David Ganahl in the Inland Empire is not just a Spanish teacher but also a swim coach. He has told me that in the classroom and at the beautiful outdoor pool they have at his high school there in Los Angeles (Tina and I visited him at his school last summer) his main wish is to motivate his students.
I consider this statement to be of utmost significance. It is because motivated students learn. But I do not see this in the general conversation across the board in our online communities, which is focused more on how to teach, not on how to motivate. David’s position perhaps reminds us that we might be focused on the wrong things in our general online CI communities.
It makes sense to think that motivated students will learn more than kids who are taught in merely clever ways. Indeed, there may be too many clever ideas being talked about in TPRS – circling, targeting, etc. – and not enough discussion about how to include and motivate kids in our language classrooms.
Too many clever ideas, too much going on in the mind of the teacher and not enough attention focused on the creation of a “language tissue” in the classroom that alone can build the most important thing of all in any language classroom: community via inclusion of all the students.
Anyway, David told me that, on vacation in Hawaii last week, he was on his 7th reading of A Natural Approach to Stories. Those of us who know him won’t be surprised, because David is no stranger to hard work – he is an incredibly dynamic personality in his school, a Teacher of the Year. And what did David tell me that he took away from all those readings of that book?
It was not just the ideas on how the Invisibles work, the one word images, etc., which are important things but not the bone marrow of the thing. He told me that the biggest idea he took from that book is that if the kids are to truly acquire the language they must be focused on the meaning of what we are saying to them. I so agree! And David is a huge community builder in his school. The two are related.
It makes me think of David’s swimmers. In training and in racing they are not focused on how they are moving their arms and legs. They are not even thinking.
Thinking is the job of the coach. That’s us. We must think about getting our students focused on the meaning. Like David’s athletes, our students must be out of their minds to learn the language. I thank David for sharing these ideas with me.