This is the last in the series of posts about the Georgia Foreign Language tenets.
Gary Null has been doing his thing promoting natural and wholistic ways of healing the body for about thirty years now. All through the years there was a feeling in Gary’s message, and in the country as a whole, that there were two opposing kinds of medicine, wholistic/natural vs. traditional/pharmaceutical based.
Now, after all these years, Gary is using the term complementary medicine, in which he suggests in a brilliantly simple way that medical doctors look at both wholistic and traditional ways of healing, using herbs and detoxification programs when appropriate, and pharmaceuticals and surgery where needed. Complementary medicine.
This is a major breakthrough for Gary, and would be an even more major breakthrough if the pharmaceutically controlled doctors could see their way to doing as Gary is doing, but that is another story. To suggest, as Gary does, that these two very different ways of dealing with illness work together instead of separately reveals a direct parallel with this issue about where TPRS is headed, in my own view anyway.
It needs to be stated clearly, after all these blog entries on the topic, that I am not saying that TPRS is the only way and that you should be doing only it in the classroom. It is perhaps too easy to hear that message. But it would amount to some lazy listening, and to some irrational conclusions.
I am saying that if you use TPRS, even for ten minutes per class, then use it in a non-watered down form. This a most critical point in this entire discussion. It is the watering down and the beering down in classes of TPRS that is causing the confusion.
If we were to do five minutes of interesting and meaningful CI, stories or not, PQA or not, just talking to the kids so that they want to understand us or not, we could then stop after those five minutes and teach however it is that we taught in the past. What we cannot afford to do any longer is mix the two in the same bottle. Separate bottles.
Complementary medicine does not mean mixing medical approaches – it does mean keeping them separate but using them both to their full potential in each case. Use both TPRS properly in your classroom and then use traditional methods, but don’t mix them together and call it TPRS.
