There is a poignant scene toward the end of the film Night at the Museum when Amelia Earhart whispers into Ben Stiller’s character’s ear, “Have fun!” before flying off in her red airplane. It reminds me of a topic we return to here all the time – the idea that when we focus on the message/voyage and not the words/airplane we enjoy happy interactions with our students. The interactions are happy because what we experience with them is real reciprocal back and forth participatory human interaction and not mind numbing focus on words that by themselves out of context carry no interest to anybody, or are about as interesting to read as a dictionary.
The motor and body of Amelia’s airplane represent the words of the language – they are merely the medium of delivery for the message that brings the joy, the human part. For us to get our own comprehensible input airplanes off the ground, we absolutely must keep in mind while we are teaching that we are trying to communicate with our students about interesting things. We must get our students’ minds onto that message at all costs.
My suspicion is that, because our own backgrounds and training were not at all like that, but focused on the language, it is hard to remember to do that. But remember we must. It is like music. Why focus on the notes on the page when we can enjoy the sounds that they make when played by the CI orchestra?
A second thought here is just how important it is that we continue to work aggressively on each and every interruption by students to our teaching in the way we have discussed here at length over the years. I won’t go into the details, except to say that the overall goal is to get the class on our side as a police force against those few intruders by using frequent double, even triple quizzes in one period to keep them in line, to of course use jGR to its full effect, to keep laser pointing to the Classroom Rules no matter how long we have to do that, and of course to call parents and get kids out before it’s too late.
Those two things, getting the kids focused on the message and not the medium for its delivery, and then relentlessly confronting every little bit of rudeness/feigned inattention from kids in the moment each instance happens, are my pep talk for today for a very gallant and brave squadron of high flying, daredevil pilot/teachers.