Most of us take on stuff in our classrooms that isn’t our responsibility. We do everything in our power to uplift others and make them feel better so we can make all the comprehensible input work better and thus feel better ourselves too.
The Invisibles approach works to bring a lot of happiness, levels of happiness that most of us have never seen as teachers, to our classrooms, but that instantly causes all sorts of problems, esp. for us trained as grammar teachers. Why?
It is because those of us (many of us) who were four percenters in high school and college became language teachers because the message then was: “You are good at languages!” so we chose language teaching as a profession.
The problem is obvious. We weren’t good at languages. We were good at grammar. And now grammar is out. Communication is in. This is not true, of course, for all of us, but it certainly is true for me. I couldn’t communicate my way out of a paper bag when I started teaching.
Being a teacher is all about being vulnerable. We are learning that we have to be vulnerable in order to teach a good language class that aligns with the research and the standards, that we should show our feelings as per Alisa’s comment here yesterday that she is allowing herself to just laugh at funny stuff in class.
But this involves letting our guards down. But we can’t let our guards down too much in order to further the levels of communication in our classroom, so what to do?
Where is the right balance? We need to feel in class, but we can’t feel too much. Hmmm….