The old idea of “spare the rod and spoil the child” is out of date. It doesn’t align with the paradigm shift we are in. What shift?
Basically, in my view, the shift is about learning to love one another – an ancient idea that we seem to never get each time that it’s delivered to us from the Divine. But maybe this time we’ll get it. What does this mean?
It means that we need to stop being hard asses like we used to. You know what I mean – the strict teacher who bases her instruction on memorization and rewards only the few fast processors in the class and telling the rest of them to take a hike.
When that happens, and it happens every day to millions of children in language classrooms around the world, teachers who still teach like they did fifty years ago are “outed”. A hard core Krashen fan would probably say that such teachers deserve to lose their jobs and they also deserve the opprobrium of colleagues and kids.
The message is that they “can’t do it”, that they “don’t measure up”.
Those poor kids.
Those days are winding down, but excessively slowly. You know the story. TPRS gave the old traditional train engines a jolt, but that was in 1995 and we all excpected the change to CI to be fast and swift but that didn’t happen. Now in 2021 the textbook and something I all Fake CI are being used by the vast majority of people who call themselves CI teachers. I suggest with respect and no blaming that those folks don’t teach using CI; they teach using Fake CI – or Targeted CI.
Here’s my message:
With stories, teaching a language successfully is very difficult, but it reaches most students. Without stories, success is virtually impossible, and reaches only a few bright kids. You have to pick one of these. If you pick the first, you align with 21st century standards. If you pick the second, you align with nothing. You do, however, convey the illusion to lots of kids that they can’t learn a language. Don’t do that anymore.