I will write a post about how teachers get away with not teaching in a way that honors the research and the Communication standard. I don’t look forward to that task, but it is becoming increasingly clear that such posts, posts that reveal the truth, are necessary. How much longer will we teach in such ineffective ways? How long?
I want to shine a light on the darkness that our kids experience in many of our classrooms. Their responses to our language instruction are as “leaden as the aftermath of wine”, a line from Dylan Thomas, but one that in our profession keeps the textbook industry alive and happy, and keeps the mechanical language teachers thriving and employed, almost unbelievably now after Krashen began his work of enlightening people about how languages are actually acquired over fifty years ago.
Have you ever watched the faces of teachers in trainings and workshops when the language sparkles (as if from a magic wand) across the room into their hearts to sparkle right back to us through their eyes? Have you ever experienced how your teaching of your language can become a conduit for a kind of give-and-take, reciprocal, participatory zone of proximal development sharing of happiness? It happens, and the world is better for it. And it can happen to you.
How can we claim to be language teachers without that sparkle, that sense of happiness, that ease, that closeness with our students? When we have that happy sharing feeling, we feel great! We never want the class to end, because we are doing something deep and fine and getting paid for it! In this world! We are learning to love! We are learning to share the legacy of Mr. Rogers.
So I’m saying that we are not really ever tired in our jobs, not really. Rather, we are blocked. When our bodies are tired, we don’t have to freak out about it. We can still teach well. I’ve heard it said that two to three hours of sleep is enough, as long as we have our priorities straight.
(What priorities? The ones that say that we are in a war. The ones that scream out that the child is more important than the instruction. The ones housed deep inside our hearts, now temporarily forgotten, that say that we should sacrifice everything for our students. The ones that rebuke our sad emotional need to CONTINUALLY test and judge them.)
Related:
https://benslavic.com/mr-rogers/ and https://benslavic.com/mr-rogers-2/