This was written in early 2014:
I feel like an idiot. I’ve been thinking about this for days now, and I can’t get past it. I speak to my students all the time in French, and so many, so many words come up in our classes. I mean, a lot of words. So many flowers.
But, there are so many people who worry that I may not be covering certain words. They exhibit a concern, an odd concern that doesn’t feel right to me, that, unless they tell me what words to teach, I won’t get them in. Trust me, I will get them in. Stop sticking your head in my door.
Plus, I get them into places in my students’ minds where they stick, in the garden of language: the deeper mind. There they grow in the fertile soil of unfettered CI. Some are still seeds, of course, pending further stories and more discussion in the TL, but they will grow, given enough reps/water. Language will grow without help.
Bright and new flowers pop up every class, and the older flowers don’t fade because they get a lot of attention in the form of repeats – there is a torrent of attention on all of these words, old and new. Krashen said that we can’t predict which words will stick and which won’t and when. So curb your gross need to measure all that.
Why would I not get to certain words? The only reason I wouldn’t get to them is that I’m so tired from filling out lesson plans and curricular docs and dealing with a failed system, and weighed down by an odd kind of hopelessness born of working in schools, that I don’t have the energy to be at my best in my classroom.