Just to clarify, I got behind on the Teacher of the Month awards, so Eric was for March and this one is for April. Send me nominations for May at benslavic@yahoo.com. I would rather do this as a group thing.
I don’t know how many of us are aware of the arc of Greg Stout’s career over the past year, but it has been very intense, a very high learning curve. Like so many other younger teachers in our group, he was not a happy camper in his traditional setting in Durham, NC a year ago. Then, in spring last year after hearing about TPRS/CI, he ramped everything up and took a bunch of ideas with him to France for this academic year where he has completely pulled himself out of the muddy water and dried off on a nice CI rock, waiting for a chance to get back into a classroom back here for the academic year beginning in the fall.
Here is a lengthy passage, but one fully worth reading, that Greg wrote earlier last month. It gives insight into how this young teacher has changed in just one year:
…I agree … that we must refuse expectations placed on us from above (or from colleagues) for students to do things they are not capable of doing.
I mentioned verb tenses above because of a phone interview I had last week with a district WL supervisor for a middle school French position. The woman told me that students are expected to leave the middle school’s language programs able to conjugate verbs in at least passé composé, present, and near future. Then she asked if I feel confident in making that happen. While my real answer was no, I was able to answer yes due to her question’s lack of specificity (which verbs? able to conjuate in what sense…by memorizing roots and endings or by using in conversation?) After all, if I’m going to have kids to do real language teaching with, I have to get the job first. Of course if I got the job I would NEVER force output of verb forms. I wouldn’t follow the district’s thematic units either, although I would certainly “cover” the vocab/structures of those units on my own timeline, and in no pre-planned order. And I would only bring up the idea of conjugation -maybe – on the very last day of middle school to show them that their teacher is going to bring up this strange thing about roots and endings, but that they already do it without thinking about it.
But what a strange expectation. It strikes me as so abstract. What does the ability to conjugate verbs in the past, present, and future -in and of itself – have to do with anything? Even dressed up in snazzy games and projects, how is that expectation even remotely meaningful? Conjugating verbs in different tenses is just a natural result (but an afterthought!) of using the language to communicate about things which actually MATTER. It’s not an objective, it’s a side-effect. Conjugating verbs in different tenses as an objective isn’t worthy of one second of a kid’s time in a school building, which is why most kids wouldn’t give it one (maybe many seconds in the “school mode” of their brain, but not one in the “this is me” section of their brains….
This passage clearly reveals that Greg has become in a short period of time a language teacher for the 21st century. It has been only twelve months – I think it was last April – since I tried in a kind of clutzy way to explain the Three Steps on the phone to Greg in a kind of emergency situation, and since that first phone call he has continued to grow during his stay in France (who would not come back from France having grown?) to the point where he has become a focused CI teacher with no limit to what he can accomplish in the classroom.
We congratulate Greg for his efforts and growth in such a short period of time and wish him the best of classes as he continues to unpeel the CI onion!