Q. What do I do with my fast processors who are always trying to get me to speed up?
A. Don’t acquiesce to their demands. Tell them that you will not speed up to the level they want in your instruction until all the kids in the classroom understand. Tell them that you are doing your job as long as they are hearing the language, and that they don’t have your permission to push you to “go faster” with the language. Tell them it’s your job to reach all the kids in the classroom and that, in spite of what they may currently believe, they don’t get to run the classroom that year.
Q. I find that hard to do. The faster processors are always speeding me up.
A. This is a serious matter and you must meet it head on.
Q. Specifically how?
A. Well, isn’t it true that historically classes in all subjects throughout the school have been about dividing kids, getting them to compete with one another, with disastrous results for all but the few?
Q. Yes, and I would venture to say that that is one reason for the intense stress found in school buildings these days.
A. Nobody can relax in schools these days. I think it has A LOT to do with the competition vs. cooperation piece that sits enthroned in most schools, unnoticed but very much there and very much a destroyer of kids’ belief in themselves as language learners.
Q. And there is an actual physical toll on this for many of us, or so has been my own experience.
A. I believe that my blood pressure was at least ten points higher whenever I was in one of the seven buildings I worked in over all the years. Some buildings were worse than others. In one building in one year, I was getting my blood pressure checked weekly because it was becoming an issue and it was consistently higher than what it was in the summer. How are we supposed to teach a simple and loving and highly understandable class when we are running around in that kind of stress in our bodies all day?
Q. It’s certainly a big topic.
A. But one of the things about the Star is to give us more time. It allows us to slow down.
Q. Exactly how?
A. By giving us structure within the chaos of normal human conversation and tableau and story creation. We are not meant to kill ourselves in the interests of comprehensible input language instruction. We must learn to relax and take care of ourselves so that we can live to fight another day. And for that we can’t have the old “whatever happens” attitude of the old CI models of the past. We need to know where we are at all times during class.
Q. Those are wise words!
A. They are words born of hard experience and no small amount of personal emotional suffering over decades. I would lie awake at night thinking about how to deal with some out-of-control kid instead of sleeping. Or with some colleague whose legs were encased in the hard concrete of 20th c. language instruction who thought that if I just changed what I was doing, everything would be fine.
Q. I can only imagine….
A. But I am happy that some of the younger teachers I am mentoring in the Star are breaking through on that level of stress.
Q. Any examples?
A. I’m glad you asked. Just this morning I got a message on the Patreon site from a really talented new Star teacher in Los Angeles, Madi Cabral. Here it is:
“I love the fact that there’s so little prep needed for both my well-being as a teacher and theirs! I find myself using the free time to either read more research or prep Social/Emotional Learning activities for them that are desperately needed after the damage of the past two years. I don’t have to pour so much into the ‘language’ planning and can focus on the humans in front of me!”
Q. Boy, that sounds good.
A. That’s what the Star does….
Q. It’s amazing if you think about the collective mental state of language teachers in general over the years.
A. And for many of us over the decades. But when we teach to our students’ SEL needs, and they learn to relax and trust more and we learn to relax more and more ourselves, we lower everyone’s stress levels. At the heart of the Ultimate CI approach are in point of fact the SEL and inclusion pieces.
Q. The Star has advantages that I obviously have missed so far in my study of the two books….
A. Just to be able to lean all of our teaching selves into the wonderful and complete support that the Star provides, and to be able to teach simply and in a relaxed fashion – it’s a win-win. Yet we have to consciously make the effort. It’s not something that’s given to us. The place to start is with tableaux in Phase 1 of the Star and stay there, which was the original start of this discussion as I remember, and not go further into the questioning levels with a story until all are ready to do so.
Q. What if the fast processors force you forward?
A. As I said before, tell them that your job is to reach everyone in the classroom and that they can and they will wait for the slow processors. Tell them that as long as they are hearing the language, they are learning. Tell them that the way you teach is based on equity and that you will not change to favor them if hell itself were to freeze over because we have a country that is ripe for reform on every level of our society.
Q. I like that, but I probably wouldn’t say the part about hell freezing over….
A. Just a stylistic device I used there. But it reveals the FIGHT in my heart for the slower processors or otherwise disenfranchised kids that make up the vast majority of our language students.
Q. But the inclusion piece is being addressed now in language education, certainly. Right?
A. Where?
Q. In lots of districts. I thought we had reached that point in our profession.
A. It may be being addressed in some places, but in words only, I fear. In meetings or at happy hours perhaps, but not in the classroom. I only know one district in the country that is consciously addressing the equity piece – in St. Louis County under the direction of Jeff Tamaroff. Even in my old district, Denver Public Schools, I don’t see much happening to DIRECTLY TACKLE how we exclude kids from our language classrooms as a matter of course. But aren’t we getting a bit far afield from our original topic here? My point is that you should only go to QL 5 and QL 6 when the tableau literally thrusts you into a story, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and to tell those pesky fast processors to cool their jets.
Q. How do I know when that happens?
A. You’ll know it when it happens.
