Where The Rubber Meets The Road

Love that expression – where the rubber meets the road. We design tires, go through an incredibly complex process to make them, but they aren’t tested until they are on a car that is on a road. Robert, of course, just wrote here about the need for the students to be completely unaware of the language as they process its message, which we know is an unconscious process, and I just want to repeat below what he said in that comment, because we simply can’t say it enough. We just cannot express and say and say over again and refocus our teaching minds on this idea here enough:

…in the world of theory, compelling input far surpasses anything else in terms of acquisition. We are so focused on the content that we acquire the language unconsciously. In the world of practice, we cannot be compelling all the time – or probably even most of the time – and beating ourselves up because we cannot do the impossible accomplishes nothing. (Of course, it doesn’t mean we stop striving, either.) Think of the cumulative hours and days of non-compelling input that we endure in our first language – we still acquire the language. This takes us back to the need for . . . wait for it . . . . . . . large amounts of comprehensible input….

I would add one thing to the recent thread here about how we must accept that we cannot make CI compelling all the time. And that is to ask the question, “Who cares?” There is so little reason to be concerned that we can’t get compelling input going all the time. Or even interesting input. As long as its comprehensible input.

The three “big words”, the adjectives that describe CI the most in what we do are, in my opinion: compelling, interesting and meaningful. I’ll take the third. That right there is hard enough to do. I feel strongly, however, that if we give ourselves a break and just have the goal be to make the CI comprehensible with just the meaningful layer in there, we’re doing a lot already.

Look, y’all, we became teachers bc we like the stage, we like to be looked at and impart information to others. We like that feeling of being in charge. We all have a bit of the ham in us. No harm. But we can’t need the kids’ approval. We can’t need observors to laud how wonderful our classes are.

As Robert says, we can’t beat ourselves up because we can’t do the impossible. And it is impossible to make five classes a day for five days a week into a wonderful stand up crack ’em up comedy routine each time. The humor and interest comes from the students. We merely ask the questions. When are we going to get that? We often beat ourselves up bc we can’t reach a certain class, but hey, they could be a bunch of boring people.

When are we going to let ourselves off the hook for not being comedians and entertainers? I am getting mentally ready to present at two national conferences next month, but I am doing that by relaxing now and hoping that some funny and compelling and cool stuff happens in my sessions, but I am not planning it. Instead, I am focusing on making sure that I understand the mechanics that underlie the stuff we do and being able to make it as personal about the people in the room as possible, and since I haven’t met them yet, I can’t plan anything.

In planning humor, in planning PQA and stories, we miss the point. It emerges organically bc we are receptive to the invisible dance going on in the room. It’s vitally important to have a strong, vibrant set of target structures for PQA, words or word groups that lend themselves to interesting discussion, and it is also vitally important to have a great story script for stories, but it is deleterious to plan how those things will enter into play in the class.

We can’t plan play. We must learn to let the interest, compelling or not, emerge from the PQA and stories, in that moment, so that, in one day, we end up using the same structures/script, but completely different things emerge during the CI, and the sense of play, or lack of it half the time, in each class is different, and, again, who really cares as long as we are doing comprehensible input and are thus adding to the 18,000 hours necessary for the kids to gain fluency, for those who will end up getting that much CI.*

We’ve said this all here before and here I am saying it again. The French, of course, in their unfailing analytical joy, have put all of this into words in this article that I periodically reprint here, just because it is so accurate. I apologize for the semi-rant here, by the way. Anyway, here is what the French say about the art of conversation:

https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/10/14/lart-de-la-conversation-and-tprs/

*this is why I strenuously object to all the planning of picking out structures to teach that most TPRS/CI teachers do. They obsess about what structures to teach and get all bent out of shape at the thought of starting the year sans targets except for the word walls. If Krashen is right, the words will occur. It saddens me to see teachers armed with the mighty sword of comprensible input fret about whether the word will get taught that year so that the kids know it for the final exit exams so that they look good on their scores. They worry about words like pencil sharpener and the colors. They try to get all the common vocabulary into that first year of teaching. How odd! Don’t they realize that it’s a crap shoot about what words will stick in the kids’ minds? It’s all about trust that CI works, which is such a key word in the work of Bob Patrick and so many of us. Well, are we going to trust or not? Oops, another little mini rant. Time to go watch my garden grow in my backyard. Voltaire told me to do that. I love him.