OK.
Everybody knows that for at least a decade and more like two decades here there has been a kind of cold war between us (CI teachers) and a new breed of CI teacher who tries to mix traditional instruction with CI by using CI to target vocabulary from lists (from chapters in textbooks, semantic sets, high frequency verb lists, thematic units, isolated chapter vocabulary lists in order to read those shitty little novels which favor the few, etc.).
The traditionalists, in order to keep up with the new changes that the 21st c. and Covid are bringing as we speak (we are now in a genuine paradigm shift in our field), had been winning the cold war. They – this new breed of teacher who quite foolishly mixes CI with traditional language teaching – had been winning only because Covid hadn’t forced us all online, but now it has, and now they are losing. Why? It is because what worked in the physical classroom DOESN’T WORK ONLINE.
Let’s say that one again: the old stuff that used to work for them in their physical classrooms – now mixed with CI – no longer works online. It doesn’t work online. For CI to work online means you have to use a non-linear, more circular, far less targeted on certain words, kind of curriculum.
The massive new online problems that these teacher-wolves-in-sheeps’-clothing (CI Liftoff is an example) – teachers who just don’t quite get CI – are experiencing online are causing their old pedagogical wall of cement blocks and dishonest sadness and thievery to experience some very serious cracks in it. When their wall actually falls, most likely in the next 6-12 months, a new wall of vivid CI dreams will replace it, making us love our jobs, and it will all be new. (See article included here at the end of this post for more on how wonderful things are going to be by the end of the summer.)
By the way, at times here the cold war erupted into a hot war. What is a hot war? It is when teachers within their departments are attacked and beaten down or dismissed or leave on their own from exhaustion after trying with CI and failing, largely due to the ignorant and non-research-based attacks from colleagues who don’t want to – or don’t have the courage – to change.
We had one such war with the ACTFL 18,000 member in 2012 and if it had been a football game we in the PLC would have won 63-0. You will be able to read about that war in a month, when I finish moving the entire content of the old PLC to this new version found here, as this site finally gets all the old PLC content successfully moved over here to this new version of my PLC.
The attackers of such extremely vulnerable teachers (vulnerable bc they are still new to CI) are wrong. I think of them in the same way I think about Lindsey Graham and his ilk in the past few years – just wrong.
Here is an example that landed in my inbox just this morning of such ugly hounding of the new breed of language teacher in the USA:
I am providing emotional support and professional/pedagogical support to a teacher on the East Coast who is being attacked by a colleague right now. It’s getting ugly.The email in italics below is from today. It is between the new CI teacher I am working with and her attacker. Both are Spanish teachers in the same school who “used to be friends” until the victim, who had just this year taken the Ultimate CI Book 1 Zoom training this past summer, started getting flack about that from a teacher whom I will name “Sally” below:
My colleague wrote this:
Hi Ben –
Happy New Year!I hope all is well. The text messages that I just got from Sally are driving me to a point of screaming. I fucking can’t deal with this situation anymore! Check out this conversation we just had via text this morning:
Sally to me (Omg 😳) :
I can’t deal with 8th grade. They suck. We gotta hammer grammar into them, both 7th and 8th bc some of them now don’t know how to conjugate a regular verb in present tense. That’s baaaaaad!
Me to Sally: The kids that know it, know it bc they’re studious. The kids that don’t know it will never know it bc they don’t care and they can’t connect with it.
Sally’s response:
Yes, you’re right, but I feel like more should know it.
Ben, I couldn’t sleep last night. She was drilling me yesterday about how we have to be on same page blah fucking blah. I’m having nightmares that I will be getting a shit load of shit from the higher ups and parents.
Any advice, suggestions?
I replied:
Isn’t it about time now after twenty years of listening to teachers tell us that they can’t do CI because they are “stuck to a curriculum” to confront them? I mean, isn’t it time for that to happen? Or are we in CI going to keep kowtowing to these people who don’t really know the research in their chosen profession? They’re hurting their kids and I know it’s not intentional but the result is the same. Look, the curriculum is the language and ACTFL defines the standard as Communication. Ergo, the language is the curriculum. Ergo, all we have to do now is communicate with our students in the TL and that’s all we have to do. Ergo, we can teach grammar later, when the kids know what the language sounds like and they can read it. Isn’t that the way it happens in their first languages? They listen and read and study grammar later? Ergo, there is no need to think of a language curriculum as a series of dry topics to “cover” in a grammar book, or via some poorly-designed linear curriculum that is just a substitute for the textbook built to fool people into thinking that they do CI . Ergo, that is why their grammar/list of words-based curriculums don’t work online. Ergo, we have the crisis we are in that is expressed perfectly in the above text exchange between these two “used to be friends” colleagues. (Note that not once in the ACTFL pages is the word “grammar” even mentioned, and note also that EVERYTHING in the ACTFL pages is about Communication.)
I’ll stop this post here. It’s already too long. I could write a book about this. But yeah, it’s time. We’re changing. The walls are cracking.
Related is this article written in 2008 on the PLC:
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 doing comprehensible input language instruction correctly, an unfortunately intellectual interpretation of what Blaine intended. The method is intuitive, and there is no right way to bring comprehensible input into our classrooms.
As we learn to listen to our students, to open up to them, to look into their eyes and speak to them in a way that instills confidence and trust in them, they will open up to us, and feel the fresh quality of the lake’s water 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, 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.