The floorboards of our classrooms are rotting. How long have we waited for the final cave-in of each one!
All of us will be dropped, all akimbo, each at the right moment for us, into the waiting underground lake of fluency. There, we will meet each other again in collegiality and joy. It is happening now. Schools are literally falling apart.
This lake consists of the waters of intuition, not obsession with teaching near the book, or correctly, or to impress people, or from lists, all unfortunate intellectualized interpretations of what Blaine intended. The method is intuitive, and there is no right way to communicate with our students in our classrooms.
As we learn to listen to our students, to open up to them, to look in shared humanity into their eyes, conveying confidence and trust in who they are, they will open up to us, and feel the fresh quality of the lake’s waters themselves.
They won’t fully believe it right away, as kids who have been mistreated tend to do, but, after a while, they will believe it, and then they will begin to truly acquire the language that, in their first days in our classrooms, they had originally been so truly excited to learn.
This lake, this way of teaching, has been waiting, waiting, ever so long, just beneath our classrooms. It was there all along but we just didn’t know it until Blaine found it and said, “Hey! There’s a lake down here!”
As the boards crack and float away, the lake embraces us. As we learn to swim in its waters, each day a little better at it, we become real teachers, and we become stronger. We learn to laugh. The old schools above our heads will be taken away by wind and time. It will all be new.
(Excerpt from TPRS in a Year! – 2007)