I have an AP teacher friend who may actually think that the Achievement Gap is all about lazy kids. She may actually think that only the kids who do their work and who get into college should be the ones who deserve to succeed. My friend may actually think that her job is not really about speaking the language in class, but to make learning selective to book intelligence, which favors the privileged. After all, that is how it has always been done. Now, my friend probably doesn’t go to the extreme of using the book to consciously separate the white wheat from the chaff, the AG kids, because it offers the latter, instructionally, stuff that they can’t nor want to understand. But that result may nonetheless be true in the instruction that she is providing for her students. The AG is real and it is real in her AP classroom. She teaches what Dakota Ridge High teachers in Jefferson County call “Academic Spanish”. Why should she go to the trouble to arrange things so that students actually hear the language in class when instruction can be made so very easy for her if she just presents the language as a bewildering set of rules and inaccessible cognitive activities that, somehow, all happen on paper? What does speaking the language in class have to do with learning a language? Some of the riff raff might even understand it, which would upset her base assumption that kids who are smart are real language students and those who are not so smart, the lazy ones, are not real language students. Obviously, those lazy ones who “don’t do their work” don’t deserve to hear the language – they must receive the book and learn some discipline! Those kids, as they entered their first year of study, came in with a lot of excitement and a lot of hope about learning a language, the language they chose, but now, because they don’t do their homework, they get lazy (reflecting their lack of a proper upbringing – shame on them!), they are made to think that they can’t learn. Every day, they sit there by the tens of thousands in schools throughout our country, continuously bombarded by the invisible world message that they suck. If you don’t believe that, make a side trip by the foreign language rooms in your building tomorrow morning and look into those kids’ faces. We in America need to educate those teachers who turn AG kids away from AP classes. We need to teach them that all kids can learn a language and all kids can pass the AP exam if they could just :
– hear the language enough (a lot!) in those crucial first two years
– be given a chance to succeed by a direct and simple and honest approach to assessment, one that makes sense to them
– follow a Krashen-based plan throughout (i.e. one that highlights output only at the right time and that properly incorporates the supreme role of reading in the game of language acquisition)
– be given the message that THEY ARE GOOD
This entire AG issue as it relates to language learning is about the book and how it has hurt kids, and how it contributes, every day, to taking the natural joy and fun of learning a language away from kids. Let us strive to be teachers who don’t merely teach languages. Let us strive to learn how to teach kids first! Let’s all become Achievement Gap teachers, as well as AP teachers. Let’s show America what patriotism is all about.