This new and exciting work that many of us in our group are doing with non-targeted instruction allows us to reach kids much better in class. It shortens the emotional distance between everybody in the room. This then allows us to get to the real problem in WL education, the incredible falseness of it all, characterized by memorization, distance, lack of community, too much testing, and a general feeling that most WL teachers are still teaching the material without having much concern for the lives of the people learning it. The only way to respond to the totally shitty, out-of-touch-with-the-research teaching happening right now in both kinds of traditional classrooms is to directly respond to the trauma students are undergoing living in their communities, and since we can’t do that because we are not social workers, we have to achieve it in our classrooms. We do that by working with images instead of word lists. We do that by asking our traumatized students what they think, how they feel, and creating lessons filled with laughter and not self-consciousness and fear of the test.
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
