This is a repost from 2009:
I was running this evening and passed a little league baseball practice. The kids, beautifully attired in new uniforms, were being spoken at by their equally decked out coaches about what to do in case a runner was on second, or some such schlock. The kids were way too young to get any of it. Their faces weren’t into it – they were little kids!
From the time I approached the well-kept ball field to the time I left it, running slowly and even turning around at the end to see if any actual baseball might happen, nothing happened.
Maybe that is why kids dressed in rags in the Dominican Republic account for the highest amount per capita of any nation of pro baseball players. They play. They play all day in empty lots. It is their domain. They gain mastery not by thinking but by doing. They get it in their bodies.
By playing all the time, they learn the game. Yoga students don’t talk about doing yoga in class, except some Iyengar classes I’ve been in. Those kids on the baseball field were being TOLD how to PLAY. It is only in playing that one can one learn, as per that great Plato quote I like to trot out here from time to time.
We should not let the kids who sit in our room have blank expressions on their faces like those sported by the little leaguers I saw that day. Those kids really wanted to play, but the big dad gasser in the new uniform thought they could learn by listening to him talk about baseball.
We should speak to our students only in L2 and, of course, let them read, read, read. We should introduce complex grammar including the subjunctive into our classes when it occurs naturally in our speech, and not think that there is some conscious order that languages can be learned in.
Those old days when teachers merely talked about the language in classrooms will soon be gone. The kids aren’t listening. They want to be engaged. They want to be challenged. They want to play.