In the short video below, Lady Elaina apologizes to Daniel Tiger for forgetting to visit him.
Should we not all have similar conversations with our students? Should we not now finally start to apologize to our students for forgetting their real needs as children studying a language and their needs to be treated in class as real people in the reciprocal and back-and-forth human communicative process that describes real research-based language instruction?
Is it not time now that we apologize to our students for making them try to speak before they are ready? Is it not time now that we apologize to our students for requiring that they memorize verb forms, which is such a truly ludicrous thing to do? Is it not time now that we make our classes less boring? Is it not time for these things?
Of course, we can’t apologize outwardly. We have to apologize inwardly. And we have to apologize to ourselves as well, for taking such a great job opportunity and wasting it by making our instruction so miserable for all concerned, except for the fat cats who run the textbook companies and testing interests. But that is the subject of another series of posts as well, isn’t it….how we have sold out on the kids in favor of the monied interests who have every interest but the kids’ at heart in the language teaching game?
In teaching our students using the old ways and the textbook, we haven’t really taught our students our languages at all, have we? But all we can do now is just accept this fact and then move on to something new by either leaving the profession or by frickin’ starting to teach in line with the research and the Communication Standard and the Three Modes of Communication.
We have not engaged our students in ways that are interesting to them. It is because we have forgotten them and their needs as children to be happy in class, and to learn that way, through talking about them and making up tableaux and stories that are about them.
Here’s the video that portrays the kind of inner conversation now open to us with our students, with all of our little Daniel Tigers whom we have basically forgotten: