Far too often, we CI teachers get challenges from our peers – teachers with whom we are supposed to be working on toward common assessments, high frequency verb lists, thematic and semantic units, etc.
We also get challenges from helicopter parents, whose success in high school and college at conjugating verbs has led them to believe quite falsely that that is how people should be taught languages and so they come in and tell us how to do our jobs. Has that ever happened to you?
(It’s an interesting point that I have noticed that many helicopter parents have robotic, memorizer-types of kids who find it very difficult to interact with us and their peers during class, and squirm if they don’t have a worksheet in front of them on their desk. I think this phenomenon in education represents a form of emotional abuse, where the child grows up thinking that if everything they do isn’t perfect, that they will fail in life.)
When the robot kid in the CI class complains to their parents, of course the parent comes after us because how could their little darling child ever be in the wrong? Then we have another one of those sleep-robbing nights as we know we are going in the next few days to experience some hand-to-hand combat with this kind of parent one more time. (Luckily, we have only one or two such kids per year….)
I will give an example of this kind of hell state that those of us attempting CI have to go through in the next post.