We have a mental health initiative here in this learning community. We need it because in our professional lives it seems as if we are besieged by fools and in our private lives just being in this insane country right now is no easy thing.
The CI movement is in shambles. The former focus on implementing the the research on CI in our classrooms is gone, replaced by a watered-down money-driven kind of CI that is, to me, frightening. The experts aren’t experts at all. They just tell people they are.
Too many teachers seem to always be looking for the newest and latest activity that will render obsolete all the other innumerable activities that they have already found over previous years of frenetic searching.
It’s not all about finding the right “activity”. It requires much deeper internal work than that, work that most teachers, still in love with worksheets, would rather not do.
The research strongly indicates that the key to our success in this work lies not in finding the next activity, but in the calm and relaxed and pleasant give-and-take of enjoyable conversation with our students, and not in any particular activity or way of teaching using CI. The core of CI lies in community building. That’s why I am calling my new podcasts here, if I do them, the CI Society, recalling that most important quote by Chomsky:
“…[Language] is acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner, merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care.”
This implies that we must relax if we are to succeed in this work, and we must teach in a way that allows are students to relax and just enjoy the class, focusing not on the form of the language but on the message, since that is what the research clearly shows us is how people acquire languages.
Too many of us are getting into stressful places that affect our mental health because we are unable to resist the temptation to “challenge” our students – like we used to in the old paradigm – with more testing than is necessary, with too-fast speech, with texts like “the novels” that many student in the class can’t even read (which results in a worsening of the equity issues in our classroom which will only go away if we consciously address them).
We can call the CI of today unwieldy. It’s a bad blend of traditional and CI, and it doesn’t work.
If you give your students material that is too unwieldy for them, you will confuse them. There is nothing more important than instilling confidence in your students. The language researcher who knew this most, in my opinion, is Lev Vygotsky.
Our real work in teaching languages, largely ignored by most teachers who have been brought up in the old paradigm, has nothing to do with “challenging” students, and everything to do with making things easy for them to understand. Always. No exceptions.
The reason for this is simple: all the brain activity that is responsible for acquiring languages happens in the unconscious mind, and “challenging” students is something that only occurs in the conscious mind.
So, don’t “challenge” your students. Make it pleasant and easy for them to simply sit in class and absorb the language via the drawings and put an end to all of the struggle and needless searching for “the right pedagogy” or “the right materials” or “the right trainer” or “the right conference” or “the right activities”.
The things mentioned above, the points that I make in all my books about this, reveal that doing CI is really very easy. You create a relaxed feeling of community in your class, you don’t bust your students’ chops with heavy testing that breaks their spirits, making them feel “less than” the few privileged robotic memorizers who divide the community down racial and economic lines, and the result is that the kids, feeling very little stress, succeed, because of what we know about the research.
Do you want to really lower your stress as a language teacher? Then give up the illusion that the old concept of testing / grading works and embrace the new testing model I have developed since about 2008. It’s a great way to grade! And anyway, when the language is being acquired by the unconscious mind, and therefore cannot be measured, why would you waste your precious instructional minutes “measuring” that which cannot be measured?
Just give some easy quizzes, have them do some free writes and dictées and use the principle descriptive qualifiers of the national standard of Communication – the Three Modes of Communication – to evaluate the “observable non-verbal behaviors” that you see in class for the most of their grade.
Using this simple grading formula provides you with lots of extra time to do exactly what has been described in these pages over the years as perhaps the most important thing you can do as a language teacher, and that is to just relax. Haven’t we got enough bullshit to worry about in our lives right now than our fricking jobs?