The group decision to embrace the metacognition piece and use the rigor posters to foster discussion in each class next year so that kids reflect and verbalize their ideas on how they learn with us is an important thread from the year.
We created that entire concept of rigor, the rigor posters that Clarice did, the entire self-reflection piece to end the class, all to get kids to see that if they want to make real gains in listening, they need to listen with the intent to understand, and that if they want to make any real gains in reading, they need to read with the intent to understand.
These are such simple givens to us but often are not at all simple to the students, who have had few classes in reflecting about learning. We can talk about cheerfulness all we want, and that will definitely be of great value in our work, 4 but we need things that are more clear and concrete to the kids.
The Sufi saint Inayat Kahn (no relation to Brigitte, I assume) has said that the best way to train children is in gently repeating the command. But that may not be true in our case in CI classrooms. Our kids are so numb to rules.
Does that mean we can go ahead and get angry in those moments of palpable moments of rudeness that almost shock us when they happen bc they are so over the top? Of course not. So do we bail to grammar worksheets? I won’t do that.
Then what do we do with those four kids who almost visibly try to take down the class? First, we realize that they are the reason we are floundering. They are almost singularly the cause of the problem – which is a lot less about us than we may want to think.
That right there is my insight after writing that long response up there to you John. I know that this is not real clear, but work with me here.
I wrote first that activities are bogus and a waste of time. You said that you wanted to use them anyway when the students misbehaved, esp. now when they are nearly out of control across the country. I said not to do that, to become cheerful.
I said that because just yesterday I saw what honest, honed cheerfulness can do for a class given by a true master of CI, Annick Chen. That was a first answer, but mainly applied to us and what we can do.
Now here is a second answer I just hit on, this one much more concrete, one that is mainly applied to them and what they MUST do to assuret their grade, which sadly is just about all that counts to many of our students – they are only there for a grade that they expect to pull from us.
So I am trying to make the point here that we must realize that the four little adolescents in the classroom who could care less about following the rules and whom we know will not respond to our new cheerfulness (not fake cheerfulness, by the way – don’t even try that) need something to force them to follow the Rules Chart.
Now this gets really interesting at this point. How can we actually make those four kids (honestly I just want to call them what they really are – little shits) an offer that they can’t refuse, something much more powerful than a parent phone call (parents of shit kids are usually shits as well which is why those particular phone calls don’t work).
And the best answer to their shittiness lies in one of the rules, but not the ones I used to think were the most important, rule #1, “Listen with the Intent to Understand” and rule #4, “Sit up, Square up Shoulders, Clear Eyes”. Those are huge, but now in the light of this current discussion, I believe that the big rule, the on that can hit them right in the teeth (that’s what they need) is a rule that I recently removed from the list! Of course this is figurative talk and if you can’t relate to it then either you haven’t been teaching for very long or you are a master of classroom discipline.
By the way, that rules chart took me a full 10 years to create through trial and error, thinking about this stuff and losing sleep at night for over ten years. Over 100 rules have been tossed out and these few are the only ones that remain, so they are strong.
So what is the rule that I am suggesting here (we cannot know if what I am saying here will work until we try this in the classroom) is rule #3, the one that says “No Blurting/NoTalking Over”.
Can you feel the truth of that? Can you sense the potential in that bad boy of a rule that if we only enforce it we can change our lives in the classroom and therefore out of it? I can.
Here is what I will test now and as the school year winds down: when a kid says something out of turn, sneaking into the discussion one of those little comments designed by the kid to shred the conversation in L2, I can’t kick the kid out (can’t do that because too many kids do that in our classes now) but I can do something. What?
Well, if I have this right – that this little rule “No Blurting/NoTalking Over” represents the hidden power tool that I have been looking for all these years, I will (and here is the concrete part that the will hit the four verbally disruptive between the teeth because they have seen rules all their lives and have grown immune to them), I do the following:
I laser point to a (brand new next year) chart that is next to the Rules Chart, called the Consequences Chart:
- Head on Desk – O for the day (no warnings)
- Cell Phone Use – O for the day (no warnings – I don’t care if the phone is out on the desk, I care if it being used, but that’s just me)
- Extended Bathroom Trip – O for the day (no warnings)
- Blurting/Talking Over – 2nd offense – O for the day (after one warning)
- Blurting/Talking Over – 3rd offense – student is removed to a colleague’s room (after two warnings)
- Absent without excuse presented in the next few days – O for the day (in other words, I put the zero in for an absence automatically and they have to produce a written excuse to get the zero neutralized.) – this one I need to think about but the other four I am solid on implementing.
The thing is, I feel that I am being forced by an out of control system to do the above as part of my job, so that I can even do my job. I now have to fight fire with fire. I cannot do my job if I don’t do something like this. I have never come close to good classroom management of the kind that I believe is possible, that is, great CI with no interruptions. I have always had to keep a slightly bitchy edge to get the CI to run smoothly, and I don’t want to do that anymore.
Note importantly that the teaching with CI gives energy, it is mentally healthy giving and therefore not draining at all. Stendhal even defined happiness as an unending conversation among those one loves. It is the enforcement of the method in a robotic society that is severely draining. It is not stories that is draining, it is the kids who refuse to show up for class is the draining part.
Those who say that TPRS/CI too draining emotionally and tiring are just plain wrong; it’s the opposite – TPRS/CI gives energy and can even be said to be a kind of emotional high, a happy state of sharing stories with others that is really quite wonderful and has given me over these past 12 years some of the happiest moments of my life.
The discipline piece, largely due to kids who find themselves severely uncomfortable in being asked to show up in classrooms as real human beings, is the real culprit, and I feel that we have here a nice new unopened can of new and improved Whoopass that we can spray around the room here in May and then let it fly all over the room in the fall for one very badass result and a change in our relationships with our jobs that could be of monumental proportion.
To make it simple, I tell the students, at every infraction, I will briefly pause in class, walk over to the gradebook, enter the O for the head down or whatever. I tell them that if they had no infractions and were clearly trying to show up and be present for class that day, they would then get a 10 (perfect score) for that class. I told them that the rules only applied to when we were either reading or talking in French. I told them that in the moments when we were transitioning to another part of class, or if we were on a brain break, they could put their head down, text, go quickly to the bathroom one at a time, and blurt all they want.
What is this, really? It is a quiz grade aligned with the Three Modes. It is a grade that targets the four kids who usually blurt out and talk over. Those are our target. So most kids get a 10 for the day – often their second grade of the day after the regular quick quiz written by the super star on the CI for that day, and four get a zero.
It happens again the next day, and the next, and after just a few classes the kids grade is down to an F. We call the parents, explaining in detail how that happened and how concerned we are for their dear little Fauntleroys who now are failing our class.
We explain to the parents how the national and new state standards require that we grade language students in terms of the Three Modes of Communication, and we explain the 90% Use position statement of ACTFL, which their little shit of a child is preventing us from doing, thus affecting our job performance, and we make it clear that the child cannot afford in our classes to continue to get more than just that first warning on the rule of No Blurting/Talking Over.
I am going to try it. I am out of options. Everything we have so far, the Rules, my little rant on cheerfulness here yesterday, phone calls, nothing works with those four kids who, let’s admit it here, are the real reason for all of our failures with CI and classroom discipline – just those four kids!
This new idea of a Consequences Chart is the only idea that I think can work in a comprehension based classroom to completely neutralize those few shits and shut them up by my simple writing their grade for the day in the grade book in the moment of the infraction to save time at the end of class, Their grade will have tumbled precipitously as a direct result of having failed in the art of conversation and particular in the Interspersonal Mode of Communication that is so absolutely necessary if our work with comprehension based instruction is to succeed.
I’ll try it, if anyone else wants to try it with me they can, and we can get back here later and compare notes. I think it will be, for me, the best thing I have ever tried to keep those four shits from ruining my class. If it works, I will be very happy, because the one thing that has driven me crazy over all these years of doing CI is those kids making some comment in English right in the moment I am trying to get the beautiful Boeing 757 jetliner off the runway and into the air.
Are those kids, in the light of that image, dangerous? Hell yes they are! Are they pig kids, who need to be removed physically, as per that thread five months ago here? No.
Here we are addressing those minor pigs – we might call them pig shits – who float under the radar much better. We must hit them where they will actually feel it – in the gradebook.
We only have a few days left. Let’s test it and see. I’m hopeful that we could thus next year make a HUGE step forward with this strong whoopass move on the blurters, who, as I suggest above, in my view cause somewhere between 99% and 100% of all of our problems with classroom discipline.