I’m taking off my CI Cowboy hat for good. It’s been way too intense for way too long. We fought lots of intense battles with real courage, and they kept us awake at night. Many of the battles were fought right here on this PLC over the past 15 years. Remember when we took on the ACTFL For. Lang. Educators list of 18,000 grammar teachers in about 2013?
We crushed them in online debate over a two month period and outed the ACTFL leadership of Paul Sandrock as being in serious conflict with the research, possibly because of their ties to the corporate book lobby and the fact that 99% of their membership were using the textbook.
They don’t even know that they got crushed because few of the 18,000 members even came to ACTFL’s defense. What a fight that was in 2013! But no real and substantial change happened. ACTFL continues to do their Jabba the Hut thing. The textbook is still used in the majority of WL classrooms.
Like Jabba himself, this change is vast. It will take much longer than we thought even five years ago here. We are learning to accept that fact. Yes, we won a lot more battles than we lost, but the war, like all wars, is going to take a lot longer than we originally thought. Now I am willing to be a lot more patient and let go. I think our history might one day possibly be written like this:
1950-1970 – Simon Belasco and the early CI thinkers (this was the phase of tinkering around doing the research on how to make the CI nuclear bomb)
1970 – 1995 – Krashen applies that early thinking to his own CI research (this was the making of the CI nuclear bomb)
1995-2015 – Blaine Ray applies Krashen’s work consciously to storytelling (this was the exploding of the CI nuclear bomb and the period of the “real” experts – Blaine Ray, Susan Gross, Jason Fritze, Carol Gaab, Kristy Placido Joe Neilson, Skip Crosby, etc.)
2015-? – Everything gets diffuse and confusing. (This is the phase when the well-formed mushroom cloud that was TPRS loses its mushroom shape and where everybody starts speaking in increasingly vague terms about CI and everyone listening to them starts wondering what the hell is going on and which expert to listen to. But there are no experts anymore – there’s just us. God will help us along just fine. I’m not worried. There is no emergency. We will all get to CI heaven in God’s always perfect timing. I would like to formally thank Him that the war is over, and that the period of slow, decades-long period of integration of CI into WL classrooms in a much more natural way has begun.)