Linda and I were talking about whether we should join a program in our school where we open our doors to groups of teachers from all disciplines to share ideas about teaching. My position and Linda agrees that we are so different in what we are doing, in what we are trying to accomplish, that its apples and oranges and how we get the high engagement and laughter would be something of a mystery to anyone who doesn’t teach a language. Why? Because we teach to an entirely different part of our students’ brains – their unconscious minds.
That’s THE game changer in foreign language education. It is the underlying concept at the heart of the reason that the WL community worldwide is – that we don’t even target the same part of the brain that all the other subjects target. As I have said, a child doesn’t learn a language by thinking. Thinking has nothing to do with it. So we decided to not participate in the program. Our doors are always open anyway. The image here is that when we go uptown we use the subway, and everyone else uses the bus.