I interviewed myself:
Q. What is your intent in teaching?
A. My intent is to explore the beauty of the French language for myself, because I love it, while getting paid to share ideas with my students in a loving way. If some of them pick up on the beauty of the language and want to learn more later, so much the better. If not, who cares? I get to work with something I love, and it’s not the students as much as it is the French language.
Q. Some would say that that comment shows that you don’t really care about your students.
A. I worry about myself first, because if I’m not happy in the classroom, how can I help my students become happy in the classroom?
Q. Well, that makes sense!
A. I used to prepare for every class as one would prepare for battle. First, I would do “this” – it was sure to grab their interest! Next, I would do “that”, and on and on, delivering each instructional product in tight little increments of ten to fifteen minutes each, covering all the “material” that I thought they had to learn.
Q. And that didn’t work so well….
A. The students didn’t hear me. They didn’t hear what I was delivering, because I was only delivering instructional services. I wasn’t delivering the language, just pieces of it.
Q. That sounds depressing.
A. My job slowly turned into an invisible battle – the crafty teacher vs. the smart student going for the grade and the heck with everyone else. Now, after teaching well over 35,000 classes over a period of four decades, I am starting to “get” it. In language instruction, battle plans don’t work.
Q. What works?
A. Only CI can work to teach a kid a language. That’s what the research says. But the goal is not to teach them the language, is it? Not really. Because we know that in the short time that we have with our students, compared to the amount of time needed, we can only make them want to learn more. So, shouldn’t that be the real goal – just making them want to learn more?
Q. That makes sense.
A. If we really grasp that the four years or whatever we have available in a high school program can only make a small dent in the language, then that would help us decide how we want to teach – not in a frenzy to “get it all taught” but to just invite them into a lifelong path of pleasant increasing of their proficiency in a balanced, not frenzied way.
Q. That seems like a more reasonable goal.
A. We can’t maintain our mental health and teach our students everything about the language in the time we have. I have come to understand after getting too much CI burnout over the past 20 years that I am not a CI teacher, but a language teacher who happens to use CI whenever I want as a base, but with no compulsion to use it all the time. My basic and foremost goal is to relax and get paid for it.
Q. I thought we were supposed to use CI all the time.
A. In our excitement, we sometimes think that way, but the kids need time to adjust. So do we! So a little coloring, drawing, grammar study, down time, it’s all wonderful. We do what we want, not what is best. Otherwise we really do burn out!