It’s time to destroy the myth that problems and solutions in stories are difficult. The myth exists because, in the past when teachers have tried to use stories to teach certain vocabulary from lists, the stories lost their marrow and became like a dry bone.
This was due to the constraints on interest that came with focusing on the words in the list. The term “constraints on interest” is not my term; it’s Dr. Krashen’s and it’s based on hard research about the very truest aspects of how languages are acquired.
A second reason that the myth that stories are so hard is that we have trained CI teachers in our country that they have to be some kind of superstar cute, clever, inspired and wonderfully intelligent leader who is rolling in enough money to attend conferences all the time, in spite of the fact that the content of those conferences hasn’t changed much in 25 years.
We are not superstars who make wonderfully creative stories all the time. That’s not who we are. We need to stop thinking that that is who we are supposed to be. We need to accept our limitations in humility that this is where we are now in this work and that it will get better.
There are too many experts out there who aren’t all that great, and the reason they are not great is because they think they are.
Most of us, me very certainly, are generally scared, vulnerable and overworked teachers who have always felt like strangers in a strange land just trying to find a way through the morass and the inherent depression of our careers.
Today I got an email from a member of this group who said she had failed at TPRS (“I bombed” were the exact words) and I responded that she did not bomb, rather that the bomb that she was using was TPRS and that was the problem – as a system it is too unwieldy.)
There are no experts. There’s just us, working shoulder to shoulder at what is no less than a herculean task – that of shifting our focus as language teachers back to the research and the standards so that we and our students don’t have to suffer so much and can access the vast treasure trove that, properly understood, awaits us if we just keep getting up each morning and going to work.
The myth that we can’t do this work must die. All we have to do is just speak the language and we can end stories with as lame an ending as we want. We’re not entertainers. We can do this work and we will, and in the future it will be a lot simpler to learn and apply.
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