I was reading another teacher’s account about how important it is to get her students emotionally invested in the story being told in class. A story isn’t just words floating in space. I feel like it was something Judith DuBois may have written, but I did not keep track of where I was reading, who spoke those words, until a few hours later when I found the right video to follow her advice.

Truth be told, I feel like the talk suggesting that CI teachers should be constantly compelling is intimidating, unrealistic and convinces many good teachers that they aren’t good enough. Most days when I am ‘up at bat’ in my classroom, I am not swinging for a homerun. I am just trying to move the game along… the baseball metaphor is falling apart. If I get on first, will the students still acquire? Okay, I’m just trying to not strike out.

But occasionally I see the possibility of a homerun, and I swing.

For the squeamish, let me tell you that the man wins.

After a brief bit of imagination work (in Spanish I asked: Where is the man? What does the bear want? What does the man have? Does he have what the bear wants?), we then watched the first 2 minutes of the gripping video.

Then, a good thirty minutes of class discussion and Write & Discuss. One class insisted that the man was loco, crazy, the only word that they knew in Spanish that could come close to describe how they felt about someone who would climb a mountain alone. Really?! I thought that the beauty of the view glimpsed as he was fighting off the beast was reason enough to cancel class and go hiking immediately! Another class insisted on writing a fictional short story in which the man and bear hugged and became best friends… I am not sure exactly where that came from, but I called on each student to provide the next word to the W&D and they all insisted on the peaceful narrative. They were sweetly invested in a peaceful outcome.

Another class built the paragraph in the photo below. I insisted that this Spanish 1 class only use words we already know. It was especially satisfying how they finally settled on a way to express that the man “found his head” and figured out how to fight back. It is very satisfying to help them learn to use their limited vocabulary to still be creative and express what is in their minds. But to get them to this point, you really have to have the high-frequency words posted on the walls to provide inspiration.

I will often do something like this as an opening activity, and it will fizzle in a matter of minutes. That is okay. I had a reading prepared, expecting it to fizzle. But for some reason the kids wanted to talk, and we are at that delicious moment in the semester in which more and more of them are realizing that they are developing real communicative ability.

It was a good 30 minutes.