Unprecedented 2 - Ben Slavic

Some of us are in worse situations then others. Those of us here in Denver Public Schools, for example, are in the majority to the extent that, because of the huge work over years of Diana Noonan, teaching using comprehensible input is pretty much a district wide requirement.

But many in this group are not so lucky. They are being looked at by fools. Their current job performance is being judged by people who have no idea of how human beings acquire languages and who use the wrong models to judge their performance in the classroom. The result is an all out attack on the confidence of teachers wishing to explore CI, and great amounts of fear being put into the teacher by, to use the word again, fools.

In that vein, here is part of a second email from the colleague quoted in this article here yesterday:

https://benslavic.com/blog/2013/01/04/unprecedented/

In this new email, this colleague mentions how he may as well just go ahead and give the administration and parent helicopter fools what they want and be done with it. I don’t think it is such a bad idea.

Like Jeff, some of us who are new to the method already have a somewhat modified plan for the second semester (doing lots of R and D) due to huge stress from the people around him, who will be even more pissed this week because of the Cincinnati loss to Houston today in the NFL playoffs.

Here is the email text I wanted to share:

I can be dismissed for no reason whatsoever. This is not the time for me to be bucking the system. One of the reasons I left the old school was that the power-drunk incompetents who were running that place thought they knew more about teaching FL than I did, and were circling around CI like the vultures that they are. Even though their own offspring were in my class, learning and enjoying it, 1984 with all its horrors had sprung to life in that place. War is peace, love is hate, and good teaching is outdated and ineffective if it doesn’t follow the ridiculously contrived model that they had swallowed, hook line and sinker, from an overpaid consultant who used to be a kindergarten teacher. I was going to get hit hard this year about my under-use of the internet and lack of hands-on projects. For starters. So I left for a school that appeared to be untouched by this crazy fad, but they hired a new superintendent who also doesn’t appear to know very much about teaching. He does, however, know that the state legislature voted in standards-based education and made it law, so by god we are going to obey our superiors. Chain of command.

I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that we can’t avoid this, so we need to figure out a way to do it such that it interferes as little as possible with CI. Let’s check the box, and go back to doing what we know to be best for students. Unlike the nuts running the last school, these people really do just want the box checked.

The painful truth is that while I still love teaching and especially CI, the other parts of my life are more important and more compelling to me now (see previous e-mail), and I’m not spilling any blood on the battleground if I can help it.

Those are strong words. We cannot risk our jobs or our sanity in our endeavor to be better teachers. Maybe having our students do culture projects in English to meet the Culture standard is not such a bad idea.

Maybe taking a day off when we need it is not such a bad idea.

Maybe we should create the illusion in the minds of the box checkers that we are doing what they think we should be doing. In the movie “Lincoln”, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens tells a lie to accomplish the overall goal of passing the 13th amendment. Maybe we should do the same from time to time.

Maybe doing lots of stuff from this list sent in today by Carol Gaab to meet the tech expectations is not such a bad idea:

Photopeach.com
Dvolver.com
Wordle.com
Makebeliefscomix.com
photobabble.com

(plus textivate, etc.)

Anybody who has been reading this blog for a long time would agree that things are getting worse. We haven’t always talked like this here. There are greater levels of despair among us now. School buildings are full of fools and they are in charge. Few would admit how crushing this job of teaching has become for them. We don’t need to go there, but it needs to be said.

However, even if it feels that the whole world is just plain spinning off its axis, we must do our best to keep balanced. We can do it. If that means not doing CI all the time, even though all the research points to the fact that projects in L1, early forced output, the use of the book, the assigning of output based homework, etc. are totally useless in actually acquiring the language, then so be it.