Dave Talone sent this, and I repost it from the moretprs list in case anyone missed it. Very badass indeed. Very supportive of what we do:
Ben I just saw this over at moretprs and wanted to share it with you in case it slipped off your radar. It is amazing!
Diane Volzer posted:
Reading the correspondence of Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, has been just fascinating! I’ve already shared one quote…I hope you won’t mind a couple more I thought would be interesting to CI/TPRS folks:
“Helen is as eager to have stories told her as any hearing child I ever knew. She has made me repeat the story of little Red Riding Hood so often that I believe I could say it backward…I am teaching her little rhymes and erses, too. They fix beautiful thoughts in her memory. I think, too, that they quicken all the child’s faculties, because they stimulate the imagination. Of course I don’t try to explain everything. If I did, there would be no opportunity for the play of fancy. Too much explanation directs the child’s attention to words and sentences, so that he fails to get the thought as a whole. I do not think anyone can read, or talk for that matter, until he forgets words and sentences in the technical sense.”
“For weeks we did nothing but talk and read and tell each other stories about Christmas. Of course I do not try to explain all the new words, nor does Helen fully understand the little stories I tell her; but constant repetition fixes the words and phrases in the mind, and little by little the meaning will come to her. I see no sense in “faking” conversation for the sake of teaching language. It’s stupid and deadening to pupil and teacher. Talk should be natural and have for its object an exchange of ideas. If there is nothing in the child’s mind to communicate, it hardly seems worth while to require him to write on the blackboard, or spell on his fingers, cut and dried sentences about “the cat,” “the bird,” “a dog.” I have tried from the beginning to talk naturally to Helen and to teach her to tell me only things that interest her and ask questions only for the sake of finding out what she wants to know.”