Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
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Options to the Old Ways
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11 thoughts on “Options to the Old Ways”
A good example of responding to intuition in class and just trusting the process of CI is when (if) we are working with the word wall to start class, we feel that we have to gesture and teach a certain amount of words.
We may have in our minds that we are going to teach, say, five words each day, for example. So we get that content kind of goal in our minds and we plow through the five words, satisfied when we finish gesturing the fifth one that we accomplished that part of our lesson plan for the day and we turn to the next part of class. A much more intuitive response would simply be to have fun with the words and not feel that we must cover a certain amount every day. This opens things up for acquisition.
An example is when we find that we might get a lot of play going around two words that pair up well together for TPR and PQA and gesturing and just good comprehensible input in general, like “throws” and “bird”. We could have the kids throw two birds. Throw a big bird. A big bird throws a steak. Why would we leave that in favor of adding in another three words before we go to the next part of class just so we can say that we covered the five words?
If Krashen is right, those five words have a good chance of not being acquired at all, but the two words that were used for maximum repetitions in compelling ways would stand a much greater chance of being accepted into the growing vocabulary of the student’s deeper mind.
“Pondering some learning experiences I have had over the years in areas outside of language study—let’s just say, generally, in “the arts” of various kinds.” As I read Bob Patrick’s post I was saying, “Yes! Yes! Exactly!” For me it was horse-riding that made me see the difference between learning and acquiring. Throughout my life, whenever I’m confronted with something new, I go out and buy a book. Laugh all you like, but when I found out I was pregnant for the first time, my first stop was a bookstore. But when you’re sitting on a horse, it doesn’t matter what you’ve memorized and how many chapters you can recite. I have two shelves of books about horse-riding and some of them I’ve read three or four times. Some of it is very valuable information and has helped me to improve, but acquisition is what you do when a barking dog bursts out of the bushes and believe me, you don’t have time to look it up. Horse-riding is about developing automatic reflexes, and that is what fluency requires too. I may have been a 4%er in languages, but I am very much in the 96% for riding, and it has opened my eyes to how difficult it is to acquire something to the point where you do it without thinking about it. I’ve also come to realize that the hardest part is unlearning bad habits that have been acquired and shouldn’t have been.
…horse-riding is about developing automatic reflexes, and that is what fluency requires too….
This is the part that boggles my mind, that the traditionalists think that if they arm the student with enough conscious, memorized, left brain centered and mechanized information, they will then be able to respond to input that requires an unconscious, spontaneous, right brain/whole brain centered and fluid reaction. I’m not kidding, I know that I need to get over it, but I just can’t seem to grasp how it is that the language teaching profession fails to grasp this basic notion of acquistion of vs. learning. I need to say Saint Francis’ prayer every day for a long time (I need to anyway) to ask for help in accepting that this is the way it is, and that there is a reason for it, but boy does it just seem odd how they do that with such impunity and claim it works. Du calme, Ben! Du calme….
Judy, one of the things on my summer “to do for me” list is to paint some, every week. 28 years ago, at the age of 24 I said out loud something that I had always wanted to do–take art lessons of some sort. I always felt that I might be artistic but my circumstances growing up never afforded the opportunity. I found a woman who taught oil painting in her basement on Wednesday nights. I showed up every Wednesday night for two years. I loved it from the first moment I started, but I was clueless. I had to be told everything–mostly I had to be shown. I had to watch and mimic what the teacher was doing until I fell into that place where my conscious brain just didn’t matter much.
Same with the piano. In college, I finally got to take the piano lessons I had wanted to take all of my life. I approached it by reading the books! What a miserable experience. I hated it. I got my A in Class Piano (of course!) but couldn’t play the piano. When my wife and I married a few years later, I gave her a piano for 0ur first anniversary (she is an accomplished musician in piano and voice). I found that if she would show me how chords were formed on a piano, I could play them and very soon was able to read a line of music and play the chords that went with them. It was another case of show and learn and dropping into some place where my conscious brain didn’t matter much.
So, as for painting this summer, this thing I love to do. I’ve been putting it off. The brain fears I can no longer paint because I haven’t done it in a while. Finally, two days ago, I spent the morning getting out my paints and brushes and paper (water color is my real love). And I started drawing, and painting. What a struggle, but I finally got to that place where my conscious brain . . . you know.
Can I teach that way next year? Can I invite students into a place where their conscious brains just don’t matter too much?
My answer to that Bob is a resounding yes and I point to the word that you have put under the spotlight here – trust – as the medium to accomplish that goal. I would suggest that the meal you serve them next year be served in a bowl made out of trust, filled with the manna that is comprehensible input, and flavored with those wonderful spices, personalization and humor.
We know a lot about CI and personalization, but do we know about trust and do we know about humor? I think the key ingredient in the bowl, actually, in my view, is the humor. Let the humor arise and you will see how little their conscious brains matter, since at their ages anyway the only way to dismantle the fear and defense that describes their entire days in school, such hard years in life, the hardest in my opinion, is through talking about them all the time and by having an extra large container of humor.
But not the kind of humor that you create, or that they create to impress each other – rather, the kind that sponataneously arises out of nowhere at the expense of no one. Can CI do that? Oh yeah! But, as you have pointed out so many times, only when served in the right bowl.
Ben, I copied and printed out your understanding of Krashen’s “nest eggs” because I need to have them in front of me all the time. The four points were:
• Language learning is an unconscious process and cannot possibly be taught in a conscious way. Like painting and playing the piano and riding a horse.
• We need to be in face to face human relationship with other humans to learn a language so that we can negotiate meaning with them. In other words: Trust your students, teach your students to trust you.
• We need to be happy when we learn a language. = Humor*
• Language learning is spontaneous and we don’t need a plan. = Trust the method.
* I finally realized that I don’t have to be a funny person to have humor in my classes. All I need is to be open to my students. If they trust me, they’ll give me all the humor anyone could ask for. I’ve had so many good laughs with the kids this year. …. And somewhere I read that laughter is a reflex reaction when you realize that there’s no reason to be scared. We laugh when the coyote falls off the cliff because we know it’s not going to really hurt. In five seconds he’ll be chasing the Roadrunner again. So when we and our students realize that there is no danger, that we can trust each other, then we can laugh together.
Nice. And implicit in what you say Judy is that the humor has to be genuine (arises from the natural flow of the conversation* vs. pre-planned or forced or like somehow we feel responsible for the humor to happen). Besides the humor of course is the personalization and like the humor it must be genuine for them to appreciate it. We can’t personalize by telling a kid to go act like she is a lion under a tree. What’s that got to do with the kid? Nothing. So it doesn’t ring true. So, in that light, it is via the unforced organic emergence of humor and personalization that we get the real stuff. I hope in this venue to drive that point home. We are not staging a play in our classrooms. We are letting the play stage itself.
*as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/14/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/22/brian-on-flying/
Bob I’ve been talking to Keith Rogers about going over there to London but I just can’t get myself to do it. Keith tells me quite directly that almost all the Classicists over there don’t truly want to hear about our work. It makes me think of what Jeremy kept repeating throughout the movie Yellow Submarine:
…ad hoc loc and quid pro quo, so little time, so much to know!…
So much to know, my ass. Those sad little men in those Latin societies over there in Oxford and Cambridge need to be stood up and taught some real things! They need to turn ownership of languages over to the people, not to the elite. But hey I certainly don’t need to tell you that. You and David and John and Jacque and the other Latinists here know it already. Let’s just keep jabbin’ the Latin point home, at least here. I like it. But dude I ain’t going over there this fall. They’re light years away, is my feel.
By the way, talking about ownership of languages going to the people, look what I got from Luigi, that polyglot kid going into the military I mentioned here last week and to whom I’ve been suggesting career options:
Mr. Slavic –
So I was thinking, “how in the world are we going to cause this change in the educational system?”
Simple we need to bring this to the low, dirt crap schools, and of course make it work. Make it work so good that these students have higher test scores than the preppy stick up their butts schools.
Why? Because all the parents of these preppy children wll wonder why it is that these kids from the ghetto are so much smarter than little timmy.
It will [irritate them so badly] that they will make a big commotion out of this and will pull every string they know of to get their kids on the same level.
And we will take charge.
Why fight our enemies? This is a waste of time, energy, and resources. Lets make them work for us.
That and I was looking throught the TED talks and I couldn’t find anything on this.
Point #2 Im gonna get this method on the TED talks I guarantee it.
Like I said before come hell or high water we got this but we have got to hit them like a swarm of angry hornets.
[ed. note: the poorest kids in George Washington High School vastly outscored the IB kids in the same, segregated school on the DPS assessment last spring. It got noticed. So Luigi is onto something here.]
[ed. note: You will be hearing about Luigi. We want to get him into DLI in Monterey with Katya. He hasn’t even graduated from high school yet but he has credentials – 66/70 correct responses on the 2011 National French Exam with a lot of absences at level 2 but he was in level 1 French. A rare talent. Luigi Guadarrama. The future. Why does he believe in stories? He has done both, so he knows the deal firsthand from sitting in the desk over the past three years at East High in Denver.]
You can’t make this stuff up! Priceless! I am pumped! What are TED talks?
Thanks so much for sharing this Ben…. I can’t wait for updates!
skip
(I do think that it is true that we will “win” by our own achievements and success and not through our debates trying to convince others….)
HELL YEAH!!!
How can we get this on a TED talk? I am surprised it hasn’t been on there yet. What if we (Ben!) got Luigi on there? With Katya? Freaking cool!!!
Skip, TED talks rock! I don’t really know their origin. Try googling it. Or someone else in the know will chime in. But they are these short lectures on cool stuff and they are super inspiring. I do know they film them every year in California.
Skip the people who attend are the movers and shakers and millionaires – Bill Gates and all those people – of American society. They love getting together at these events each year to talk about new stuff that can change the way we live and then they film the lectures and everybody is happy to be a part of such an enlightened group. In that light, I think that the best TED talk would be a Circling with Bill Gates:
“Class, Bill runs a company!” (ohh!)
“Class, does Bill run a company or eat a company?” (runs)
“Class, does Bill eat a company?” (no!)
etc.
Bill would get it, because he would compare his Spanish class in high school to that, and we would have ourselves a supporter. Maybe somebody could take it from there to Arne Duncan so he could become less confused and finally, finally, Krashen would be getting more than just ignored by people in education.
Of course, such musings aren’t important. What is important is that we get into our classrooms this year and do the best jobs we can with the greatest amount of faith in what we are doing, and with forgiveness in our hearts because we can’t do it perfectly. Going to work everyday. Step by step, one day at a time. That’s what our task is.