I was up at Eldora Ski Resort today. There was an instructor coaching a kid down a run. He was so positive! And there wasn’t a shred of false praise in his words – I listened carefully. He was really interested in every detail of his student’s skiing. It was amazing, really.
As I listened, I could tell that the message carried about 25% information to be processed and 75% of it was pure encouragement and cheerleading. The information went to the kid’s mind, but the cheerleading went straight to the kid’s heart.
The only teacher I have seen teach like that in language teaching is Jason Fritze, whose positive infectious sense of fun when teaching is a great model. We all need to make sure that we spend some time learning from Jason whenever we can in the coming years. Joy counts. Encouragement counts.
After the coach and his charge disappeared down the slope, I reflected on what I had just seen. I had just seen pure teaching. I thought to myself, “Maybe we are studying the method too much and not paying enough attention to HOW we are delivering our instruction, our tone of voice, our sense of encouragement during class, etc.”
Then I realized how stupid that idea was. We could encourage kids to conjugate verbs all day, to learn grammar all day – it wouldn’t work. That kid WANTED to learn how to ski. Our kids WANT to learn how to speak the languages we teach them. (They only appear not to; once they hear enough English and bullshit they just hit the off switch on that desire because they know it won’t happen and they drop out of the language program the next year).
Can you imagine what it would sound like if we were to get in there and encourage them and be a cheerleader with them on how to do grammar and conjugate verbs? How fake would that be?
No, we need both. We need the method, which is so positive in so many ways when it is done properly, and we need to be positive like that ski instructor every day. We need both.