I remember two occasions in Denver Public Schools hosting Dr. Krashen (in 2012) and Dr. Mason (in 2010) into my classroom to observe, Krashen for an afternoon and Mason for an entire day. Krashen said after visiting my classroom that my teaching was “terrific” and Beniko called me “Mr. Comprehensibe Input” after her visit.
I was happy at the time, of course, as any teacher would be to get the blessings of two of the research pillars of comprehensible input based instruction, but later I started to wonder about those accolades. For one, both researchers don’t teach in secondary schools. Their eyes are not attuned to the subtleties of teaching kids between the ages of 14 and 18 because they never did it. I don’t think either of them realizes how hard it is.
Secondly, I know that on both days of their visits my teaching was not that good. It was mediocre. Of course the kids put on their usual show, as they do, but they were not really all that involved. I felt like I was pushing things uphill throughout the classes. There was no real flow being experienced by us. It all felt forced, and I know why. It was because I was using TPRS. I had targets behind me on the board, and many of the things that I refer to in this article were happening:
https://benslavic.com/blog/why-i-prefer-ntci/
So if those visits were good teaching, I didn’t want any part of them. It was WAY too much work for me and there was too much fake stuff going on. At that point finding the missing link to reach my goals – the Invisibles and NTCI – was still five years away.
The deep work of dredging and excavating continued from 2010 to 2015 when I went, after retiring from Denver Public Schools, to spend a year teaching at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India. Even after retiring, I wasn’t going to easily give up my efforts to find a way to teach that would bring joy to both me and my students. The quest, the odyssey, rolled on!