Jonathan Marye, commenting here this morning on the Candy – 1 post (Aug. 5th) about how NT is different from collecting big bags of TPRS candy, has shared an image-rich, very tasty meal with us today. Bon appétit tout le monde and thank you for the delicious imagery, Jonathan! –
So, in essence, we are to shift our mindset from stockpiling a mega-warehouse of candy and try to hone our foraging instincts to find those chanterelles, morels and other such precious “student-directed-emergent-and-pop-up-language-fungi” that happen in our classes naturally, so that our instruction/facilitation in NT is TRUFFLED (if I may so use one of my favorite French descriptors) with a rich, organic quality that is hard to resist, even by the most finicky of mushroom-hating, candy-loving students.
I mean, the mushrooms are out there. But we have lost our foraging instincts in some way perhaps, and we need to trust that we will find them, and NT seems to allow us the freedom to do that and trust that.
Easier said sometimes than done.
Easier to know that you can count on a warehouse of stockpiled treats & eats but who can sustain a healthy language-aquisition diet on a steady stream of fly-swatter vocab et. al?
I guess we just need to be willing to let go of that controlled stockpile of candy as our go-to staple.
Of course, holding to the maxim of “COMPELLING” input as key, I think that a delicious piece of candy every once in a while, especially a tried and true one for the particular group you are facing, is to be allowed, but again, not as the staple.