I am very heartened by the group decision to slow down. I haven’t known how. Yesterday in my classes, as I said, I had five very important suggestions for all of us. Ideas that could make us better at this because the devil is always in the details.
But what the group has said in agreement with me, that we all need to cool down the afterburners a bit, really hit me, especially what Kate said, “…let our life do it’s natural rhythm….”. (Things she says usually come from wisdom that is thousands of years old, from individuals who are called elders and ancestors, so it is different.)
Now, I hold onto no illusions that I am a TPRS/CI junkie and it will be a challenge for me to slow down. My work is here. This work is real. It is real work that has real merit for others and for the future. It is a rare thing, actually, because a lot of people have jobs that don’t have explosive change potential in them, but we do.
When I saw few teachers around me changing (most are not ready, and there is nothing wrong in that – that is their natural rhythm that they are in now), seeing few others doing anything and yet not considering myself an expert (just an addict), I decided to write those two books, and then create this venue for us, for those who share this vision, to safely talk to each other. (Honestly, I feel that only about 20, maybe even just 10 of the group of 80 actually follow along in the daily conversation).
That is fantastic. That is what I have always wanted ever since teaching my first class in 1977 in Columbia, SC. I have always wanted to be part of a small focused group that can actually communicate our work as teachers at a high level. That is what I have always wanted in my sadness and isolation and hatred of my job for all those years. Look at the people in this group like Jody, Robert, Jim, etc. – you won’t find more exemplary language teachers in the world anywhere to talk to!
Anyway, here I am starting another ramble on a Saturday morning and had we not had that conversation yesterday I would have rambled on here on this blog post and then unfolded all my little slips of paper from my classes yesterday and spent until noon or later working on them and it would have been a very happy thing for me because I love figuring this stuff out so much, but instead I propose that we just take our weekends off. That is all I really wanted to say in this post and yes I am a rambler.
Moreover, we should also take periodic vacations of a week or so. All of us, not just me. Paul Kirschling recently wrote to me saying that he thinks that this TPRS/CI stuff could one day be the end of us. I feel that truth. We must balance.
So, I won’t spend the weekend at this computer, but I will be very busy during the week. And we can take periodic longer breaks. Just like real people schedule their lives with weekends and vacations! I have always felt that the reason for weekends and long vacations is that people just can’t take the intensity of their jobs without that time to recover and balance. We are so vulnerable and we don’t even act like it.
So, as an act of loving myself today, I am taking my boys to a no-kill cat shelter and picking up Argonaut and Sputnik, two cats whom I saw in one of those mobile shelter trucks in a shopping center last weekend. We will take our Aussie Elsie to see how they get along.
Then, I will take Landen who is very interested in basketball, to get some tickets for the next Denver Nuggets home game.
I will read these pages this weekend and maybe briefly comment on something, but I will try to hold weekend comments down to a few thoughts. I will try to tame this need to know all about TPRS/CI at the rate of a speeding locomotive that I have done since that glorious day when I attended my first Susie Gross workshop in Colorado Springs at exactly this time of year twelve years ago.
Thanks you guys, you really are the best!