Jim said:
I’m curious to know what you all think is most hurting kids in our buildings (I can think of many things), or shall I say where we should focus in order to help nurture a capable generation of young adults into our society. The food? The grades? The compulsive nature of school? Class periods? Nature deficit? Chalk dust?
I said:
Jim in my opinion the hole in their hearts is what is hurting them most. The being ignored as people in favor of government/corporate run testing programs that measure gains about which they could personally not give a rat’s tutu because those gains don’t really lead to fluency.
What is hurting them most is the absolute denial of who they are as human beings in their language classrooms. They are stung daily by being made to feel stupid because they can’t conjugate a verb or keep up with a story.
Stories and PQA are light years better than the old stuff, but can they reach the hearts of all the kids in the room? We know that they cannot. (We blame it on our own inexperience with CI, but is it that?)
Comprehensible input in the form of stories and PQA can reach some of their hearts, but it is still a teacher centered thing, and god awful hard work. Why not explore comprehensible input in the form of music? Since music reaches their hearts – and our own – where nothing else does, why not aim our instruction at their hearts, and not always at their funny bones? Why not find a strong pedagogical interface between CI and music?
Jim I hear in your question a desire to know why we who claim how wonderful stories and PQA are don’t reach more kids with them. I may be reading that into what you wrote above, and if so I apologize. But, to say it again – stories and PQA have shown that they can teach a ton of language but do they address the holes in kids’ hearts?
The CI that we are delivering now is still a mental thing except for the laughter, and it doesn’t reach all the kids. Maybe we can reach more kids and do a better job with the CI if we create a way of delivering CI that addresses more emotions than just that of laughter. If Krashen is right, shouldn’t we be developing ways of delivering comprehensible input that reaches ALL human emotions? Is twenty years of experimentation with stories by the best teachers in the world long enough before we go looking for other ways of making Krashen’s ideas work, not by leaving stories and PQA behind, but by expanding the field, the possibilities of CI?
Duke will be here in Denver this week. I’m going to wring his brain out, and learn what he already knows and has been working on now for years – how lucky we all are – how to teach and reach the holes in their hearts with music, so that they pay attention for real, not because I tell them to sit up with squared shoulders and clear eyes and focus on the CI.
Using technology to bring music to them that is fully comprehensible and, because it is music, begins to fill the holes in their hearts with the multifaceted emotions of life, the kind of life that happens in the world beyond school buildings – that is where my ship is going.
Again. No – technology is not bad. Yes, it is misused by teachers who don’t know how to use it in the service of the generation of meaningful and interesting comprehensible input.)
Maybe I can just generate CI from the twexted songs – those four ass-kicking songs – I have just begun to use, and you also, Jim. And Andrea. Maybe I don’t need to do uniquely stories and PQA. Maybe I have songs.