Normally, I focus only on content here, but I would like to register something else here in this post today. I am feeling, for the first time in 20 years of slogging through the TPRS/CI wars, real and authentic hope. What does this mean?
I’m trying to say here that I finally feel, as I travel on my own CI journey, no need to argue with people about the best way to do CI. Any old timers who have been reading here over the past two decades know what that means – we have spent so much time, without coming to agreement, about how CI should actually be done in our classrooms.
What a relief! Things are popping! I have the same “Let’s go camping!” or “Let’s go climb that mountain!” attitude that I did in the early days, when we all weren’t at each others’ throats over things connected to ego and “me, my and mine”. They’ve gone their way and I’ve gone mine.
My hope is expressed in this poem by Hafiz and an article I wrote about it:
We just can’t afford to be bored in our life’s work. It’s terrible to go to a job every day that we don’t enjoy. We must find a way to make it fun. We just must. We don’t have a choice. For me, twenty years ago, it was like, “Either this comprehensible input stuff is going to work for me, or I’m out.”
There is a poem by the great Persian poet Hafiz (14th c.) that made me think about the importance of enjoying our work. The translation is from my friend Danny Ladinksy in a collection called The Gift (Penguin Compass, 1999). Here is the poem:
Last
Night
God
Posted
On the Tavern wall
A hard decree for all of love’s inmates
Which read:
If your heart cannot find a joyful work
The jaws of this world
Will probably
Grab hold of your
Sweet
Ass.