Stephen Krashen has said many times that he only did the research and that it is up to classroom teachers like us, everyday people, to implement it. This is a profound thought. It means that we can’t turn to anyone as an expert.
There are no experts. There is just us in our classrooms sloughing through the daily mud, creating something new – a new way of teaching languages. Keep that in mind. It will help you when you are tempted to criticize your teaching as not good enough or in some way flawed.
It is not flawed. It is just unfolding. What we are doing, with all the confusion and feeling of being overwhelmed with too much new stuff to learn, and too much old baggage to let go of – that old stuff we used to do that didn’t work – all we are doing in this work, it has to feel this way, this awkward way. That is because it’s never been done before, at least not in classrooms.
So let’s not be perfectionists about it. We are like the old inventors of the airplane. We are on the beach at Kitty Hawk or in the France of the 1920’s right now, just trying to get those old clunkers to fly, with no idea of what sleek teaching jets will appear fifty years into the future, jets that I am certain will be fueled by and get their propulsion from the same source we are using now – comprehensible input.
For many us, at this time, the vehicles that we are inventing feel very much like clunkers. We have many clunker classes. We want to say that we suck at this work. But all those awkward classes are a necessary part of a progression to a more conscious way of teaching. Let’s keep inventing so that those teaching jets of the future can happen one day.
Bob Patrick said in a comment here once:
…it’s become my mantra: all we have to do is show up and deliver understandable messages. Of course, there’s always more, but in terms of students in my room making progress in Latin, all I have to do is show up and deliver understandable messages in Latin….
I feel exactly the same way and that one thought simplifies my life in the classroom in a most profound way. Just give me one expression and I’m good to go. Because the kids are going to need lots and lots of repetitions on that one expression for it to become comprehensible to them anyway. That one expression could take up the whole period. I just show up and get reps and it’s all very natural.
We are on a continuum of advancement to better and better ways of classroom flight. I really do believe that each class, good or bad, is a necessary part of our moving Krashen’s work forward, getting the planes out of the airplane hangers of ideas and onto the runways of flight and up into the air. It’s time for that now.
For some of us, now may be the time for the rough flights. Let us steel our resolve to do the best teaching we can do in the months to come, and let us begin now to forgive ourselves for every class that is not wonderful CI, for every class that doesn’t get off the ground. There is no wonderful CI, most of the time. We’ve got to get that. Two good classes out of ten is par for experienced people. Just get reps and stay on the structure until it runs out of energy. Stop judging yourself.
How many times did one of the original aviators who happens to be the author of Le Petit Prince crash land in the desert of the Sahara or, once when he barely survived, in the Mediterranean, or another time in South America which was really brutal? A lot. He crashed a lot.
But he was in an airplane and we are just in classrooms.