My favorite developmental psychologist is a Soviet named Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934). From him we get concepts such as “Scaffolding” (actually, like Rousseau never using the term "noble savage" Vygotsky never used the word "scaffolding," but the underlying concepts are traceable back to him) — the idea that a teacher’s job is to provide an artifice which allows the student to safely explore beyond her/his current realm of mastery — and “ZPD” — (Zone of Proximal Development). The ZPD is what you might call "the sweet spot.” If you throw material at the student that is so far beyond the student’s current level of proficiency that the student is having to guess at everything and can barely recognize those chance moments where he or she gets it right, then not much learning is going on. It all kind of washes over her/him. If, on the other hand, everything that you are asking of the student is easy, then this too is a waste of the student’s time. So the teacher’s job is discern the student’s Zone of Proximal Development, and find ways to keep the student there for as long as possible. Any decent critique of any lesson needs to begin with the question, for what percent of the time were the students in their ZPD. If the answer is close to 100%, then whatever else went wrong, you did a pretty good job. Lesson 2, I knew, was going to be a heavy lift. Revisiting my prioritized objectives ...

1. Tangible experience of success with the first listening activity (“Dish Soap for Dinner.”)
2. Some kind of engagement with with topic for the day.  (“Food Theft in Italy”)
3. SOMETHING that feels like a step in the direction of this bing a debate class. Probably some sort of opinion-formulation/opinion-evaluation activity.

… I was sure that getting to all three would be a log shot. But it turns out that my wording for objective #2 was actually a bit too modest. Everyone had done the reading homework (something I rarely expect to see with 3rd-year senior high school kids that have plenty else to worry about).  To a person, they had assiduously looked up every marginally unfamiliar word, and written the translations in the margins; something I try to discourage, but the kids don’t know me that well, and this was their way of demonstrating that they give a damn. I was very tempted to go deep with the text and discuss with them every single unfamiliar expression, but I resisted because this isn’t a reading class, and from “go," it’s been obvious that they desperately need this to be a speaking class. The one moment that stands out as a determined step forward was when in response to one of my questions, one of the shier of the boys volunteered, “if he had not stolen the food, he would have died." I nearly jumped out of my shoes with glee. That went up on the board and I engaged the entire class with shadowing variations on the past counterfactual conditional. This gratifying turn confirmed to me my suspicion that pretty-much all the forms are there, along with the willingness to explore using them, I just need to drill ARMP (Authentic Rhythm, Melody, and Pronunciation). We even managed to finish with the students working together to compose 4-sentence opinion statements for or against the proposition, “People that steal food must be punished as criminals.” Getting everyone to really elocute and experiment with really feeling their own words in their mouths was … well, unfortunately, it was like pulling teeth, but somehow, everybody wanted to be in the dentist chair. We squirmed, we winced, occasionally, we laughed. We were exhausted. This is going to be a great course!