What is this work really about? It’s about laughing with kids. If you spend your time in class laughing with kids, and it’s in the target language, you will probably end up by the end of the year having taught a nuclear explosion amount of language compared to what is possible in what you were doing before.
When you are laughing with the kids, you are certainly not laughing about the structure or the form of the language, or its single word lists and silly rules, but about its content, the message, its contextual richness, its groupings of understandable words that get bigger and bigger each year from word chunks to sentences to entire paragraphs to entire stories, what Rabelais calls the “substantifique moelle”, the bone marrow of the thing.
It’s the freedom from fear and worry that counts – freedom from the fear that you won’t teach all the words and all the word lists and all the stuff that your students are guaranteed to forget after the test anyway.
You have the capacity to be a great teacher and if you’ve made it this far into the second The StarSystem™ book you are doing very well indeed. You are venturing into new territory that few teachers venture into because of the insane demands made on teachers these days and the clinging claws of the old paradigm. You are bringing real reform – much needed reform – to your profession.
Yes, teachers should be able to teach how they want, but not at the expense of children while ignoring the research.