A repost:
Being on the other side of the pond, I had never known how deeply entrenched in the old ways England was until now. I knew that Bob Patrick, after doing a Latin CI workshop at King’s College and Oxford a few years ago, told me it was like opening a can of sardines with one hand, but lately the image of the Recalcitrant Brit Educator has taken on even new meaning.
A few examples come to mind:
Judy Dubois told me once last year about how a strong young American teacher of English over there in France with her, one who really gets what comprehensible input is, Tamara Galvan, is currently being given grief by her English evaluator in France, evaluating her as “too American” in her teaching style. We’ll see about that. As Tamara’s mentor, Judy will see about that, I am certain.
Moreover, I learned during my year in India how conservative parents and students are in their need for work sheets. It started out the year just kind of funny but, except for my sixth graders who totally rocked the house, any kids who had taken French before my class still had a little chunk of England left in their language learning machines in spite of the power we experienced with stories.
In one case, a board member of the American Embassy School, who is English, took me to task at the fall parent conferences over my failure to “teach her daughter in the right way”. Later, in April, this child is one of my biggest fans and is spouting off all over the place about the wonders of stories and her mom doesn’t even have a clue about what to make of it.
A third example of how curiously outdated the Brits are was provided to me from Linda Li in a short catch-up meeting we had before school one day last year.
Linda had just done a two day CI workshop in Beijing that past weekend. Among the 60 participants were 20 English ESL teachers. Linda explained to me that they were typically standoffish at the beginning of the workshop, as one would expect from teachers who don’t get the magnitude of the change they are in (until they lose their jobs). We’ve seen them standing in the back of our workshops before with that look on their faces.
Long story short, Linda reports that at the end of the workshop those same ESL teachers were all gushy about CI and that, “although their brains hurt a bit”, they considered it the most important training of their careers. They were sufficiently impressed to let their guards down.
This work we are doing is real. Jason Bond is over there in Scotland, all William Wallace-like, getting ready to lead the way into England again. It will happen!