Yesterday I got some specific questions from a colleague and want to share my responses to him with the group. Sorry for the long rant. I do that sometimes, more for my own mental health than anything else.
My colleague writes:
I am currently teaching at two elementary schools in South Korea. I have been here for 6 months. I’ve already taught a whole semester, with TPRS first and then some of your methods, with varying degrees of success. I’m preparing for the new school year using the Ultimate CI Book materials. I would rather not use the traditional textbooks or worksheets at all, since I’ve never been a fan of such methods. I am firmly a proponent of CI and language acquisition. But I’m running into issues with not only social culture here, but school culture. The school wants me to follow the curriculum (textbook), though I am able to pretty much do what I want, so long as I’m following the unit.
I responded:
Therein lies the problem. You cannot successfully mix CI and a textbook unit, any more than you can fly to the moon. It’s not possible. And yet a number of people have tried, with the result of completely watering down their CI instruction to the point of ineffectiveness. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the TPRS movement and what it has become in its present incarnation as “CI”, that’s what happened. I advise people to teach the curriculum straight up without any CI at all, if they are feeling that kind of (highly uninformed) pressure from others in their building.
Then, towards the end of class, do stuff from the Ultimate CI book separately. Soon five minutes of building a tableau from a student card, a one word image or an individually created image at the end of class becomes ten minutes and then twenty. The kids wake up. They start to patiently sit through the grammar lesson because your message to them is “the sooner we finish this required stuff, the sooner we can talk about Sally’s drawing (or Malik’s student card, or Maria’s individually created image”, etc.).
When you then give the Ultimate CI strategies later in class, you defend against any potential parental or admin attacks on you while also being able to do some CI. These usually come from kids whose helicopter parents can’t understand why their little memorizer offspring can’t keep up with a class that is not using the memorization method. In doing so, you keep up with the departmental curriculum. You send the message to those watching you that you are in compliance with what they ignorantly (no blame…) want you to do.
(TO BE CONTINUED)