Most teachers, really unfortunately, just soldier on until they collapse at the end of the year, when that is completely unnecessary. When I don’t want to teach, I teach what I call fake classes:
FVR – 10 min.
Reading Class – here we just read to them in L1 while they follow along in the text. We may spin discussions in L2 as we usually do, if we have the energy* – 15 min.**
Break, call roll, texting time – 5 min.
Dictée – 15 min.
Now, this looks like a real class, but consider that the only real actual work you are doing is during the second part, the reading part, when you may spin into L2 to circle a few questions about the text.
For the rest of it, it can hardly be said to be any work to stand there and read to the our wonderfully attentive charges in English during the reading part, nor is it any work to do a dictée*** as long as you are strict about the rules as per the description of dictée on the workshop section of this site.
(The material for the dictée should be taken from the reading, to make it look like some kind of thought went into planning the lesson.)
The beautiful part is that, if you don’t spin any discussion during the second (reading) part of class, then you are teaching a 100% fake class, in which there is no aural CI being delivered and yet, unlike the fake grammar/computer based classes of the past and present, the students are actually learning something during our fake classes.
What could be more perfect for this time of year, when everyone’s energy is so low? At Abraham Lincoln High School, we have nine teaching days until our spring break, and I will be doing fake classes on each of those nine days. It is a form of survival because in teaching there are times (like now) when you feel as if you just can’t go on.
Just one thing to add:
The best Movie Reading occurs when one thing – and this is something that I don’t believe has been discussed anywhere in the TPRS community – is present in our voices when we read to our kids. When we do this kind of reading, when we try to make it into a movie in our students’ minds, we absolutely must read with love in our voices.
It sounds odd to say that in what we view as an academic setting, but schools are no more academic settings than machine shops or restaurants. All places are really just places where we can practice being loving and sharing a sense of peace and happiness with others. Especially children.
Krashen and Ray have shown that language instruction is not and has never been an academic, merely intellectual thing. Language instruction has always and must always involve the heart. The same feeling that we convey to the kids during Kindergarten Day is what we want to convey when we read to our students in Movie Reading.
We must read to them with love, that’s all I can say about it. If we read novels to them in a robotic way, none of this will work.
People always complain about how shitty Blaine’s novels are. Stop it. Just use Movie Reading to make it enjoyable for the kids to listen. Read to them with a relaxed, permission giving, softness. Read to them with love. Give the characters in the novel a bit of personality, but not too much (let the kids add their own internal definition of character as well).
The feeling of relaxed enjoyment of Movie Reading, along with the Calming Music done during FVR, will cause the kids to forget how bad the novels are (criticisms and judgement are functions of the conscious mind and we teach our kids to be that way all the time in schools) and they will have a different experience of the novel.
Understand what reading lovingly means. It just means reading with a sense of respect for life. This can be conveyed, even in this world.
* this is the only real teaching we do in fake classes and it is optional.
** this part can be reduced to 5 or 10 minutes, because extra time is always needed at the end of class during dictée.
*** I have spoken many times on this site about dictée as the “great bail out move of all time” when you really need to just get to the end of the period any way, any how.