He saw that they could be used to represent anything that is not physically present in the classroom, including concepts that students of whatever age struggle with when they are purely mental constructs. I first used them as an aid to story-telling, picking up a different colour/length of rod every time I introduced a character and then leaving them on the table to be touched when referred to again later in the story, moved closer together as relationships between the characters developed, or further apart when things went badly. I well remember the tumultuous love triangle between Ms. Pink, Ms. Brown (an unusually tall young lady), and Mr. White.

From there, it is a small step for using the rods to illustrate prepositions of place. Give me a handful of rods and I can show you the difference between on and above, between next to and near. If I add movement, I can help you see the above/over distinction and the in v. into.

Gattegno’s great insight was to see that we can use the rods to represent language itself: words, syllables, and letters. Using rods of different lengths, one per syllable, I can show you the difference between badMINton and BADminton. Similarly, one rod per word shows “How KIND of you to let me come,” over “How kind of you to LET ME COME.” (Granted I’ve just done the same thing with capital letters, but you will see where I am going with this in a moment.)

Grammatical transformations that change word order (questions, imperatives) can be shown by rearranging rods. Assign a colour to each part of speech and now you can demonstrate how, for example, using a verb instead of a noun changes the pattern of the rest of the sentence.

Error correction can be done by plotting out the errant utterance with rods and then rearranging them, replacing some of them, and/or removing some. In the spirit of the Silent Way, I should also add that error self-correction can be done by indicating which rod represents the mistaken word, syllable, or letter and letting the learner correct the utterance.

For me, the great value of the rods became clear the day I left them on the table in the classroom and came back to find the students PLAYing with them (you knew I’d get to play in the end, right?). I watched for a while, fascinated, gradually realising that they were actually playing with language, trying out different word orders and permutations, seeing how they looked and sounded. I’d never seen students play with language before. This was something new and exciting.

After a while, they started to check with me about whether the patterns of grammar and syntax they were creating were acceptable or not. Some of them were; all of them sounded like poetry. I was reminded of one of my favourite expressions from the bilingualism literature: “the creativity of the bilingual.” I understood why some teachers get excited when their students write haiku or some other form of poetry. But this was something more: they were not only creating; they were checking out possibilities, testing the limits of the language.