My department chair here at our school in New Delhi is Zach Al Moreno. We were just hanging out talking about teaching this morning and Zach said something that made me realize that staying in shape professionally (my theme for today) cannot be done without constant remembrance of one particular fact about how we acquire languages.
Zach said:
…if it takes 600 hours of input to reach basic fluency and if we have less than that in our TPRS programs, then we cannot achieve basic fluency in our students even in the best of conditions….
Why is this important to remember? Because many of us go through the day with the fatal thought in our heads that if we just teach harder, get better at storytelling, find the magic bullet in this work, we will get our students to higher levels of demonstrable fluency, and then the big people around us will love and approve of us, and we will be happy.
It ain’t gonna happen. We’ll only get to the happy part if we stop worrying so damn much about our teaching. Demonstrable fluency (I would assume that would be something in the range of 600 – 1000 hours) is not possible when we don’t even have enough hours to get our students to basic fluency. It’s just math.
Yes, we could have our students read at home to make up the other few hundred hours we need to even get them up to basic fluency, but how many kids would do that? Maybe 1%.
We can’t do the true Krashen approach (Zach’s term) in the time we have. It’s a disaster to our mental health to forget the above and become little versions of Mr. and Mrs. Fix Everything. We can’t. We won’t.
There are no magic bullets. There is only us with our kids, hanging out with them in love and shoulder to shoulder co-creation of fun and interesting things, which then enables us to stay in shape professionally in what then becomes a peaceful act of teaching, teaching as art, which then carries over to our students, and then we learn something.