Teacher: I’m mostly focused on what to do for procedures since classroom management has been my Achilles heel, and find myself overwhelmed with ideas how to structure my lesson plans. I know you said to stick to more traditional for now because it’s a new school, but I keep writing down ideas and then trying to redo them because I am not satisfied with them and start over (can’t even get through 1st week plans!)
My response: This is serious. I know I said to teach traditionally but if you can’t get through the hard and crazy-making work of writing a week of plans then use the same ones from last year and don’t plan. Planning is garbage according to the research. Garbage. What? I said that according to the research planning is garbage and there is no need to do it. They get us during the day, and then in the evening when we plan, and then at night when we can’t sleep bc the stress just builds and builds and builds. Don’t plan. We’ll make it work. It’s more than I can express in an email but there is a way to keep your mental health. Right now it’s bad but let’s figure a way out anyway. Can’t you use last years’ plans and add in the Invisibles as you go along and not plan? And get some sleep too?
The entire way you are thinking is outmoded. We would do well to look at it. We are told by experienced teachers around us to work on “procedures” for classroom management as it the students are animals that need to be trained and kept in line. None of that is true. If we just engage them in class they will behave. In my own experience, the textbook (24 years of it) and TPRS (15 years of it) both failed to engage students. The Invisibles do. They represent a cutting edge to solution to all the problems generated by the book and TPRS and yet no one, maybe ten people, really get them. People have voiced that they think I’m trying to sell something. They are so wrong! I’m simply trying to share the very best way of teaching a language that I have ever seen or could ever imagine.
