What matters is not whether our students are learning or not. What matters is that they feel as if they are learning. Therefore, in buildings where students in levels 2, 3 or 4 are used to doing grammar and learning from a textbook, those students should not have stories and other CI activities pushed on them. The reaction will be swift and violent. (Yes, do ten or fifteen minutes of CI per class, but don’t tell them that what it is – just do it.) The exception is level 1 students who should always be taught with TPRS. Why say this? Because it is true. For me at least, the days of happily teaching language in a new way must be tempered by the reality that most buildings are not prepared for it, not the students, not the other language teachers, not the parent body. They resist the new. I wish I would have picked my battles better. I would have learned all about TPRS, of course, because it is the bomb, but I should have used it less, and much more under the radar, over the past fifteen years. Why say this now? Because I finally get that self care is more important than changing the world for TPRS. It’s just too exhausting to fight passive aggressiveness. It always brings us back to John Bracey. He has gallantly shared his story with us. But I wonder if he would do it again in the same way. Or been less obvious. Just wondering.
