John Keats, in his Letter to John Taylor, 27th Febrary 1818, stated:
…if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all….
This line expresses how I feel about language learning. What we do in instructing our students should not be a primarily conscious thing, no more than a tree can consciously push out leaves, or a fetus become a baby by the conscious effort of the mother, no more than the stars can align themselves by sheer effort of will.
Once I fully learn that my classes need not be a result of my hard conscious effort to make the CI interesting, but rather a natural natural outcome of the beauty of human speech created together, I will have learned something of the poetry of what comprehension based teaching is all about.
For…if language comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all….
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
