In our desire to plan this, plan that, get control of our stories, have a lot of charts on the wall (most of which only serve to confuse students), and then the next day do it again, squeezing all the LIFE AND SPONTANEITY out of our classes, we miss the entire point. For those like me who may have forgotten, this passage I wrote years ago goes a long way in helping me return my gaze to what is truly important in language teaching:
Teaching using comprehensible input requires work on the part of the teacher. It requires an emotional as well as an intellectual commitment. Breaking old habits is never easy. It takes courage. Yet the rewards for those who make the effort are considerable. Teaching well with CI makes teaching the rewarding experience it is meant to be.
Stories made using CI bring an immediate sense of play into the classroom. Chris Mercogliano, writing in “Paths of Learning” (Issue #17, p. 12, 2004), states that there is considerable evidence for “a classical link between education and play.” He points out that the ancient Greek words for education/culture (paideia), play (paidia), and children (paides) all have the same root.
Chris asks us to consider the following remarkable conversation in Plato’s Republic between Socrates and Plato’s brother, Glaucon:
“Well, then,” Socrates begins, “the study of calculation and
geometry, and all the preparatory education required for dialectic,
must be put before them as children and the instruction must not be
given the aspect of a compulsion to learn.”
“Why not?” asks Glaucon.
“Because the free man ought not to learn any study slavishly. Forced
labors performed by the body don’t make the body any worse, but no
forced study abides in the soul.”
“True.”
“Therefore, you best of men, don’t use force in training the children
in the subjects, but rather play. In that way can you better discern
toward what each is naturally directed.”
I agree with Plato.