Grammar is like a rabbit hole that you go down into in order to avoid actual eye contact and back-and-forth, reciprocal sharing of ideas with your students that is NECESSARY for acquisition.
Let’s repeat that idea:
Sharing ideas and communicating using words (the Standard) involves human contact and is not robotic in nature. The rabbit hole can be likened to a Realm of Robots. Therefore, going down the rabbit hole and asking your students to follow feels wrong to them and many of them refuse to go with you.
They expect language instruction and get a mechanical analysis of things that are mysterious to them, things that they don’t care about.
It’s good for you if you are a robotic teacher because then you don’t have to really WORK and create human LINKS and COMMUNITY and a “web of connectedness” in your classroom, something that is ESSENTIAL to language acquisition. Your classroom will have become a rabbit hole. Why is this?
It is because language acquisition has far more to do with the heart quality than with thinking. It’s about focusing on a message in a community and not about breaking the language down into its various parts like they do when your car is in the shop.
Going down the grammar rabbit hole is NOT GOOD for at least 60% to 80% of the kids you teach, especially those who don’t have: (1) minds that easily take to grammar; (2) childhood homes without books or parents in them who communicate with them as they grow up about more than just telling them to brush their teeth; (3) the ability to overcome their natural teenage shyness and converse or listen to you because in all their other classes for years before they were never encouraged to do that (just memorize things for test) so didn’t learn how to interact with you verbally or even look you in the eyes in some cases (4) were beat down and disenfranchise in invisible ways in the classroom by the few, the privileged, those who own the teacher.
The result is that we have arrived now after decades of going down the rabbit hole at a point where we in general as a profession STILL refuse to even create a real language classroom (one that aligns with the research) because we want to stay in the rabbit hole because it is too scary for us to climb out of it and actually develop our heart quality so that we can reach ALL of our students.