I often felt, at the big summer workshops, that I couldn’t possibly remember all the stuff they were teaching me. It really was overwhelming. But now I realize it wasn’t me. They were giving me too many rules and things I had to follow, like circling and targeting. I’m glad it worked for them, but the message was that unless I learned how to do CI the way they said, I would fail at it. I even wrote books about it to try to understand. Anyway, that is all history now. I am glad for TPRS – it pointed out the way to me. But it was me who had to come up with something that worked for me, and that turned out to be non-targeted comprehensible input. We each must find our own ways in this work, because we are all different individuals with different teaching personalities. Diversity has been our strength as a nation and that is no less true when it comes to our work as language teachers.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/hit-list-of-8/