Animal trainers know that it is easier to teach a horse or dog what you want it to do, than to teach it not to do something. “No” is an abstract notion. In the same way, it is much easier to teach students what is right than it is to teach them not to do
“Why didn’t I use the sacred red pen? Because student minds retain things that are underlined in red. They retain them …. and reproduce them. Haven’t you ever wondered why students keep making the same mistakes over and over? The mistakes that you have been so carefully underlining in red? “
My students played the game quite honestly, and once they realized that I was more interested in reading what they had to say than in counting spelling mistakes, many of them trusted me by writing very personal and interesting texts.
Writing is output, but when I edit their texts and give them to other students to read, it becomes input. and compelling input at that.
Through my comments I wanted my students to know that I was reading what they wrote, reading it for content, not for grammatical correctness, that I was truly interested in what they had to say.
I have spent literally years of my life seated on a hard wooden bench in the kitchen correcting papers hour after hour. Whole weekends while the sun was shining and the dog needed walking and the horse needed riding.
Every summer for the last ten years something magic has happened in Agen, France. Teachers from around the world have gathered in a friendly little town in southwest France and particpated in what many of them have called a life-changing experience. They come together because they have heard of a different way of teaching languages, a way of creating stories with their students and building a different kind of classroom. They come with open hearts and open minds and they leave with smiles and warm memories and many new friends. That is the magic of Agen.