Yesterday I saw a former student in a coffee shop. She is now at Pepperdine. I taught her six years ago in middle school before I went to Denver Public Schools. She went on to a traditional French program in high school. The background is that in eighth grade she was a gifted listener, a true superstar who absorbed stories like I was speaking English. She gave me a lot of confidence in my teaching.
I tried to speak French with her. It shocked me. She couldn’t understand me. She seemed to know even less French than when I taught her before, in spite of the full four year program in high school. I saw her eyes flicker in defeat. It wasn’t her fault. Now she is off to Switzerland this year and maybe she will learn some French. She certainly didn’t learn any in high school.
The other people in the discussion, a student and a parent, tried to soften the student’s humiliation by making a comment about how her teacher during those years in the high school speaks four languages. Very impressive. But her student, after a great storytelling start in middle school, emerged five years later with not even one language. It is because she didn’t hear the language in the classroom in comprehensible ways during those years. She probably could have told me about relative pronouns though.
Other news: I haven’t even written, let alone published, any Teacher of the Month articles since last May. That is an example of how busy things have been this summer. I look forward to publishing those and other articles here as soon as I can get to them. I don’t want to lose the Teacher of the Month feature here. If you are new here, go back and read some of the articles (find the category) about some of the teachers here whose names you will recognize.
The blog queue is just jammed with good stuff. I am almost at a loss to keep up with it. And I’m going out to Portland in early September without a computer to visit my daughter and will be off the radar for at least a week, by the way. But articles from the queue will appear when I am gone. This will keep the discussion flowing normally.
It’s been a really fine discussion lately, and I am happy that we have kept its main focus on classroom management, the key to everything we do and far more necessary to discuss in August than actual teaching, because, as Susie has said so many times, discipline precedes instruction. That is why many of us do word associations and CWB to start the year, to get the classroom management piece fully in place first.
Thank you to Greg Stout for providing the key article in that discussion. It’s like a baseball player delivering the key hit in a baseball game, what you wrote there last week about your own truth of how to bring your students into proper adjustment to you in your classroom this year:
https://benslavic.com/blog/address-behavior-first-you-wont-get-another-chance/
(A teacher wrote me an email about PAT time just yesterday, wanting to know my opinion about that tired old way of instilling classroom discipline. And in Chicago I was asked about pagames. Here is what I think – we can’t instill discipline by manipulating points in our clsasroom. The process is much more psychologically complex and requires much more core emotional work on our parts than just playing around with points.)