Susie always said to dive right into the method. I used to agree but now I think otherwise, for these reasons:
1. It is too difficult. I wouldn’t want to race in a Grand Prix without some practice time in a Formula 1 car first.
2. Too many people will notice, in and out of the building, as per:
– your kids will notice the sense of flailing in you and that is never good.
– your administrators will wonder what is up with the weird ass lesson plans and then you will be shackled with re-educating them yourself in an area where your own learning curve is just beginning.
– your family will wonder what is going on when you start muttering at the dinner table about how PQA weirds you out.
– your dog will resent being kicked as you walk in the house after another excrutiating day of switching to using the TL 90% of the time in your classroom.
3. This method is a body cell driven method. You feel it in your body more than you think it in your head. This takes a lot longer than you think to get and accept. So give yourself a break. That’s how radical the shift is. It takes language acquisition to another place. A choir does not just sing the words, they feel the words. They taste the words. They give life to the words. What we have historically in language acquisition are robot choir directors teaching robot singers. So youi want to build your career as a robot choir director? Do you want your kids to be cardboard cutout robotic versions of students? That’s what I mean by cell driven.
4. Your old teaching self, remember, is a 4%er. The reason you became a teacher of languages is because you were really good at understanding things via grammar and analysis and your teachers in high school and college told you that you were good at it – they rewarded you for doing what they did and playing that discrete grammar game – and so when it came to declare a major and you didn’t have one you chose to become a teacher of language since you couldn’t get a more glamorous job as an interpreter because you weren’t a native speaker. although you tried to be. Accordingly, the 4%er in you, seeing now that you have grown up to what real language acquisition is all about – an unconscious process involving mostly input for the first two years – is going to basically cause all sorts of mental opposition in your deeper mind which will wake you up at night for years as you struggle to believe.
Now, what is the antidote to this gnarly ass transition into real teaching? How do you keep the transition period down to a minimum of a few years before you start running across the parking lot in the excitement of being able to teach that day, before you start dancing for joy in your classroom at how cool language instruction can really be?
The answer does not lie in diving in, for the aforementioned reasons. The answer lies in steady, daily training and slow progression while eliminating negative self talk like “I suck at this”. Conferences aren’t enough. You need daily training. You need to work on one skill at a time in order to slowly build your TPRS castle stone by stone. You also need emotional support through the tough times. Honestly, I didn’t set out here to write some advertising copy for this website, but this is what we need instead of being thrown into the method by ourself in a hostile building.
We need time, emotional support, constant refocusing of our angry 4%ers, and lots of training and pracice standing on our feet in our classrooms. Yes, twelve years ago I took Susie’s advice and jumped in head first, but now I wished I hadn’t. The icy waters just shocked me too much. That is about the only thing I have ever disagreed with Susie on, by the way – if you are on the East Coast, go see her with Laurie next month in NJ. You will be glad you did!
Meanwhile, we need now in springtime to forgive ourselves for not having been perfect teachers this year, begin to reach up and unstrap the big bundles that we have been carrying around on our backsall year and set them on the ground now, in March, not in June (that’s too late for us to be ready for August).
We need to give ourselves a much needed break. Again, do not wait until June to begin to relax, start relaxing now with Fake Classes. Yes, start teaching using Fake Classes, as per:
If you look carefully at the Fake Classes schedule, you can see that, during the part of class where you just read the novel to the kids, you could right there practice circling. How? By trying every few minutes or every few paragraphs to just ask a few circled questions. Just try to get a little circling practice. Train the kids in the rules of listening during this time.
Why is this the best way to start your classroom training in TPRS/CI? Because, in the movie part of Fake Classes, you can always return to the reading. Let’s say a sentence in the book that you read to the kids in L1 is
…she walked home…
All you have to do to begin your completely safe training in CI is to ask in L2:
Who walks home? (student raises hand)
Oh, Jimmy, you walk home! (yes)
Class, does Jimmy walk home? (yes)
Class, does Jimmy or Pablo walk home (Jimmy)
Class, does Pablo walk home? (look at Pablo and hopefully he shakes his head no)
Correct, class, Pablo doesn’t walk home, Jimmy walks home. (ohh!)
Class, does Pablo fly home? (use Point and Pause if it is a new verb to them)
Correct, class, Pablo doesn’t fly home, he walks home (Ohhh)
Then, after circling the subject and the verb, circle the object.
Note, as stated above, that when you practice circling inside of movie reading you are never in danger of falling apart during the circling because you can jump back into the L1 movie translation of the novel whenever it’s feeling weird, which is all the time when you are first learning circling.
Practice the circling often like that, in a kind of stealth way as little spinouts during the L1 reading, and then, when you feel great about your ability to circle, turn to the next skill you want to learn as you slowly set about learning the method, in safety.