It really is time to destroy the myth that problems and solutions in stories are difficult. This myth exists because in the past, when teachers have tried to use stories to teach certain vocabulary from lists, the stories lost their marrow and became like dry bone.
This was due to the constraints on interest that came with focusing the class on words in a list. The term “constraints on interest” is not my term; it’s Dr. Krashen’s and it’s based on hard research about how languages are acquired.
One reason that stories are seen as hard to make happen is that we have inadvertently trained teachers to think that they have to be some kind of superstar sort of leader: cute, clever, inspired and wonderfully intelligent who is rolling in enough money to attend conferences and get training all the time.
Most of us, present company certainly included, are generally vulnerable and overworked teachers who have always felt like strangers in a strange land (school buildings) just trying to find a way through the morass and inherent depression found in our jobs.
There are no experts. There’s just us, working shoulder to shoulder at what is a herculean task – that of shifting our focus as language teachers back to the research and the standards and away from the corporate influence so that we and our students don’t have to feel like such failures at the language learning game all the time, which causes us to lean on the textbooks even more.
Our professional prayers should be that our students finally can access the vast treasure trove of enjoyment of learning a language that, properly understood, awaits them if we just keep getting up each morning and going to work to try to align our instruction with the research. Our students have no one to protect them from teaching that does not have their best interests at heart, but supports the existence of the textbook.
On this topic Mr. Rogers has said, ““Children need adults who will protect them from the molders of their world.” Who are the molders of our children’s language worlds? Administrators should be, but they often – through sheer ignorance – become roadblocks to the proper implementation of best practices in their schools.
What other “molders of their world” are there? Certainly ACTFL should be one. But they have never really appropriately challenged the textbook and all the teachers who want to mold their students with chapters in a textbook, with computer programs that don’t work, with long lists of words, and with too big a focus on grades instead of using true research-based instructional methods that have the self-confidence of the student at heart.
WE are the molders of our students’ worlds. All we have to do is speak the language. We’re not entertainers. We can and we will do this work, and in the future it will be a lot simpler to learn and apply, because more and more of us will be doing it.
At some point, this way of teaching a language will become the norm. Imagine that!