A repost from 2011:
I personally never want to lose this comment so I’m making it into a post. Others may not resonate with it so much, but to me, with its focus on building community, what Kate wrote below as a comment to the David Young thread is of vital importance to everything I personally am doing as a teacher, irrespective of the method. The quote is such an antidote to all the mental ruminating people do about methods. The concept of community building floats above, should precede, any discussion about what the best teaching method is. It points to the real core of what many of us who have grouped together here seem to be about. I will categorize this under Kate’s name and also under Building Community so that I can read it whenever I lose sight of my overall goal, which is not to find and master the best way to teach languages, but to continually try to do what Kate expresses below:
…so a classroom family develops where conversations grow more complex and deeper and richer in understandings as we grow in acquistion of language nestled in the safety to laugh at our mistakes and learn behind the walls of at least that one room….
My comment: that sentence has in it real vision. No comment needed. It is truly a radiant sentence, one that deserves to be read over and over. It pushes on the dull clay of egocentric analytical language instruction with a star pulse. Thank you, Kate, I really love that sentence, and I’ve read a lot of sentences in my life. This one gives me unmistakable hope. Interestingly, it echoes Stendhal’s definition of happiness:
Un bavardage sans détour, et la présence de ceux qu’on aime….An endless conversation, and the presence of those one loves….