John Bracey rocks Latin and for those who are not aware of the tidal waves he is causing in his school you may want to read one or two of these articles before reading his current Report from the Field below:
https://benslavic.com/blog/report-from-the-field-john-bracey/
https://benslavic.com/blog/report-from-the-field-john-bracey-2/
https://benslavic.com/blog/response-to-john-braceys-report/
Hi Ben,
I just had a really interesting experience applying for a teaching job that might be worth sharing with the PLC.
The situation at my current job has grown even than it was last year. My enrollment boomed again this year and the response was EXTREMELY negative from my colleagues, department head, and the parents of the students in our chronically under-enrolled Mandarin program. My principal and department head went so far as to send an email to the entire community (all parents, students and co-workers in the district) informing parents that the low enrollment numbers in Mandarin were the result of students thinking that Latin gave less homework and that they should consider taking their kids out of Latin and placing them into Mandarin. I even found out that parents, who had called my department head asking for more information about Latin, were told by him that they should just take Spanish instead.
Because of these events, and about a hundred others, I decided to apply to a middle school Latin teaching job in my home town. There hasn’t been a Latin teacher job opening in my town since the 1980’s, so I decided to take a shot at it. Here is what happened next…
The application process involved writing a mini-essay on my teaching philosophy. I decided to break all of the rules and write the entire thing about TCI. I used all of the terminology, I mentioned Krashen, and I held nothing back…
I was called in for an interview. During the interview I answered virtually all of the questions about pedagogy with information about CI…
I was called again and told that I was a finalist and that I was to come in to teach a sample lesson to a class of 7th graders. I taught what felt like a train-wreck CI lesson which included some CWB, TPR, pop-up grammar and a choral translation. The class included lots of blurting but there were some good moments. The principal, department head and the high school Latin teacher were all in attendance…
Today I received a phone call from the principal saying that they want to offer me the position.
My reasoning for trying this interview approach was based on my desire to truly enter into a better situation. I figured that if the school was resistant to CI practices outright, I wouldn’t want to work their anyway.
Caveat lector! I already had a full-time job with tenure when I tried this experiment, so I wasn’t putting my livelihood at stake at any point in time. I just thought I would share this positive interview experience with the group.
I hope all else is well,
John Bracey