Alisa Shapiro is this month’s Teacher of the Month. Her leadership in Chicago and on this blog are very important to a lot of people here.
What I like best about the work Alisa is doing is her encyclopedic knowledge of how teachers used to teach and how they are going to teach. She gets both sides of all the arguments, and can go into the most minute detail on any topic involving both the old way and the new way. Why?
Because she, like Susan Gross (there is no higher compliment than to be compared to Susan Gross in the work we do), has put in the time – many years – as a previous master of the eclectic stuff that people used to think defined good teaching, but, like Susan, then turned away from that junkyard into a brand new field of colorful flowers, from black and white and rusty old teaching to teaching in new living color.
Alisa’s knowledge of the educational jargon is as good as it gets, making her a weapon. If she wanted to, and she doesn’t, she could serve on ACTFL’s Board of Directors and speak their language all day long, impressing by confusing. That tickles me. I find it amusing that, if those ACTFL people could understand her new message – and I am 100% convinced that they can’t – well, they can’t, so why am I bringing it up?
Why should Alisa waste her time doing that, talking to the unlearned, to peddlers? She has much more important work to do these days. It looks as if she has chosen to just keep getting better at CI at the elementary classroom level. That’s where you find the great teachers – in the classroom, not out spouting half truths to half wits. Alisa also needs all the time she has to serve as a mentor to a growing cohort of talented CI teachers in the Chicago area.
We’ll save a recent Helena Curtain story for another time. Suffice to say that Alisa, in “disappointing” Helena (Helena’s words) has done something very important – she in her staunch and quite intense support of everything Krashen, has rocked Helena’s world which very much needed to be rocked. Details on that later if anybody wants to hear them. Eric Herman has been involved with Alisa and the Helena Curtain thing if that tells you anything.
So, as we do each month, as Alisa continues daily to become more and more of a CI expert, we offer her our deepest respect for her hard work over so many years on behalf of children’s best interests. A true expert in how language acquisition theory best applies to the elementary classroom, up there with Jody Noble and Catharina Greenberg and only a few others, Alisa is a most deserving winner of this month’s PLC Teacher of the Month award.
Contratulations, Alisa, from all of us here on the PLC!