We take delight in leaving our old stodgy paranoid piece of our teacher self behind. We relax no matter how hard it is for us. All we have to do is be aware of our intention to be relaxed and milk the right sentences and do the only thing that we really have to do in our work as teacher: deliver interesting comprehensible input, which is a simple thing made complex by too many CI experts. How to keep it simple? Be vulnerable.
I’ll look for a few other posts from the past about letting ourselves be free with our classes, one on jazz and one on Handel. All we have to do is learn speak to our students in ways that trap the joy in the phrases that happen during class (which phrases cannot be planned), as each phrase that we milk is a link between our hearts and our students’ hearts. It’s jazz, what we do.