Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and that people in the U.S. are not.
Extending this (what I consider to be a) fact about the two nations to the teaching of languages, we can say that many language teachers in the U.S. don’t even explore CI – in spite of its considerable promise – because they are unhappy and CI instruction requires that the teacher be happy and cheerful in the classroom along with the kids.
No blame on the teachers. How could they not be unhappy? Any sane individual who looks at what education has become in our country would – if they looked deeply enough – want to weep at what American teachers go through every day. It’s literally insane. Most building and district admins in the U.S. are very dark in the way they run things.
The teachers just can’t climb out of their misery, and no blame. The dark overlords of American corporations run things and this is true in our field as well, so dominated by the textbook industry and district finances that spend far more money on research and data collection than on teacher training.
It’s sad, and the kids are the real losers in this. They bring their innocence and happiness to their language classrooms, but their unhappy teachers can’t reciprocate the happiness that they bring because of the daily onslaught on their sanity by the masked system.
Teachers who do CI and bring the happiness into their classroom in spite of all of the opposition are the real heroes of American education. They may not even know it, but they are slowly bringing the healing.
They are like little light bulbs in a dark land and their efforts will eventually bring more light, like the lighting in sports stadiums, and then more light, and eventually – over many decades – the dawn will arrive and the sun will shine in American language education, and it will all be new for the first time.
The efforts of such teachers, who are so reviled right now by their wraith colleagues, reflect very strong inner work, crushing work that breaks many of them every day and so many quit.
The few who stay (true to the research) and make CI – not the new kind of fake CI – work are bringing the light to the deep institutional darkness. No one else can except those few.
Language teachers who do CI and stick with it are heroes, even if they do it shittily.