[ed. note: if you have recently joined this group and are new to CI, you will find this post extreme. Just don’t read it. There are many other posts – thousands of them – that can help you become a better CI teacher, lots of videos, some great primers, etc. Sometimes we get a little looney around her. But it’s a good kind of looney. And people are losing their jobs over this work, so I justify these musings.]
At the end of Tolkein’s The Two Towers (The Battle of Helm’s Deep) and also of the Return of the King (destruction of the Ring at Barad Dur), victory is won at the last minute. The saga leading up to those two events at the end of the second and third books of the trilogy, however, is marked by an almost complete absence of hope.
If we could compress the Lord of the Rings into an analogy describing our own careers in foreign language instruction (no small feat), we would come up with some hope that, even though the battle for kids’ minds and hearts in our language classrooms is raging now, not all is lost.
However, we see so many reports from the field here, more and more it seems lately, of CI teachers being cut down. It always happens at the building level where proper administrative support is missing and teachers who think in the old ways are in charge.
Let’s be clear here. I am comparing old style two dimensional teachers, who make their kids memorize and who drown them in too much required output way too early, as a breed of Orcs. The overall effect of those teachers’ work over decades has been devastating to what small amounts of hope kids may have had as they began their language learning careers, and so I justify the analogy.
Another analogy could be made between what we do and the Illuminati, a cultural YouTube phenomenon describing the end of the world brought about by a small group of people who control the way we all think. Many kids believe it. A third analogy is available in the movie Mask, which aptly describes the scene in many classrooms today where authentic human communication is missing in favor of masked behavior and piss poor communication.
So lots of evil out there. Lots of illusory thinking by lots of kids. Lots of fear. Lots of hiding behind masks. But aren’t we the teachers? Are we not the ones charged with giving kids hope? Isn’t that what teachers are supposed to do? Or are we just there to deliver instructional services to and serve the few, those elite ones in the best schools who are the only ones going to college anyway, and let the rest – all those poor kids who get in the way – be tossed aside because they waste the time of the teacher and of those few kids who are serious and “want to learn”?