It’s happened before. Many times, actually. A student starts by asking questions relating to your role as teacher and what you actually contribute to his/her learning within the grander scheme of things. Those kinds of questions never fail to turn my entire day sour! I can list the many benefits to learning a language by heart, but we all know that foreign language can be a hard sell, especially to largely unmotivated high school students. This year, I’ve been confident that CI really helps and makes teaching a language worthwhile. I mean, how often did my kids (namely my non-heritage/native speakers) actually use Spanish meaningfully outside of class? Never?

Just the other day, we spent the entire period talking about our lives, our relationships, our goals and motives — it was incredible coming home that day knowing that we’d accomplished something, that my students contributed to great conversations about what they are most interested in and love to talk about most. It’s what’s so great about CI — students acquire almost unconsciously with their brains so re-wired that they hardly even notice we’re speaking a different language in class.

I teach advanced placement classes, so naturally many of my students are highly intelligent overachievers whose brains’ systematic/conditioned way of interpreting data has corrupted their own opinions and perspectives on how learning should take place. They pour over their notes with highlighters. They complete lengthy study guide packets in their other classes. They complete worksheet after worksheet after worksheet and although they hate doing them, they expect to do the same in my class. This is all they know — memorizing incredible chunks of material needed for tests and forgetting nearly everything soon after. It’s sickening, but this is what they want from me. “We hardly learn in here,” says my star student, “You call this exhausting work? Going over ‘campanadas’ [warm-ups], reading from this book, and asking us questions?”

I’m happy they don’t think our work is exhausting. If only they knew how exhausted it makes me!

I started off the year not intending to make a full switch to TPRS. I failed to briefly educate my students on the theory behind what we do. So what do we do when students question the amount of learning taking place in the classroom? When they say, “We come to Spanish to do nothing — that’s what this class is for,” or “What’s the point of this class? We don’t do anything!”