I don’t know about you, but the deeper in I get, the more untenable classroom instruction in foreign languages looks. I am not sure that classrooms of 35 work. Are we just spinning our wheels? Should we keep trying to figure this stuff out – how to best teach languages in classrooms?
(These are just random thoughts I woke up with. Don’t get weirded out by them. It’s a blog! I like to do a little reality check from time to time. Just using the blog to think, to clarify – the real reason this blog exists, quite frankly. It’s like journaling for me – that’s it. So if you are reading to find some kind of truth here, forget it.)
I know, I know – it is hubris, to talk like that, to imply that schools simply don’t work. Nonetheless, I absolutely wonder if a classroom of 35 different individuals with different learning styles and different motivations and different parenting (a huge factor) and different levels of intelligence and different social skill ability levels can, in fact, work. Are we just spinning our wheels?
Not only that, but we’re the only target language speakers in the room. And if we give them L2 related technology, it turns into an English fest. I’m not talking about what Duke does with technology, songs, etc. – as long as the class is focused together that is one thing. But, sorry to say it, but if I had more information/research at my disposal, I would pursue on this blog an investigation into the use of technology games and such to teach languages.
Does the use of technology games and such in the classroom produce CI or does it produce bullshit CI? We, not machines, are ultimately responsible for what our kids learn. This is especially true in languages, which are human things. (Like Dr. Krashen said – “Robots can’t converse”.) Use of internet sites and technology to provide supplemental education to motivated kids outside of the classroom is great, but I’m talking about using machines in classrooms to keep kids busy and/or to make the teacher look like they are up with things here.
I know. We’re told to differentiate. Forget about it. I don’t think differentiation can work in language instruction. Why? Because when we separate kids by ability level and get different groupings together and then we get that particular top spinning and walk over to a second differentiated group and get that top spinning, and then a third and a fourth and a fifth top gets spinning, by then the first and second and third and fourth tops have stopped spinning.
But all they are doing – when they get the English rolling behind our backs – is being kids. Why this pollyannish belief in differentiation in languages? Probably because the administrators who talk it up aren’t the ones who have to implement it. People who merely theorize about teaching should one day be made to actually teach, so that they can finally learn what that means.
It’s kind of like the big cooperative learning thing of twenty years ago. The theorists came up with the idea of placing kids of different ability levels into one group of four and get them working together. Has anyone seen any research on how that worked? Hell, I don’t think it worked at all. Straighten me out on this. Am I wrong?
Am I being overly pessimistic here about whether schools can actually work? Am I off base? Duke called me a control freak the other day in a private email. He suggested that if we just let the kids go free with songs and gutteral sounds in the classroom, they will learn. I disagree. Corky disagrees.
For a moment, I bristled at the idea that I am a control freak in the classroom, and, whenever I bristle, I immediately ask myself what is true in what I heard. In this case, I don’t think anything is true about it. Anyone thrown into a classroom, in order to survive, would have to immediately be perceived as, to some extent, a control freak.
But what is in our hearts? I am only asking this sweet question to my TPRS colleagues here. I don’t care what others think. I only want to hear from those of us who have fully drunk the Kool Aid and who, as a result, are now experiencing careers of incredible emotional change. I am only asking this question to those who, in spite of all, keep to Krashen’s vision because they know it is far superior to anything every thought of thus far in language acquisition.
I know what is in my heart. I have, deep down, an undying, spiritual kind of deep love for the grandeur of learning, for the greatness of humanity, of, especially, France. I have a deep desire to never FORCE this love upon anyone, but, instead, to make a living simply by making it as joyful as I can (this is Krashen’s real discovery) in my classroom. It only looks like control, Duke, when you’re visiting me at East. It is an unavoidable persona that you see there without which I cannot teach.
So, what about all this? Are we spinning our wheels? What about differentiation? And, in the larger sense, what about our daily struggle to share our love of the language and culture we teach with kids? Can we do it? Are we doing it? Or, as long as there are 35 kids with
different learning styles and
different motivations and
different parenting (a huge factor) and
different levels of intelligence and
different social skill ability levels
are we just lying to ourselves? It’s a real question, folks, so answer it by commenting below. And don’t forget, October is a bitch month. The honeymoon of August and Septmeber is over, the sociopathic monsters have begun to emerge, and we have a long hard winter of seemingly endless days in front of us.
So let’s keep the faith. Maybe not the faith that what we are doing will actually work, but the faith in each other, that here we are having somehow ended up serving kids who are suffering and so, no matter what, we must continue to do so, as patriots.
We must continue to serve our country, because America is in critical need of public servants who know what they are doing right now. Let’s continue to try to make our schools work even if they cannot work. Isn’t that the game?