We dance with the speed of the story. If we go too fast, we encounter bored kids, which is code for kids who don’t understand. So, going too fast is a serious error.
If we go too slowly, nothing bad happens. The kids appreciate it, even if is seems way too slow for us. (It should seem way too slow to us.) Thus we enshrine one of the four pillars of TPRS/CI: SLOW. We go slowly for the good of everyone in the group, and we insist that all students buy into that, some of us using jGR to that end.
We just can’t rush the story once it is under way. I do it all the time, and then wonder why the kids are having trouble following along. In those speedy moments, I forget that I am teaching kids who don’t know the language.
When that happens, my own knowledge of the language that I am speaking trips my awareness that my students can’t understand me when I speak too fast, and, often, my own interest in the unfolding events of the story makes me forget that fact as well. What to do?
What I try to do when I get to those points in a story is to just focus on one thing at a time. Like mopping a floor, I make sure one corner is clean before running with the mop to another corner. I circle more than I want to, but my students need me to do that. So circling more at those moments effectively puts the brake on the train as well.
If an actor is rolling down a Smartcar window while talking to a pixie, I wait until that image is quite clear to my students before moving on. I don’t rush the rolling down of the window, nor do I rush the conversation with the pixie. I don’t smear the paint of the image being created. I don’t have the Smartcar go peeling out of the parking lot until the paint is dry.
I will probably always be working at this pacing thing. It is good to be writing about here, as a personal reminder that pacing is an art form and one that requires a lot of practice. Finding the right pace is at the heart of the method.