F16s

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Two group members cancelled their memberships in the past week, each with short identical statements to me in private emails stating flatly that “I won’t be teaching any more.” This has stuck with me. Both were enthusiastic students of comprehensible input when they joined a year ago. What happened?

Of course, I can’t ask them. They would have told me why they quit when they cancelled if they had wanted to share that information. But it upset me. I was up there in my F16 looking over at Jody’s shot up plane to my left and Robert’s shiny plane to my right and chill’s plane cruising over New Jersey and Bryce’s plane with a big cowboy hat on the tail flying next to me* and I wish I could describe everybody’s plane but that would make the worst run-on sentence in history.

But then these two F16 pilots both took hits and went down in flames and we don’t even know what happened to them. Maybe they were flying their planes in still-entrenched departments and lost the battle of methods, lost the energy to do CI, got themselves beat up in a mental war and just quit because they didn’t want to be around a bunch of robot teachers who give them no support.

Been there done that. If that was true for me this year, I kid you not, I would just land the plane and walk away from it. I have flown too many missions to be in a hostile teaching environment, now after all these years. God knew that and put me with Annick Chen and Barbara Vallejos at Abraham Lincoln High School this year. Thank you, God.

But another, even more alarming possibility comes to mind. These two teachers just gave up with the method without any opposition. They just felt as if they couldn’t do it. Doing comprehensible input just overwhelmed them after their initial year last year. Sophomore jinx. CI Burnout. Splat.

Or it could have been something completely different like they moved and couldn’t find a job. Who knows?

I dare not ask them, but these two teachers’ stories can serve to remind us of things that are crucial for each of us to remember as we start the year:

  • We are still in hostile environmments. The people we met at conferences this summer are few and far between. They are rare. Just because 2% of teachers may be exploring CI now instead of 1% doesn’t change the overall environment in which we teach.
  • The national change in focus on standards that Robert described so accurately in his comment here a few days ago, and in countless other articles over the past year, and the changes in awareness of research, will only cause entrenched teachers who do not want to change to dig in their heels deeper and get nastier about any hippies flying F16s through their department meetings.

3. This is serious business. Jobs are being lost and gained over this issue of methodology. Some enlightened principals who get it are making it very difficult for some of the entrenched people, but the opposite is true as per my experience a year and a half ago – an experience that I can’t seem to fully recover from (I feel like the bullets are still in me) – as per:

The teachers who want us gone are not always kind. In fact, they can be nasty, as per:

I bring all this up to make a simple point. We have to be careful when we go into our schools this year. Diana Noonan’s leadership has made many schools in Denver Public Schools safe places where jobs won’t be lost and new CI teachers are being hired as we speak. But the opposite is true in some districts. Watch what you say and to whom you speak.

That’s all I’m saying. The teachers who seem interested, as soon as you start talking about some of Krashen’s ideas, get real defensive. Their claws come out. Friendships become strained, and lost. Many of us have learned to close our doors and do our thing and it works. But in some schools a closed door is an invitation to enmity and quiet fuming or even overt hostility from our colleagues.

Avoid being too optimistic. Protect yourself. Don’t be a Candide unless it is safe.

Again, I don’t know why these planes went down. It could have been mechanical failure. But it sure didn’t feel like it. It felt connected to battle.

*not to mention those new F16s flying over the Atlanta area and over LA and San Francisco with those neat Latin inscriptions on them and names written on their noses like Marcus Aurelius and Virgil – those new F16s with special settings that allow them to fly 2000 years into the past and wave a hello and whisper encouragement to warriors who have been long gone for over two millenniums.