Q. You seem to have finally reached a place with your teaching where you are happy. What was the very worst part of your career leading up to this point of being professionally content?
It was what I just mentioned, the misery of only reaching a few kids in a class of thirty or so, year after year without exception. And that didn’t stop after the traditional years, but persisted into the fifteen years I spent doing storytelling as well. When doing stories, typically only five to seven students in those classes – at the most – were involved, and only a few or usually only one who was truly involved. The rest were just trying to make me believe that they were paying attention.
Q. Why?
As fast processors and extroverts, those few took over the class and left the rest of the students behind and, until now, I didn’t know what to do about it. I wasn’t even aware it was happening! Maybe it was because I was distracted by the language I thought I was supposed to be “covering”. Those split classes of lots of confused kids and a few “smart” ones, as it were, were the worst single aspect of those nearly four decades of teaching. And, along with that, came the worry about someone walking in and seeing that I wasn’t reaching the entire class. And yet it wasn’t my fault, as I know now. The way languages were taught then and a million other reasons joined together to prevent me from reaching all the kids in the classroom, and those few kids who got it were really not helping the others, because they made it all about competition.
Q Isn’t the idea of a teacher not “teaching” but just talking to the kids in community a bit too extreme for schools to ever embrace?
Not if we abide by the research. Dr. Krashen’s Natural Order of Acquisition hypothesis states that we learn languages in a predictable order and that order remains the same regardless of any explicit instruction that teachers think they should be doing. In other words, explicit teaching and learning cannot really help people acquire languages. So when teachers spend so much time planning and trying to control and arrange how their students learn, it’s kind of nuts. Why do they do it if it goes against the research? It also goes against the standards set by ACTFL, so I have a hard time understanding why anyone still insists that we teach certain words and phrases and tenses and grammar points and such. ACTFL is concerned with global competence in language, the whole language, not certain sets of vocabulary or certain language structures.