How to not be blocked? Develop FLOW, whose source is in our hearts. That’s what my message in the StarChart™ is, and why it works. I never could get real flow going in my classes until I developed the Star.
Believe in the process. Believe in the work. Don’t let fear and fatigue even get in the door to your own heart. Cultivate self-care. Learn how to love and nurture yourself first, before trying to learn to nurture them. Take care of your heart by barring thoughts of criticizing them. That used to work, but it doesn’t work now in this new post-Covid 19 era where teaching a language is going to be more about loving our students than finding out what they can’t do.
There is fear in the beginning, of course, but over time, as we get better at this, we experience, via the simplicity and humble heart qualities found in our instruction*, a wonderfully grand feeling of not being blocked anymore, because we won’t feel so alone anymore.
So even if we are only getting limited amounts of sleep, we will be able to experience FLOW precisely because we are not blocked. Then we can say that we will have learned something about teaching a language. Krashen once said that all his research, all the crunching of numbers, all the research done, ALL of it has led him to one conclusion: if the teacher loves what they are teaching, then the students will learn**.
To make sure that I didn’t misrepresent him here on my blog, I asked him to approve or disapprove of my saying this here as a restatement of what he said: “So you are saying that after crunching thousands and thousands of numbers over 40 some years, that your grand conclusion is that if the teacher teaches with happiness embedded in the words they say, then the students will learn?” He said yes, but adding that as long as those words are comprehensible and, in the best case scenario, compelling.
*https://benslavic.com/blog/category/simplicity/
**one could counter then that grammar translation would work if the teacher loved grammar, but I would counter that grammar is not something that has any intrinsic love or flow or happiness in it. Grammar is just a two dimensional and very boring representation of what a language is, one that very few students even find interesting. REAL grammar is something far greater: correctly spoken language.
So, the old kind of grammar (the one taught in books) is something that human beings (vs. computers/robots) do not resonate with naturally (because it is not natural to them). Thus, when the teacher teaches in that old way, their instruction becomes unappealing in the classroom, because they are working from ego, which works in the service of power over children.
None of that is what Krashen meant when he was talking about FLOW. Dr. Krashen has in fact said: “It is very hard to create compelling messages when the hidden agenda is the relative clause.“