Meg asks the group:
I have a class that used to be super chatty and is still a bit on that side/disrespectful. But with new seating today, NOBODY raised hands with suggestions for our OWI. I should have given suggestions, or done a turn and talk, but I was so seething I had to go to silent work and table it. Has the sudden dead silence ever happened to anyone else, and how’d you conquer it? I am praying for patience and doing Diana Winston’s meditations 2x/day in the meantime!
My response:
It could be a class move on you. They act like it’s the new seating arrangement. But they know each other. That’s not it. They don’t know how to/are not allowed to protest that they done’ want to be in school after a long break. Plus, my sense is. that there is a ring leader. They are taking cues from that student. Your response is to not let them see you seethe of course. (By the way, oh do I know that feeling of seething!) Instead, (1) go right away to a writing-based bail out move (see that category to the right of this page – some are outdated. The extreme example is one month to two months of the textbook. It has worked TWICE this year w PLC members, one in Sept. and one in Oct. (2) use Story Listening (there are some posts on it here and in the Natural Approach book – tell me if you can’t find anything but I think you know it) because SL doesn’t require that they speak/provide answers. Make the story 35 min. long. Give a quiz on it, prepared beforehand, half way through and another one at the end. Two quizzes on what you told them in SL. All five classes same story at different speeds. Same quizzes until they figure that out then write five classes and catch cheaters if necessary (probably won’t be) (3) use the Reading Rubric in A Natural Approach appendices to grade them on what you observed them doing during Free Choice Reading. (4) give them an interpersonal skills grade for each class. You will have to grade them down if all they are doing is looking at you like a bunch of dumb clucks. That’s four grades in each class. Yeah, busier for you, but they will have to change into the behaviors you want. For example, when they ask why no more stories in the pre-break way, tell them that they weren’t doing their 50% and you need for them to show up in class if their grades are to come back up.
Others who have insights on this excellent question are requested to throw in on this. There are many answers.
Kind of related: https://benslavic.com/blog/kids-who-arent-able-to-show-up-as-human-are-not-bored-kids-there-is-more-going-on/
which includes this long rant on the topic Meg brings up:
…these kids have been trained for years to be bored. It takes a lot of talent to be bored, to get really good at communicating that to a teacher. You have to go against every instinct to be joyful that you once had as a younger kid. If something wonderful and joyful and unexpected happens in class, you, as a professional bored kid, have to be able to suppress your own urge to react with like joy. You have to fully agree with most of your recent teachers – perhaps beginning in about 4th or 5th grade, that your voice isn’t all that necessary, that you yourself don’t count for much in the class, that how you score on the test is really the goal of it all, etc. Such kids as that are trained FOR YEARS to be boring. No language teacher like you, Brian, is going to come along and ruin it for them and require them to actually be a human being who can listen and be a part of, say, something as crazy as the co-creation of something in class. How uncool!
…can you recommend any thing these students can be DOING while listening…?
Think about that one, Brian. I would suggest this outlandish idea – that they listen and let you know that they are understanding with an expression of good will on their faces (Yes…good will!) or, if they don’t understand, of course letting you know that at every juncture. One of those two things. If a kid is zoning out, that is a refusal to participate and reveals so much more than the kid wants you to know about their zoning out. It is not that they are tired. Rather, they sense a humanness in the room that makes them uncomfortable. They DON’T KNOW HOW TO REACT TO THE INCREASED LEVEL OF HUMAN INTERACTION IN THE ROOM because they probably haven’t experienced it before. For so long they have been rewarded for being robots, it is so easy to do, no expression on face needed, and now you request that they show up and be human? They’d rather act like sleep has them. But it is not sleep. It is fear of being human, being vulnerable, being able to love and laugh and display all those qualities that we beat out of them in school. My hardest class right now has so few real kids, so many robots, so many suffering kids, that I actually have to entertain myself during class. I interact with my own superstar Mini Me Ben and he laughs and we have a grand old time together right there in class with all the dead people. I have never before had a class where not one single kid wanted to play, so I just do it that way interacting with my stand-in superstar. I rather like Mini Me Ben. He’s a good kid. The dead kids don’t know what to make of him, but he doesn’t care. I told him to fly his freak flag all he wants in class, in life, even if Susan Gross walks in on one of our presentations at a conference, and he is getting better and better at it.
…any thoughts on the idea of giving them the chance to write down, throughout some CI discussion, all that they are understanding – maybe even on some sort of organized (dare I say it…) graphic organizer…?
No. Nothing on the desks. You can’t escape showing up. No notes. Never. That would undermine your job of creative interplay in the target language and would be exactly what they want, a place to hide in a notebook. No and double no on that idea, in my opinion.
…of course, they would have to follow strict adherence to a rule that says no extraneous doodling or writing….
Good luck with that one. That is a failed rule before it starts.
…how can I help their attention span and their motivation to be engaged…?
Dude you don’t have to do that. You can’t do that. That firmly comes under the heading that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make her drink. You are a teacher and not a person whose job it is to change them. If they are incapable of doing the class then fail them. They can drop at the semester or, if they get lucky, maybe a parent will “get” what you are doing and see the rare chance for their child to cease being a self absorbed memorizer little Fauntleroy shit and to become a person with actual human traits, like being able to listen. Do you really see that as YOUR responsibility? That’s phucked up. Your job in these situations is to teach kids who are not yet human what failure is all about on the communicative level so that, by doing that now, they learn THE most valuable skill in the job market, communication, empathy, how to listen, all of that. But all YOU have to do is deliver the CI. Just teach the class. Make your CI the best you can and then forgive yourself for not having 10 years of experience with this stuff. My gosh what we put on ourselves. Some little kid has zero ability at this point in their life to interact with us in class and we think it’s our fault and that we are boring. That is so not true.
…what about those students that do not signal and are not understanding…?
Well you can coddle them and suck up to them but the fact is those bored and non-comprehending faces are the result of a calculated decision made out of the realm of their conscious minds to opt out of the interpersonal stuff going on in your classroom. They just can’t do it. The vibration in the room is just too high for them. And what is your question here? You want to know how to get a fence post to laugh and interact with you? Trust me, those posts can and will laugh but not until THEY decide, not you, and certainly not because you go over to them and start doing jumping jacks. Gradually they will learn to trust you. They have been ripped off by teachers for years, also. Give time for trust to re-appear in their hearts. Again, you are taking too much on yourself and denying THEM the opportunity to actually learn this crucial thing in their education that they may have never had a chance to learn before, step by step, one class at a time, FROM YOU. Trying on new behaviors is hard for kids. THEY will decide when to take the shields down and let some light into their eyes. Not one single teacher may have ever asked this of them! Give them a break. What they need is a nice big series of zeroes on the interpersonal rubric and a nice big fat bunch of low grades, preferable F’s, to get the ball rolling. The failing grade is their ticket to success. Only when the first term F is posted (I had at least 30% fails in the first term – it is always that way, it means you mean business. Then the parent call that results from the F jolts the kid into your way of doing things. If the parent is conscious, which depends entirely on how you explain the F – in terms of current research and standards and not in terms of any fault in the kid – THERE IS NONE – then the hard fails of the first term gives way to one or maybe two kids dropping, and many others stepping up to the plate, and then each month things get better and you have taught the kids something far more important that a language, you have taught them that if they don’t show up for life they will fail at life, which is a very strong message that they DO NOT get from most of their teachers, where it is not about developing listening skills and becoming human, but about grades. Good grades don’t bring success in life. Being a human being does.