We all have one class that doesn’t work, in our view. It just feels wrong. The kids don’t partipate, there is a culture of passive resistance – often led by a single kid with passive aggressive tendencies, and it’s just the chemistry of the thing.
We soldier on, bravely accepting this one class that we simply can’t get to budge with the CI, not knowing that we may be a lot closer to a solution than we think. The secret catalyst to make the class catch fire may be one simple conversation in English. I chose to have such a conversation with my eighth period class today.
I just felt like being honest. I shoved aside the teacher protocol language and told them how I felt. I told them about comprehensible input, how it appeared in the final quarter of my teaching years, how much I hurt all those years as an AP teacher serving only rich white kids, how hard that all was, and how now I feel that I have found a way to teach that gives me joy and so that is why I am so intent on succeeding with them as a class.
I laid it all out there. All that is appropriate for a group of kids, anyway. I told them that I was sorry that I kept walking around the room looking in their eyes all the time, that I wasn’t trying to be rude with that, that I was only trying to reach them because that is the way I believe languages are learned, through meaningful interaction with others.
I asked them if they had a loving grandparent somewhere in their pasts who may have taught them games and songs with words, sweet rhymy things, sounds that they may still remember. I told them that I could never replace their grandparents in that capacity, but that I wanted the honor of just hanging out with them in French. I made it clear that all the tests and all that stuff, all that teacher stuff, was not what I am about.
They really listened to me. The look in their eyes, by the time my ten minute rant was over, had changed completely. I had reached them on a human level.
I will continue to stay the CI course that I have started with this class. Their stony silences may or may not continue. I will not let the fear get to me when I feel like I am the only person in the classroom, exept for those few of good heart, those shining angels, put in there by God to balance things out.
I won’t threaten them with the book as Plan B to force compliance. I won’t make them pay me points. I accept them as they are. And I won’t give that lecture again. I fully accept that if I fail, it’s all right, because, as I heard once, what seems like failure may really be success, and what seems like success may really be failure.