This is an updated version of an older article:
Thinking about how we push-push-push ourselves too hard to get big results using CI, it occurred to me how really nutty we are when we try to get our kids up to a level of relative fluency in four years (450-500 hours). That’s so nutty.
We need 10,000 hours. Or more. Depending on whom you speak with. Some people may want to say 1,000 hours. Too low, in my opinion. How about a mere 3-5000 hours? We’re still way below that. Nutty!
And yet we go in each day continuing to frenetically mix L1 and L2, bouncing back and forth between real L2CI and useless L1CI in hopes of having a kid get a 3 on the AP exam or passing the IB exam, whatever those two exams convey (not a heck of a lot IMHO).
I know I make this point a lot about us being nutty or at best irrational about how much time we have vs. how much time we need, and I apologize for not making it more often.
We would look at our entire careers in a completely different light if we could internalize this one point. We would drive to work in a different frame of mind. We would walk down the hallway to our classrooms in a different way. We would teach more slowly, because we would know how much time we have vs. how much time we need.
We would know that we are capable of just so much. And, knowing that, really knowing it, we would teach differently. We wouldn’t teach so hard, or so fast. We would forgive ourselves for failing to do something that nobody else can do either. We would regain some of our sanity.
We would realize how much the College Board Corporation has engineered its ways into our lives, shredding the fabric of our lives by selling something in education that we should never have bought, given what we now know about the research and what is possible in languages in X amount of time.
Fully getting this idea could change our lives for the better, because we would not be so hard on ourselves. We wouldn’t be so nutty. It is something to pray for. I am no expert and I did it all the wrong way for my entire career, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
We are like the guy who, in Le Petit Prince by Saint-Exupéry, invented a pill to prevent us from being thirsty. The author said that if he was thirsty, he would just walk slowly and easily to a water fountain:
– Bonjour, dit le petit Prince.
– Bonjour dit le marchand.
C’était un marchand de pilules perfectionnées qui apaisent la soif. On en avale une par semaine et l’on n’éprouve plus le besoin de boire.
– Pourquoi vends tu ça ? dit le Petit Prince.
– C’est une grosse économie de temps, dit le marchand. Les experts ont fait des calculs. On épargne cinquante-trois minutes par semaine.
– Et que fait on des cinquante trois minutes ?
– On en fait ce qu’on veut…
– Moi, dit le petit Prince, si j’avais cinquante trois minutes à dépenser, je marcherais tout doucement vers une fontaine…”