Q. It seems like such a simple thing – just talking to the kids. Why is it so difficult?
A. Actually, I recently remembered that I used to just “talk to the kids” thirty years ago. I had forgotten that, but now I remember it. It was emotional to remember that I had once tried to teach that way, the way that is most embodied these days in the work of Beniko Mason and Tina Hargaden.
Q. Why?
A. Well, there I was thirty years ago, trusting my intuition as a teacher, trying something new, doing something with my kids in a natural way, something that aligned well at the time with Beniko’s future research and the research that Krashen was just getting going in those same years, of which I was unaware, and then I just stopped. I probably stopped because I just didn’t know how to do it because I was so alone. I was the Petit Prince with no Pilot to talk to. There was nobody to bounce ideas off of. I think it was probably mainly because I was an AP teacher attending AP workshops and connecting my curriculum at the time to a textbook and worrying about the test scores. I remember that my big goal in life during those dull years was a very self-centered one: I wanted a 65% pass rate on the AP exam so that my kids would make me look good. I was far more interested in how I looked professionally than in offering the kids a positive language experience. I didn’t know how close I was to a very satisfying way of teaching then, and so I just stopped.
Q. What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t stopped?
A. I would have had a completely different career, a much happier one.
Q. That is poignant.
A. It’s poignant to do something for one’s entire professional life that brings pain to oneself and boredom to others, to have only two or three students stay with you until the AP level, and it is even more poignant to have done it alone, with no knowledge of any good research to spur me on to change what I was doing. This is what the internet has done, brought us the ability to share ideas. Any young teacher who is fortunate enough to study Krashen and Mason early in their career is very fortunate. On top of that, no people I ever met seemed to share my conviction that teaching a language is really meant to be a very joyful experience. But, as they say, better late than never…. And no, I am not a VanPatten fan. Thank you for asking.
Q. So what needs to happen now?
A. Well, my career is over, but younger teachers need to go back and read what Dr. Krashen has said more carefully and be more aggressive in figuring out ways to implement his ideas in the classroom. When he says no conscious awareness of form and being fully focused on the message he means it. No exceptions. And yet the problem was that storytelling teachers began mixing conscious and unconscious types of instruction and so storytelling ran aground in a lot more classrooms than it succeeded in. That was one of the factors that drove me to the Invisibles.
Q. So the big problem has been in the targets?
A. They are not “bad”. They work. People use them. But too many stories run aground for too many teachers when they are used. In my opinion they are not the best use of time. The best use of time is when we get our students fully focused on the message – like 100%. That’s what the Invisibles have done for me – enabled me to do that where the targeted stories didn’t. Now, that is only my opinion. I keep saying that. Targets work like a charm for a lot of people. Why then should they change. There is no one way to do this work. Comprehensible input is the fabric, and we get to make our own clothes out of it professionally.