Warning – rant. Long rant. Very long rant. Either get another cup of coffee or don’t read it:
Those in that last nite (Thursday nite) session remember that I taught the last story of the evening. But I didn’t get any feedback. I really wanted some but I understand that the class ended at 1:30 a.m. and it was late. So I asked Ray Bauer to give me some feedback. It probably won’t make any sense unless you were there but those there might be interested in reading his feedback on my story, which I greatly appreciate.
I would add that Ray is one of a cadre of bright and strong and dare I say brilliant new TPRS teachers whom I met in both Denver and Chicago who have been so quiet on the blog here over the years that I didn’t know they were out there doing what they have been doing , which was basically kicking ass with this approach to teaching languages.
Had I met this cadre of young PLC teachers before, had I known what they have been doing (hint: more reports from the field here this year, everybody!), I would have felt differently about what is really happening in our nation’s schools right now – and in one school in Scotland and in three or four schools in Western Canada, including Idaho, and in San Diego and New York and Vermont and in the Bay Area and on and on – with comprehensible input instruction.
I need to share more stories like Ray’s with Stephen Krashen, because I’m not sure he even knows about the groundswell that is taking place like those slow rolling earthquakes of recent years in Oklahoma. I really don’t think Krashen knows about all the young secondary school teachers like Ray that are out there now. He has quietly seen nothing happening for decades and I have seen it in his face and words that he doesn’t get why people don’t get what he says, especially at the level of universities, where the ignorance is as thick as mayonnaise.
Speaking of Krashen and the universities that can’t hear him, by the way, I am going to publish here in the next few days an article by our own coolest Michele Whaley a report from the field that will blow your mind about what is (isn’t!) happening at the university level. You will want to read every word of her articles about her trip after the national conferences to the University of Iowa!
Michel’s article is a flashback for me because there is a critic of Krashen there at the U of Iowa, or she may be gone now, who picked up on something I said here when the public had free access to this site and bashed me and I told Krashen and he said, “Was it so and and so?” and it was. That article from years ago revealing such deep misunderstanding by a university (associate) professor was a reason we went private on this blog. She tore into me and she shouldn’t have but at the time I got clawed. I bet I could find that thread published here about seven years ago. But it’s a good dead horse to leave in the road of the past, actually. But it still hurts, that attack. Does anybody remember it?
I really do apologize for all the long posts lately, and for this totally unnecessarily long monster, but I can’t help it. I am motivated by a sense of urgency that resembles the one that motivated St. Ex to draw such large images of baobad trees in Le Petit Prince. There is a fire burning up the old ways of teaching languages that I have never seen burning like it is right now this month of this year. I can’t keep up with all the emails I am getting. I’ll just post them but you will have to choose which ones to read over the next few weeks, as the queue is busting at the seems right now.
Back to our bright and strong and brilliant Ray: Ray is the Chicago Spanish teacher who had a level 1 kid this year get a perfect 70/70 score on the National Spanish Exam. At his first school, before moving to his current school, he had been hassled by traditional teachers about doing TPRS – they put pressure on him to stop doing it. Then, at his current school, as Ray told me in a recent email, “it was the parents who put pressure on me (not the colleagues).” He explained that the colleagues at his new school have been very supportive.
So here we see a school where the parents are having to deal with Ray’s success. They criticized his methods and now he has a student with a perfect score. What to do? How to react? I know that I have written in articles here over the years criticizing those national exams, but Ray here makes a case for using them to make a point. It’s just sad that we have to always use data, instead of word of mouth, to make our points, but that is the time we live in currently.
Enough ranting? I don’t apologize. I process stuff by writing. Don’t tell anyone. It’s how I understand. What we are all going through on this blog, and it was made even more clear when seeing so many of our PLC in person last month in those two kick ass War Rooms, is not typical. It is revolutionary. The people I met, everyone of them, had something revolutionary about them and Ray is only one of this cadre of new teachers.
I could go down the list of people like Ray who were there. Should I? I am tempted. Meeting those I met this summer made me see that we are in a revolution! I know because I met you all. On the surface it seemed like just meeting people at a conference in the usual way, but now I see what happened – I met street fighters, kick boxers, people who will not lose this fight! Each one so strong and fearless in their own ways. I am serious when I say that I felt in meeting many of the teachers this summer whom I only knew before in cyberspace that they all were hiding aliases as superheroes. I know, it sounds silly, but it’s what I felt this summer. I could almost see y’all’s costumes, the capes and colors of your alter egos in this work, but if I admitted that you would know that I am crazy and I certainly don’t want you to know that so I will shut up now with the superheroes comment. (You don’t even know, some of you, do you, that you are superheroes? That sucks.)
OK I’ll let it go but I just wish I knew this was going to explode like this ten years ago or twenty or thirty. I wouldn’t have spent my own career in the particular way of being depressed that some of you know about as well, having that constant feeling of low grade professional depression and of being an outsider with good ideas being rejected year after year at every turn by idiots, which made my career so much shittier than it could have been had I had a crystal ball and been able to see what I see now, especially this summer, in that group of War Room studs and studettes.
There is another aspect to Ray’s story. He told me that in his current school where he has strong administrative and collegial support (and I guess that the parents have to come around now, as well, which will force the change in Ray’s colleagues – see how it works?): “the principal at my current school talked to me about grammar teaching because he was taking meetings from parents who were telling him that their kids weren’t prepared for the grammar in Spanish 2. Can you believe that? Unreal.”
That is no small point Ray makes right there. It reveals something we all have known, that in many articulation paths there is a connected old style grammar teacher in touch with a certain group of parents usually who attack teachers with new ideas. The only problem for the old guard there is that the principal is wise to the old shit ways and hence will be a part of the change alongside Ray, the change that will bring real actual classroom instruction changes, and not just in Chicago because I heard many stories this summer that are similar to Ray’s. Couldn’t somebody have told me this was going to happen? That low grade depression was bad, y’all, and lasted for decades. Now I see that I needn’t have worried so much. Dang, brother!
So now, to say what I wanted to report on at the outset of this particular long rant, one of the longest in years and years, thank you very much, is Ray’s feedback on my own War Room story that Thursday night. Here it is for those who were there (won’t make sense if you weren’t):
Ben,
Your lesson was amazing. I was talking with Sean and Scott and we all said the same thing. Let me try to mention a few things that I noticed:
1. Engagement! In the last couple of years I have been trying hard to study the art of engagement. I have come to find that there are certain pillars of engagement that light up the brain. One of those that you do exceptionally well is keeping class unpredictable. I was so interested in your lesson because I had no idea what would happen next. You were saying unpredictable things (Eric “frickin’ travaille!”) and you were doing unpredictable things (at one point you were kind of jogging in a little circle and we were all enthralled). We had no idea what would happen next and it kept us on the edges of our seats. You also did a great job choosing ideas from the class that were unexpected and would increase engagement. As a side note, I learned a TON about engagement from this Ted Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_the_brain
2. Another pillar of engagement is other people. In the video that I mentioned above, the speaker talks about how other people interest us (an instinctual human phenomenon). Nobody knows this better than you! You are the one who has helped me personalize my class and really get the kids involved. In your lesson you had many students, including me, doing jobs. You had actors. You were taking good suggestions from the class. The lesson was very personalized. You were using people to keep people interested. Everyone who wanted to be part of the lesson was given the opportunity.
2. Slow. I don’t speak French and I had no problem understanding what was happening in your lesson. And check this out. I still remember words from your lesson. Le patron crie fort. Eric est paresseux. Craig est au dessus de Victoria’s Secret. I don’t speak French and I remember all of that. You were speaking slow enough for me to remain focused.
3. Repetitive. I happened to be the one with the pitch counter and you were over 125 repetitions of travaille. Unreal. I often have trouble staying on the target structures in my classroom.
4. You were feeling it. On Tuesday you were mentioning that with CI we need to feel the flow of a lesson in our bodies. I could tell that a bunch of people were not getting that. In my first few years of CI instruction I wouldn’t have understood that either. I tried to force things. I remember trying to force my way forward in a story the way that I wanted to or the way that worked in the previous class. When I hit my fourth year of TCI (more or less) I started to feel it. I started to realize that stories, PQA, and reading lessons take on a life of their own. I can’t dictate. I have to react to what is happening. It takes a long time to figure that out, but I find that once a teacher hits that stride, things just get awesome. In the lesson that you were teaching you were totally reacting to how the story was feeling. You were feeling the flow in air and you were going where it was taking you. Personally, I think this is some kind of a final step in the process. At times I feel like I scratch the surface of that feeling of flow, and in the next couple of years I really want to drill down into that world of flow.
Above all, your lesson was in line with the Input Hypothesis. You had us all understanding messages in the target language. That is what it all boils down to! You have said it many times, if our students are understanding messages via listening or reading we know they are internalizing language. Boom! It’s that easy. In your lesson you were all over that. On the blog I really like how you consistently remind us of that. This process isn’t hard. We don’t even have to do stories if we don’t want to (although they are great). Actually, I find that stories can get in the way of teachers adopting CI. They find that stories are difficult, so they go back to traditional teaching. All we really have to do is get the students to understand messages by listening and reading. If they are understanding messages they are subconsciously internalizing vocabulary and structure. Boom! It’s that easy. And I would beg to differ. I think you are as expert as anyone in this. That is why I follow your blog!
Again, thanks again for putting the War Room together. It was truly mind-blowing!
I have a question for you. Reading is currently my big focus. Probably over 50% of what I do is based off of reading and I’m always looking for ways to beef that up. Aside from typing up the stories that we create in class, I have my Spanish 1 students do two novel studies. My students LOVE Casi Se Muere by Blaine. They also find El Nuevo Houdini very funny and engaging (thanks to Sabrina for helping me discover that one at one of our Chicago meetings before you guys stole her!). In your classroom, what are the level 1 novels that the students have been most interested in? I’d like to add at least another one into my curriculum. Thanks!
Talk soon!
Ray