Mental health is one of the big topics here. We have a category for it. We need to protect our mental health or we won’t be any good to anyone.
I have been told that when teachers work with the Invisibles and emergent targets, they are in better mental health, even at such time like this in American history. When we stop forcing stories into a pre-planned direction, and we are free of target structures, stories can naturally flow in interesting directions. This freedom brings improved mental health for everyone in the class – both teacher and students are happier.
When teaching in this way, the teacher is free to teach the actual language, instead of specific words that someone at the district level has decided are important to learn, like “watermelon”. Then the teacher can just relax, knowing that she doesn’t have to set up some specific story to teach food or clothing vocabulary and hope that enough of the kids will be engaged by that topic on that day to keep her out of the quicksand of growing student boredom.
The kids can and will learn such words much more efficiently later, after they can communicate in the language. They will learn the words because they want to use them, not because they have to, and the resistance from students that we all have experienced in our foreign language classrooms will soften. This is where the Invisibles come in.
Tina Hargaden says, “With the Invisibles the burden of having to be the funny one trying to drag the students into a story is gone. The kids drag me into a story! I’m finally able to relax and just channel their creativity. It’s an entirely new experience for me. I don’t think that I could ever go back to doing stories in the old way.”
“Ben is a CI purist and that’s one of the many reasons I am so passionate about his approach to our work. His new ideas expressed in this book are powerful medicine and have transformed my teaching in two short months. I feel that I am finally doing comprehension-based teaching the way it was meant to be. The system he has invented to support this new highly creative and engaging work is watertight. For instance, at the time of this writing I have a rowdy class. Now they are eating out of the palm of my hand because my new focus is one hundred percent them and their ideas, much more than before.”