Today was a good day with my 6th hour class. I think, fingers crossed, I might be starting to figure out how they think. That's not to say that I like it because I think they thrive in chaos, but it's a starting point. I'm thinking of researching learning stations that work for high school students, the big drawback is that I can't clone myself to be at each of the stations to explain and help with each little problem. These kids have been trained extremely well to be helpless when it comes to any size and sort of problem. It's like all of their systems shut down, and they have a panic attack if they don't immediately understand how to do something. I don't think that I could re-train them, heaven knows I've been trying, to get them to read the instructions before doing something, which would cut down on at least 50% of the problems. One of the teachers who posts on the Foreign Language Teach list serve calls this "Learned Helplessness," and I have to agree with him.