I got a call from Diana in Philadelphia today. Not good when your boss calls you on the weekend. I had sent her an email this morning about some of what we’ve been talking about here in terms of reading too much too early. Someone who reads this blog also told her at ACTFL today about that point.
I have to qualify what I said. It is only my opinion that we should minimize reading in level 1, and is not a DPS policy coming from Diana, as per the reasons I gave in that interchange with Jody this morning. What I wish to apologize for is my statement that Diana went overboard with level 1 reading in DPS. I can only say that she may have gone overboard and that it is, again, just my opinion.
Possibly the fact that my own students are very limited in reading in any language has influenced my thinking on the issue. However, I do feel that anyone trained in the current system – where the leitmotif of teaching is that nothing good happens without strain (that’s all of us) – is going to expect their teaching to involve some degree of discomfort and “getting the kids to learn”.
Really, don’t most of us have problems getting our classes to read novels? It is hard work because we have to backwards plan not just from three structures, as in stories, but from a whole galaxy of words. I don’t think that the idea that we can backwards plan a book by isolating target structures to set up success in reading the book is even possible, although I really like aWB as a possible idea in solving that problem.
Whatever, I do apologize publicly here for my mistatement about Diana going overboard. However, I don’t apologize for the general gnarly attitude I sometimes convey about this work we are doing. I like to say outrageous things bc in my view we are far too complacent in our thinking, kind of waiting for the summer conferences to be trained in the new things for next year.
Three people quit the PLC in one day last week after my statements in one comment about how teachers who try to mix the old way and our new way should find another profession bc it ain’t gonna work for them. I like that. We want our group small. (And we did get smaller by 57 people in the last month, and I am still working on that.)
We can learn stuff we learn at conferences here. We don’t have to wait. Part of the reason for this blog is to replace the need for summer conferences. They are so expensive and nerve wracking and they throw us off balance, at least they do me, since I am afraid to speak in front of people in the first place.
Diana Noonan, like Jody, holds a pre-eminent place in our work. I see her as an invisible kind of glue, keeping all of us together, a true leader and crucial to the TPRS/CI movement as it moves further into the new century. However, if I pissed her off in this instance, and it spurs dialogue about how much reading is best for kids in our schools, then it was a good thing, as I see it.
I posted the exchange between Jody and me in the previous article here, since I think that this idea of effortless reading is such an imortant one, in my opinion.
(By the way, and this is for French speakers, I use the masculine “patron” to refer to Diana bc it just feels right. But is it? Judy or Sabrina can comment? Should I have used “patronne”?)