It’s just so very sad. We attend conferences, take vacation time to work on our craft, work late into the night, and here we are on the eve of our biggest week, the week we all finally get to meet together and talk about our what we are doing in our classrooms under the flag of our national parent organization. ACTFL week.
But we don’t look forward to it. It is largely driven by:
– people in the form of corporations who come looking not to discuss what is best for the millions and millions of innocent kids under our care, but to chase dollars;
– people who come to buy omputer shit so that they don’t have to work too hard, as if that largely ineffective medium of teaching languages would help them or the kids;
– people who, if they saw someone daring to raise a TPRS flag in support of Krashen’s misunderstood, largely unrecognized, but seminal, work, would respond with a strikingly ignorant kind of negativity;
– people who go to present to get it on their resume, so their bosses will like them and approve of them and so they can like themselves better and be admired by their colleagues, but whose actual presentations don’t really amount to jack shit.
Everybody at the Penn State/Nebraska game, tens of thousands, wore blue in support of the child victims of the dark predator soul at the heart of their crisis. But many of those fans, teachers themselves, will go back into their classrooms on Monday convinced that they are doing right by those kids, and that their work is totally pro-kid, when it is not.
Everbody can learn a language. But not the way 99.9% of teachers present them. And these are the professionals, the supposed experts in their fields, who are saying no it is not true, many kids aren’t cut out for languages.
The varied forms of child abuse in our country, from being no longer needed by MacDonald’s at the age of 18, because there is a 16 year old with a bigger smile, to the victims of physical abuse*, to the kind of abuse heaped on kids because they can’t conjugate a verb, make me pray from my heart that more teachers will stop making kids feel stupid in language classrooms. (*no intent is made here to equate physical abuse with the other things I mention in this paragraph – I’m just trying to make a point.)
In this are of language education I can have an effect and by God I will.