While I’m not a slavish proponent of the “Rassias Method”-or any other “method,” for that matter-I do find him a kindred spirit in promoting the idea that language learning needs to be fun and surprising in order to be effective.

In a video interview posted on YouTube, John Rassias uses the dictum “to please and instruct,” and I couldn’t agree more with his ideas on what it takes to be an effective teacher. Rather, I find that teachers fear what might be seen as “turning the asylum over to the inmates” and letting students discover the joys of learning for themselves.

As I’ve traveled around the country visiting Chinese language classrooms, I’ve seen everything from the absolutely fantastic to the utterly abysmal, but the one thing I don’t often see is an appropriate balance of academic rigor and student engagement. I’ve often heard debates between teachers on the challenge of maintaining a rigorous curriculum while still engaging and motivating students. Another student still remembers every line of the Blink 182 song she translated into Chinese and can sing it on cue! That boy who played the teenage mother-and who received our classroom's mock Academy Award for “Best Dramatic Performance” by almost unanimous vote-is now a college student who endeavors to become a Chinese language teacher himself. On reflection, I am amazed by the breadth of language the students retained, and how they came to love learning Chinese. Was it appropriate to let a fifteen-year-old boy play the role of a pregnant teenage girl, or a sixteen-year-old girl play a heartless boy who bounced from girlfriend to girlfriend? I soon feared that parents would complain when they learned what was going on in their child’s Chinese class (though no one ever did complain). As a teacher, I’ve often worried about some of my own classroom practices-like the time I asked my students to create their own Chinese language soap opera, and they wound up creating sordid tales of adultery, murder, cross-dressing, and just pure silliness.

Soap opera news website tom friedman