I worked myself into a frazzle for twenty four years in South Carolina before moving to a middle school in Colorado where, thanks to Susan Gross and Blaine Ray, I found the treasure of comprehensible input instruction (then in the form of TPRS) that instantly brought me a relative degree of joy in teaching.
Back in the old days, when I used a traditional curriculum, it just wasn’t any fun. There wasn’t a shred of feeling of community. There was the small group of the smart ones and me. Classroom management was spelled b-0-r-e-d-o-m for those students not in the grammar club.
The outdated curriculum I was using before hearing about Krashen and Ray and Gross, turned out to be, upon deep reflection over many years, completely out of touch with the ACTFL Three Modes of Communication and the Communication standard. I wasn’t aligning with anything.