We’ve been unloading some truth bombs on the novels lately. Really, we’ve been doing that for years. Today, Greg laid it all out pretty clearly in this fine and very accurate comment-turned-article, whether people like its content or not:
The issue is this – the pure novel brand of CI is super boring. The interesting stuff (i.e. the Invisibles and non-targeted) takes a dedicated type of teacher to embrace it.
I know teachers (mostly those who are sympathetic to CI but have not taken the plunge) who KNOW that if they would learn the Invisibles and go NT they would end up doing less work while being more effective- but they don’t want to put in the time to learn something new. Or they say things like “Greg, that stuff just fits your personality, I prefer to teach with units”
Or the new one which is floating around Twitter is that we are somehow doing kids damage by not teaching them culture in their first year of a language! (Answer to that is a novel which weaves in culture which you can buy from one of the mega companies!)
Teachers say they want structure but when I point to the Star Sequence even that is not “enough structure” for them. They want the novels because it can be done more like a textbook: with the teacher’s guides, quizzes, tests, etc that are ready made for you.
Or they will say that things that I do like keeping all of my stories in a class storybook for the students on Google Documents “seems like too much work”. It’s not! I have a system and spend max 10 minutes a day on it. These same teachers will spend hours grading on weekends.
That being said I do 1-2 novels a year. The reason? The population (especially of parents) that I teach very much like to see “rigor” and it looks like we are “doing something” other than “just telling stories”.