Let’s not mince words. Kids of today have few reasons to believe in themselves. The scene in most schools is still all about competition and testing and dominating and winning and excluding others.
But if we learn to teach using comprehensible input we can change that culture of competition into one of cooperation and mutual understanding and the building of community. We can bring success in languages to many more than just the few dominant winner students.
We really can. Let’s give the kids something to believe in – themselves. By setting up classrooms in which we speak to the kids in ways that they can understand, in ways that make them want to understand, we give them hope enough to believe that they can do something, that they can be very successful in at least one of their classes.
Let’s learn how to teach in such a way that our kids experience hope. Let’s stop teaching in ways that crush hope. That is what the old system did – it crushed hope in kids. We just weren’t aware of it. But the sad looks on our students’ faces when they were in our classes before we made this change should have tipped us off that something was wrong.
All that is done now – it’s over. There is no blame. The time has finally arrived for us to change how we teach so that we can change the looks on our students’ faces. That is reason enough to get up on a Monday morning and go into our schools, even if we don’t feel like it.
We can do it. We can help kids believe in themselves. We can help kids believe that they can be good at something: a language. We can help kids believe in life. It’s not really about teaching a language at all, is it? It’s not. It never was. We do so much more than teach languages.