Our PLC member Craig West has written a fine passage about language acquisition. It goes deep, very deep, and should cause each of us to wake up with a jolt and again assess how we are teaching:
My daughter is almost two years old. She’s just starting to really put sentences together. The other night we were laying there with her between us just enjoying the beauty of her little words. What a wonder it is. What a sweet thing to celebrate. We laughed and smiled celebrating this sweet little voice. It struck me how little celebration goes on in the classroom (most classrooms). We don’t sit back and celebrate natural development. We show no respect for the natural process. We don’t even give the natural process a chance. Every emergent utterance is scrutinized and picked apart according to modes, noun verb agreement, and all that meaningless high minded academic elitist mumbo jumbo. Where is the celebration? It is a sad thing to see a process that can potentially bring such joy minimized to a cold binary calculation.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2B6SjMh_w