In a recent exchange with a department head who is trying with mixed success to point her teachers in the direction of CI, she said to me:
I miss the days when teaching was truly teaching and we didn’t have to check off items on charts, prove that we’ve covered the standards, show test scores, have all kids “master the material”, etc.
Oh well. We all have to survive within the box we’re given. Our box is to align the curriculum with the new state standards AND write a sequential curriculum. Two of us in the department are trying to move the rest forward with more CI. It’s a start but it is not where we want to be.
I responded:
I think that the core of the problem revolves around what a language curriculum even is, how it is defined. Language is so big it could never be concretized and put into boxes. And the admins and teachers feel that they are doing something right but the kids continue to suffer.
Related to this idea is this poem of Hafiz, translated from the Persian by Dan Ladinsky:
SPICED MANNA
Someone will steal you if you don’t stay near, and sell you as a slave in the market.
I sing to the nightingales’ hearts, hoping they will learn my verse, so that no one will ever imprison your brilliant angel feathers. Have I put enough spiced manna on your plate tonight in this Tavern where Hafiz serves?
If not please wait, for more light is now fermenting. Someone will steal you if you don’t stay near, and sell you as a slave in the Market, so your Beloved and I sing.
Have we put enough comprehensible input on our students’ plates? Not if we are dividing the language into little pieces and offering it to them bite by bite. That’s not how the research says it works.
Our students’ minds will be stolen and sold in the market of curricular objectives, essential outcomes, and textbooks unless we keep them near and safe? How?
We must keep them focused on our verse. If we put enough SPICED MANNA, enough RICH input in the target language, enough input that is about THEM, we will keep them interested. Each time we review their (Matava) questionnaires, each time we build a one word image or story out of invisible creatures that THEY have invented, each time we assign and christen them with a new name, each time we make THEM the subject and object of our instruction, we keep the fermentation process going. Each new day. We sing to them. To keep them out of the market.