I just want to say how grateful I am for you all. We are a good group, there’s no denying it. I have just turned down visits to England, Seattle, and UC Boulder precisely bc the people I would be presenting to are not you.
Most people in formal presentations want to take pieces of the method and chew on them and, since much of what we talk about are ideas they don’t like – Krashen is a major threat to the professional ego – they often hubristically spit the ideas out.
It’s all such bullshit, presenting*. You get up there and people don’t really want to believe you. They want to believe themselves. You get nervous be we are all so unsure of this stuff ourselves.
The one constant that I have I have noticed in people who claim to do this work is that people cannot help themselves from overiding the core thinking of this method in favor of creating a disastrous hybrid of Krashen/Ray and what they used to do before. This creates even more problems than ever.
In fact, that is a point that Susan Gross made in her keynote speech at NTPRS last summer. She said that TPRS, when mixed with other methods, is the worst possible thing that can happen in language instruction.
And many teachers end up doing that. So then the grammar teachers down the hallway see it and often conclude wrongly that it doesn’t work when in reality it is the teacher not making it work, and often innocently for lack of training usually. The fact is that people who do TPRS/CI poorly often become, through no fault of their own, the worst enemies of the method. It’s not really the grammar teachers, is it? It’s all so crazy.
But you are different. You want to get to the marrow of the bone, and not just chew on the outside. Thank you. We have a long way to go, and we are all tired. But we have no alternative right now. We have to see it through. But I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the discussion here. It is so real. Thank you.
An update on the queue. It is so jammed! People send me good stuff and I hold it back because of the discussion we recently had about many of us only getting to read half of the content that I was publishing before we realized the problem. I will probably release a lot of articles (letting some water over the dam) soon. It’ll work out.
I also want to thank you for the quality of the content particularly over the past four or five months. Wow! Have we done some professional growth or what? It hasn’t always been easy, but are we better off than we were at the end of last year? I certainly am, in spades! And it’s thanks to you.
I do want to keep the focus on classroom discipline and jGR as we have been, throughout this current year. There are still going to be some surprises with jGR, can you feel it? It’s about the point/percentage distribution we run through our gradebooks. But since it is so new we have to wait it out to see what problems arise. At least we can say that it makes Classroom Rule #4 and the other rules work in a way they never have before since I first published them here about five years ago. So that is a start.
And I think that if we focus, those of us who want to, on LSI and the kids’ jobs in October, then that will help us survive the October Collapse. Like John said again a few days ago, we can’t ever let go of the personalization/discipline piece, and LSI and the jobs, if we use them as personalization tools in the right way, can be of even greater benefit as we crank up stories now.
Many many people haven’t sent in bios still. I will publish those I have received in the past month or so soon, with thanks . I have more than one email from long-standing established TPRS/CI teachers that they are not comfortable with not knowing everyone, or at least reading their bios, who is in this group. Hint. Just write the paragraph and send it to me as an email.
*When ANY observor is there, it changes the dynamics of the room. You can’t really wail on your guitar when people are there watching the class or when you are trying to do a story at a conference. We have a few articles here on how to set your mind when an observor walks in, by the way. It’s a topic we should revisit this year.