As the battle between trusting the process of free form CI and needing to follow a CI curriculum goes on, I got this from a colleague today….
Hi Ben,
… buddy you are reading my mind. After a mostly sleepless night of tossing and turning trying to figure out how to return [a bunch of books], I got up and read your piece today on the futility of trying to tie in the elegance to a book. You took the words right out of my brain. As bad as I still am at CI, I get it, and the moments of magic are enough to keep me going even though these past 6 months have been one of the most stressful periods of my life. The books … have their good points, but the idea of tying myself and my students to a year of them, having to complete one unit in a certain amount of time because the parents paid for them, is making me old before my time. It was a (kind of miraculous) gift to read that today, as usual thank you……… thank you…
Here is the post he was referring to, from yesterday:
… whether the kids generate the stories or however, is just a variation on a theme – we introduce a few structures (establish meaning), talk about them for awhile while trying to get some personalized information tied to the new structures (PQA), then, when and if we feel like taking the structures into a story, we do that, then we read, expand/embed, and, when that process (Reading) and talking about the reading through various stacks of embeddedness is complete, we start the entire process again with some new structures. At least that is what CI means to me as I think about it today. The pattern I just described is elegant. However it is labeled, the process described above seems to be what makes CI work best, and what makes it unique, truly unique, among foreign language pedagogies. Tying that elegance to a unit in some book, even a TPRS unit book – which to me is a contradiction in terms – would only harden the process described above, which is one of free form elegance, as in the ice skaters who win the gold are not just the technicians, but the artists who ALLOW elegance to FLOW THROUGH THEM]