We live in our own CI worlds. We can only report back to the group what we go through ourselves as individual teaching artists. Sometimes it’s really bad, like what jen has been, is going, through lately. I’ve had my class like those six boys. (Abraham Lincoln High School on Denver’s west side – I thought I would not make it through one class that year.)
We all know. It’s deeper stuff that we can admit, far deeper. It’s personal and scary and can make us want to vomit when we go to school each day. It’s part of teaching. Most of us don’t share those things here for that reason and understandably so. It hurst too much. We’re just trying to survive, to make it through each day. Anyone who is not a teacher can come close to appreciating what I am describing here, any more than they could fly to the moon.
But sometimes things happen unexpectedly that lift us out of the darkness of trying to teach too many kids a language in a small box thousands of miles away from the rich and vibrant culture where the language lives and moves and has its being. Such a thing has happened to me in my own CI world this week. Without Zach and Linda, both CI high riders are about change, it wouldn’t have happened.
As I sit here in the middle of the night trying to sleep in India, I keep waking up because I can’t believe this has happened in my classes this week – my students are no longer blurting as a direct result of our town meeting and the invention of Two Strikes and You’re Out! in the last week or so here in our school. The result is what appears to me to be the final end in my classes of all that has torn me down and made me think TPRS can’t work in schools.
Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe my classes didn’t go like that this week when the kids and I finally grew up and did three 30 min. classes in three different classes with zero blurting due to the town meetings (done departmentally last week) and the Two Strikes plan I implemented on Monday of this week that has made me write this in a kind of wonderful happy state of shock.
I just want to say that those of us who are in our tenth year on the blog – Laurie, Robert, Jim, Piazza, etc. – just to share with y’ll old timers like me, nothing has happened, ever, to come close to improving my teaching than the town meetings and Two Strikes and You’re Out. (I made both of those into categories and added them to my working/changing/growing ecopy of The Big CI Book, which is getting very fat and which Diana is using in DPS and loving, she said.)
I heard once that if you don’t give up and just keep working hard in all good faith, trust and service, then good things will happen. For me, this has become true in a way it never has before. All I have to do is not speak English – and now I know how to do that – and, as Zach Al Moreno commented here yesterday, the students won’t either.
It starts with us. Kids won’t brook anything resembling a double standard – we all know that – it’s part of the price of admission into a school classroom. OK, I need to fan myself in the Delhi heat and the pollution. Maybe it’s a dream. But no, I really taught 100% in the TL for an hour and a half on Monday and Tuesday and not one kids blurted and I wanted to run out of the room and bash my old body against the walls in total joy but I hung in there and stayed in the TL.
Will it fail? I don’t see how. Two Strikes has like 72 big teeth in it. It’s not a fly-by-night solution to blurting. It’s a heavyweight boxing champion. So I’m optimistic. I always have been. We got this. We can do this. If you haven’t checked out the town meeting and the Two Strikes post, do so.
(I know that the town meetings can’t occur in most schools with 35 kids in a room, but it might could. (I love to say might could.) Get a bigger venue. Present your case in an auditorium. What Linda and Zach and I were shocked about was how truly seriously our kids took our message to them.)