Q. The idea of no planning destroys my entire concept of what my job is as a teacher. Don’t I have to plan? Don’t I have to teach?
A. You can if you want to but in my view it destroys the very spontaneity and beauty that are required to get our students to acquisition and that are always potentially present in any classroom. How beautiful teaching a language can be! We say the language, they hear the message, and, when they go to sleep that night, the language goes sneaking into the part of their mind that organizes everything they heard in class. The work is all done for us by a far greater system than we could ever put into our classrooms by ourselves. I am convinced that in all the planning and fussing about with the language can be found a core reason why teachers fail with comprehensible input and yet it is the one point they cannot afford to miss if they want to really enjoy their work, in my opinion. I remember so many stories where I was focused on making sure that my students learned certain words. What a pain that was. I know now that it lowered the quality of the story enough so that my students seemed to be always just below the necessary threshold of being naturally interested in it themselves. And that sinking feeling of not really reaching my students via stories persisted for fifteen years until I went to India last year. There, it was like when Dorothy gets to Oz and everything moves into Technicolor. Finally we were all truly interested in the story!
Q. Fifteen years is a long time to be frustrated with a way of teaching.
A. That’s not as long as the twenty four years before that when I taught French in the traditional way. That was far worse because we were totally locked into mental paralysis by analysis every day, and only a few students could stay with me. It was just horrible.