If you are like me, you reflect on what you do in class sometimes more than you actually teach. It’s part of the change. It’s the dismantling of the old by means of allowing room in our minds and in our teaching practice for the new.
This process feels strange to us, because it is genuine. We are not used to genuine things in education, especially in foreign langauge education. The feeling of awkwardness with the method is just an unavoidable marker of the juggernaut of the change that we are in.
It gets to be a bit of a pain, actually, doesn’t it? It’s scary, especially when new and creative ideas, carried in on the wave of change, regularly wake us up at night, clamoring for our attention, demanding to be tested in our classes the next day.
I have gotten to the point after twelve years of this change of giving up any hope that it will leave me alone. It is too fresh and interesting to walk away from.
The only way out now is through, to plunge into the belly of the beast and feel the fear and keep the change going by doing all I can to point to the new ideas for the younger teachers who have already made their appearance in our schools, hammers in hand, ready to destroy the old bullshit that has turned so many people off to languages for so long.
How do we know that this is real change? Anyone with a clear mind would agree, if you asked them, that the best way to teach a foreign language is to use the language in class, and not English. The change is real, it is here, we know how to do it now, and we learn more every day because we are brave.