I hear comments about how teaching using CI can be exhausting. I don’t agree with that position. It’s about FLOW. (Search that category for more articles on this important TPRS/CI concept.) Flow is one of Krashen’s favorite words, judging by the things he’s said about it since about 2008.
It was stressful learning how to do this work. I had the old ways engrained in my teaching – the AP stuff, the absolutely false belief that only smart kids can learn a language, etc. And yes, I remember being tired much of the time, waking up at night thinking about CI, feeling very alone, etc. But it wasn’t learning how to implement CI (TPRS at that time) so much as simply my job that was making me tired, because I was still transitioning.
But now that I have gotten to a decent level of comfort with it, I am no longer down in the dumps about picking what I felt at the time was the wrong career. Now, I feel fantastic much of the time because of CI. My body has often been tired in doing this work, but not my mind and heart, nor my sense of humor, which got a great workout every day with kids who for the previous 25 years I had thought were boring people, out to make my life miserable because they wouldn’t engage with me.