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2 thoughts on “Conflict 3”
I agree that it’s probably time to drop it. The positive that I see in the letter is that the principal stands by his teachers. That’s a rarity in this day and age. To pursue this any further would encourage “non-supportive administrator” climate that we always complain about. So many districts are known to be “run by the parents” that while it may be disappointing that the dept and principal there are happy with the status quo, at least he is standing by his teachers, not giving in to parental demands. We would absolutely hate it if a band of 4%er parents with 4%er kids were demanding our administrators to force us to teach the way they think languages should be taught. Goes back to why the blog got shut down, right?
Yes Chris, but that (IB) principal, unlike this one, spewed fire and brimstone through the phone at me. When I think about that experience:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/03/02/why-i-shut-the-blog-down-1/
my socks start to roll up and down, my teeth start itching, and I generally feel really bad that a colleague could even talk in that way to another colleague on any topic for whatever reason.
I don’t know, at what point are these people responsible to get up on current research or at least show some degree of openness to things that are different?
I mean, this stuff on how we learn actually in fact for real learn languages has been out there since 1983 – and its ideas were laid out by Simon Belasco in 1963 as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/05/13/1963-a-blow-to-his-confidence-30/
and these guys are out of convenience still largely ignoring anything that takes them out of the textbook and the computer and two dimensional grammar as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/04/24/tprs-is-about-grammar/
There must be some point where this principal, if he is to provide real leadership for the community as a whole, just doesn’t discard Ben Lev’s position based on a counterargument from his WL team.
The difference in this situation is that Ben, as both a parent and a teacher with expertise in both the old ways and in comprehension based instruction, is communicating very effectively with parents, and is thus bypassing the usual pathways towards change. And what the parents are seeing, they don’t like a bit.