We’re in Tuscon now. We just left Maine yesterday. What Alice Yates, a friend of Susan Gross, started there back in 2000, or even before, I think, is amazing. Those guys are badass up there. They are relaxed, sharp lobster-eating devotees of storytelling, and so working with them was easy and fun. Our Jen Schongalla came over from NH, and being with long time PLC members Anne Matava and Annemarie Orth and Nathaniel Hardt and others felt really good.
Each city has had its qualities. I loved the Philadelphia and Atlanta groups – so vibrant, and of course Charlotte, with teachers there who really do reflect the elegant Southern charm of the Queen City. Chicago, of course, was flexing its broad shoulders fielding its wealth of talent there, including our Sean and Alisa. Each city contained gems in the guise of teachers – people working with open hearts for the best benefit to kids, and not working timidly from a place of uncertainty but with strength and determination.
Tuscan is where Joe Neilson back in the 1990s started it all, working with Blaine – up in Utah at the time I think – to put the first pieces of what later became TPRS into place. I remember at NTPRS in Kansas City in 2005 going on a run with Joe and I specifically asked him how it was that he started a story. I never forget his answer: “I think of a character like a dog and then I have him go somewhere and then something happens.” I was a bit surprised, because it was a bit loosey goosey even for me (at the time), but he only said it worked for him.
Anyway, that is exactly how the non-targeted work we are doing with the Invisibles works – we may have a general idea of a plan about what happens, maybe, but we generally let things develop on their own because in non-targeted work we are more worried about teaching the language as a whole than teaching specific words, which is not how human conversation works and is in full and direct conflict with the research, even if Krashen isn’t saying that these days. In non-targeted work interest, not words, should drive the story.
I find it interesting to note that after those fifteen years of working with a kind of codified way of doing stories from 2000 to 2015, even writing books about it in my efforts to understand it, I end up here in Tuscon where Joe, almost twenty years ago, was doing a very similar thing, not making up a lot of rules and regulations connected to high frequency word lists, or lists to backwards plan from a novel, or thematic units, etc. and not arguing online in heart-draining ways with the new breed of TPRS experts, who hadn’t happened yet. I guess something happened along the way.
Anyway, tomorrow morning I will work with a group of teachers here in Tuscon to show off my own vision of non-targeted stories, kind of where it all began. I hope the story we create with the teachers here does justice to the vision that Joe and Blaine had so long ago. It wasn’t targeted, that vision, and there were far less rules and regulations then. I certainly will be starting the story with the same format as like with the dog, except that I also will be starting from an image.
We’ll see what happens. I think Joe would agree on this point that it doesn’t matter if the story we make is funny and cute. I know we say that a lot here but in my view we never say it enough (probably because teachers are such perfectionists and because some of us – moi certainly – need approval more than others, mistakingly taking the quality of the story as an indicator of their worth as a teacher): it only matters that we stay in the target language during the time that we are working with our class to teach the language.
(This means no back and forth during the story from L1 to L2 and back. Just stay in the TL as long as possible. Speak English as long as you want, the whole period if you wish, but don’t mix up the two languages. I like to explain that in terms of the 1/20th idea that I talk about in our workshops, but I will leave that for another post.)
Not having to teach certain words, and only having to build a story based on interest, is expansive and not reductive and thus takes a lot of the pressure off. It expands the possibilities for our classes, and we are no longer slaves to things like circling and targeting and teaching lists, which have little to do with how people learn languages.
Not having to teach words brings back our dignity, and classroom management comes along as well, and all sorts of good things, because the kids actually want to know what happens when the subject of the story is not a set of words, but something interesting. That’s what Joe and Blaine are about, in my opinion.