The fact is that the grammar teachers’ claim that their students can acquire a language by focusing on bricks is and has always been completely false. Nothing can come from studying a language in this way. As language teachers we need to build houses. We don’t have to become architects – no mere human could ever become an architect of language.
Creation of language is deceptively complicated and yet majestically simple and therefore is not within the ken of conscious analysis at all. It never was. Why, then, teach it via the conscious mind?
Languages emerge from the collective experience, that is, from the personal and collective unconscious minds of countless human beings over countless centuries. Language thus continues to evolve in the same way. Nobody, not even the French Academy – which has tried – can control this evolution. If one were to risk pushing the image too far, one could point out that, in the area of architecture, Garnier probably never could have predicted the work of Chagall in his building.
It is the same with stories – things emerge into the discussion organically, naturally, at the oddest times. Something learned in PQA about a kid three months ago is suddenly relevant to the story on a story day three months later.
Those connections, like the connection someone made between Marc Chagall’s lofty vision and the ceiling of the Paris Opera House, just happen, and we are all the happier for it, because our teaching days are not dull and boring. We build things – houses of sound and compelling (because they are personalized) images – real things that real kids can wrap their minds around.
We take kids to the opera every day! And we don’t make them stare at the individual bricks on the outside of the building that make up the opera house. We invite them in to the play!