It saddens me when the passion that some of us have for comprehensible input methods is misinterpreted as being some kind of boastful claim to expertise and superiority in the field.
Just because we write and talk about what we do with such intensity and excitement, people latch onto that in oppositional terms and accuse us as bashing other ways of teaching language.
Are we really bashing other methods, or are we simply trying to articulate huge differences in our experiences with the old and the new way of teaching? I know in my own heart what my own intent is in all of this.
That appearance of bashing, in my own opinion, stems largely from enthusiasm. Of course disdain from others creeps in – this CI stuff really is just better. We never liked teaching in the old way. Accepting our enthusiasm instead of meeting it with disdain would require to0 much on too many levels from many many teachers who may be observing our joy.
Now, we are feeling as a young horse might feel when let loose in a kitchen after being fed some kind of super food and feeling his oats. A few things are going to get knocked over.
We are seeing our students – forget the strange data discussion for a moment – doing things we have never seen before in our classrooms, and it is blowing our minds, and making us kick up our heels in ways that would naturally offend anybody standing behind us.
But I like my role as a horse’s ass. My prayer is that I fully learn to allow myself to not worry about other people and their judgement of our passion for Krashen’s ideas. If, for whatever reason, they can’t really see what we are into in language education – it’s truly a quantum leap forward – I mustn’t react in frustration.
These leaps are happening everywhere right now, by the way, not just in languages. It is happening in language arts, I have heard. It’s all very malcom gladwelly. All we have to do is keep an open mind. We’ve nothing to lose. Not a thing. We can ride our really tall horses around and enjoy it.
I was on a bike ride today. Into my mind came an image of 30 to 50 feet tall horses leaping and bouncing around, horsing around, if you will, in the snow fields next to me as I rode along. Just big ass horses as tall as two or three story buildings, much bigger even than the really big horses that are everywhere in Colorado.
On two of them were Harrell and Drew Hiben, who had ridden up from SoCal just to shock me on my bike ride. And it was shocking to see such big horses, and that Robert and Drew could ride them, looking way down on me over on the road with such joy on their faces. They seemed to be having so much fun!
Why did such an image come into my mind? I don’t know. I put a lot of miles on my bike and all kinds of thoughts come in and I’m a weird ass anyway. But I do know that somewhere in that image, which I prefer to give a Jungian slant to, reflecting my own training, is a message that what we are into contains a lot of power that must be tamed. The image shows that what we are into is very pranciful, very horsifonic, very big, and very very much a real thing that is very likely to completely mess up the old concept of what a rodeo is, and fairly soon.