I didn’t choose this profession to be bored. I chose it because there is so much potential for fun in this work because the intellectual curiosity of kids, unlike so many adults, hans’t been entirely snuffed out yet. I figured such people would be more interesting to work with than, for example, people in the insurance industry – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Back to the anti-targeting rant from yesterday: over a four year program of comprehensible input, I will get all those high frequency words that they “need me to teach” all in, and in a natural way! Some kids will acquire them and some not. That’s how it works. Leave me alone with your high frequency lists and semantic sets. I know what I’m doing.
The old guard and the admins and textbook writers and to a large degree ACTFL (because they allow it), want the flowers picked and placed in vases of the same kind of flowers and then placed in vases and placed all over town, separated from each other in their little vases (chapters, thematic units), cut off from their roots so that they can’t sway in the breeze with the thousands of other flowers in the garden, where variety and contrast and wholeness are the watchwords, and brightness and spectacular scents abound in the natural glory of language!
I just can’t figure it out and am about to give up on this one – why do people fear that a word won’t be covered when we are in a garden like this one, the garden of free language, with no rules to uglify it, to splash it with fear? As long as I can start with an image I can take my class anywhere.
Do we even know what words are? I see them as having a certain kind of sacredness in them, because they play such a big role in connecting people, who are spiritual beings.
We try to “cover” words. Why would anyone want to cover a flower? Or pick it and separate it from its brothers and sisters in their natural state? Am I missing something here?
Marianne Williamson has said, “We’re not educated in this country. We don’t know how to talk to each other.”