So much is going to change in our profession as a result of Covid-19!
We will move more and more to using the internet, as schools go in that direction in general. Physically showing up for class will not happen very often, and eventually not at all, and that will reveal one of the biggest weaknesses in the way we have been doing things in our language classrooms. Why?
Students in the past have been mostly motivated by a grade. This includes even the “smart” students. That is our history. Our classes have not been rooted in the standard of Communication and in the real research that people acquire languages unconsciously. Quite the contrary.
The term comprehensible input has been usurped by the CI marketplace and by schools who lie about their pedagogy in order to be perceived as u-to-date. In fact, we have made a memorization bed in our profession out of the term CI and now we are going to have to sleep in it.
The students are not to be blamed. They are bombarded with schoolwork that makes no real sense to them, nor does it bring any joy to them – so why should their boring language class that STILL INVOLVES MEMORIZATION in spite of all the research be something that they get excited about, especially online?
So, what will happen to our jobs as a result of the online learning revolution? Slowly, over time, as the shift continues away from education as brick and mortar experiences, we will lose our students because nobody will show up in our online Zoom-type of classes. Why?
There are two principal reasons and I don’t want to get too deep into this today – I’m just sharing some morning thoughts as I continue to write my larger article (could become a book) on how our profession will change as a result of this crisis:
Two of the many reasons that many of us will lose our jobs within the next five to ten years:
- Our field has always been the red-headed step sister, elective-level (read “unimportant”) classes in our buildings. We’ve always been right up there with shop class, which has brought more value to kids than what many of us have brought. Now, with many states beginning to award foreign language credits toward graduation for coding classes, which they call – not incorrectly on the surface – languages, we will lose a boatload of students. We can’t have jobs without students. (Admit it – the only real value that foreign language classes have in most school buildings is as a place to put students who have nowhere else to go.)
- Look at this next reason. Read it. Think about it. Admit it. It’s the big one that gives insight into why so many of us will slowly lose our jobs over the next decade: The only reason we have kept our jobs for so long so far – while delivering bad traditional/book-based instruction for the past 100 years and bad questionable – in terms of the research – instruction for the past 25 years – is that our students have been in the classroom physically with us, and thus have been forced to “pay attention”.
It is this second reason that will chip away at our job security in the post-Covid-19 era. So much will change in the way kids are educated, there will be so much online/self-paced activity’Khan activity kind of learning, and so little physical travel to the actual classroom, if any, that the only “ace-in-the-hole” that we had, the only thing that really allowed us to keep and maintain our control over our students, the physical proximity piece, will be gone. Not next year – it will be a gradual dissolution of the entire system that will happen slowly enough to go unnoticed, but then there it will be, with us wondering if we should have re-tooled into another profession a lot earlier.
What about the CI piece and all its promise? I don’t think it’s any secret that most of the “best ideas” about how to teach using CI in an internet environment will eventually fail. So many students don’t show up for online language instruction at all now, and those are kids who know the teacher and the program. What will happen when the students don’t know the teacher? It’s difficult enough to establish rapport with students in a physical setting, and now we have to do it through a computer? Good luck with that.
If there is an answer to this problem of reaching students with CI through a computer, it can be found in the big thought that I have been pouring out into the TPRS/CI community ever since my first book called TPRS in a Year! appeared in 2007 – the answer lies in personalization. I feel that I know how to do that.
So the old questions surrounding CI are all gone, victims of the virus, and the new ones will all have to do with how well you can personalize an internet classroom (it’s the only hope to get them engaged) in some kind of Zoom meeting.
Boy are things going to change now!