We have a number of bios from group members. Some go back as far as ten years. So you can search a person’s name and maybe they have sent one in that you can read. But we’ve gotten away from them in recent years, and the Teachers of the Month awards, too. We’ve been so busy! I would love to get back to both of those things as we move ahead here in the group. So if you care to share your bio, please do so. There are two ways to do that. One is to go to the Forum and put one there, or you can just send me one at benslavic@yahoo.com.
Daniel has provided a great example of one below. Thanks, Daniel!
Hi, Ben –
This month marks a year since I bought a copy of your Big Book of CI…and almost immediately began to implement everything I could wrap my mind (and teaching abilities) around. So I thought it would be a fitting time to introduce myself to the group. I never saw myself teaching Spanish. I majored in it, love it…as well as loving everything I can pick up about all manner of language-related stuff from any language. But I didn’t want to teach it, I think now because I couldn’t get excited about the grammar approach. I was a 4%-er and can geek out about language matters with the best of them, but couldn’t see myself teaching that way.
So after college I worked for a few years in outdoor education in Michigan–mostly high ropes and team-building challenges–and that really shaped the way I see how kids learn best. After we moved to Colorado, I spent a decade as a stay-at-home dad, and was perfectly happy with that. I was writing and earning a measure of success with short stories and poetry. I missed working with kids, it’s true, but wasn’t actively looking for any change. Then a year and a bit ago, my kids’ school announced they needed a K-8 Spanish teacher, and I took the job…with very little prep time before school began and a scattered hodgepodge of resources, including middle school textbooks that were published before any of the students were born (and aimed at high schoolers). I knew nothing of TPRS or, to be honest teaching language at all, besides my own experiences learning it. (My high school teacher was quite proud of his “European approach” as he called it, which was really an even more extreme weeding down to the few who could learn that way.)
I started muddling through the materials I was given, while intuitively reaching for some of what I would find in the Comprehensible Input approach. It seemed…not great but OK, until I started checking how much they were retaining of what we’d covered…and realized it was negligible. The former teacher had some early TPRS publishing materials that he’d used with the younger grades, and a Google dive quickly led me to your name and site, and I ordered the big book.
Over Thanksgiving break I dived into the book and saw it was a perfect fit for what had been missing from my classes. What other language teachers may not realize is how perfectly the approach you present fits in with the ideals behind the big forces in experiential education like Project Adventure and Outward Bound. So though I don’t even have the two-day workshop experience to prepare me, I began right away to switch the way I was teaching toward this. I made plenty of mistakes. That’s how you learn, though. (There’s that experiential ed background coming forward…) The remainder of the year was far more joyful than the earlier part had been, and this year even significantly better, and the students are enjoying our time playing around in Spanish. I have pretty free rein with what I do to teach, which was terrifying at the start, but after seeing the stories from others about meddling administrations, etc…I see now how fortunate I’ve been on that count.
So that’s my introduction. But with one last encouragement to everyone else here. If you’re looking for allies in the building, look for those outdoor education types. Maybe you have a teacher who always wants to bring their students to the YMCA camp every fall or who coordinates their homeroom group’s spring excursion to some environmental learning center. Maybe some of the science teachers down the hall used to be camp counselors. Maybe your district is fortunate enough to have an outdoor education coordinator (sadly less likely now than it was a dozen years ago when I was more involved in that). It may take a bit to show them how what you’re doing fits with outdoor education, but they should be receptive, once they see the connection.
Thanks for reading my ramble…and keep on inspiring and challenging us all!
Daniel Ausema
dausem10@hotmail.com