Let’s say it’s a year from now and it’s a Thursday morning in March of next year (2023), and you’ve been using the Star in your language instruction for about a year now, having signed up for both the Book 1 and 2 trainings a year ago back in March of 2022 with great results, but as you drive in to work that day you’re not sure what you want to teach.
You don’t care much because you never plan classes anymore, having learned that the more you do that, the shittier your classes are.
You now know how idiotic it is to plan, because since you stopped planning and started working uniquely with the Star, your test scores and student enrollment have both gone way up and the students and parents and your administrators are very happy after just that one year of your using the Star, and so you could care less about changing things at this point. It works, and you’ve got a life to live outside of school besides.
So you just decide to work in Category D that day – that’s the extent of your lesson planning for the day. You’ll just make a story in all your classes from a student card. Why do you make this decision, when you know that tableaux and stories made from student cards are less interesting than those made from Category E and F class and student created images? Why not work in Category F today and have more fun?
For one thing, you no longer care if the class is interesting, because you know that that is not your responsibility. That knowledge is a snake skin that you shed months before – that terrible feeling that only language teachers can know that you not only have to teach the language to a bunch of irritable teenagers every day but you also have to make it interesting.
Disburdened of the need to feel like you are an entertainer in your work, and happily disburdened of all the old pressures to keep up with the dinosaur grammar teachers in your department down the hallway who still haven’t shed their itchy and ugly grammar skin selves, you revel in your newly found happiness that you know that the class will be interesting no matter what you do that day.
You know and have known for one year via direct experience that all you have to do that day and every day is just communicate with your kids because that is your job description as expressed by your national parent organization and at the level of the state standard as well..
For one thing, you may decide to work in Category D because it is later in the year and you have only done half of the student cards in all your classes at that point and you know that the kids know it. You certainly don’t want to have forgotten a bunch of kids’ student cards before the April projects begin to prepare for the end of year celebration. That’s one reason.
Another reason is that you are not particularly filled with pep and vigor that day. You just want to get through the day. You almost decide to declare a “Drawing Day” to prepare an image for a Category F class for when you feel better later. But you go with the easier Category D “Story Day” for that reason.
It doesn’t matter. You just feel relieved that you are using a curriculum that brings much greater language gains than the textbook curriculum you used when you were first hired into this school, one that allows you to just be yourself instead of some kind of disingenuous clown teacher because when you used the textbook and worksheets you always felt that way and you were always tired and your home life was suffering.
Now, when you don’t plan everything out, and when you allow the language to happen naturally just as it does in “real life”, you know that you have learned something about language teaching that can’t be taught or even explained that has to do with much lower stress levels connected to the old false thinking that we always needed to plan to be a good teacher.
Because of the Star, you have learned that your job is a lot easier than you thought it was. Praise God on that one!