dynamic and noticeable and full of an abundance of real and genuine approval of our nation’s children so that all kids and teachers and administrators don’t have to fake the good will all the time like they do now, and so kids don’t have to take guns out and blow people away to show how pissed they are about things.
May we be privileged to work in service to real and lasting change. Finally. May all students be happy, may they thrive, in our schools, and if that is not possible, at least in our classroom, the ones we teach languages in. Stories help so much. We have seven years of articles and comments here that address just that point. Stories have the potential to bring massive change in how language classrooms are run. We’re onto something, and we know it, and we experience it every day.
May this next week, and all the weeks we teach this year and for the rest of our careers, be spent in service to students so that there may be no more Columbines. We are uniquely placed. We have something that is very precious that we can share with some very precious people. Let’s take advantage of that. Let’s not falter.