High school language departments usually anoint themselves as judge and jury of the middle school teachers who feed them their students. Their message is and always has been that if rising ninth graders show up at their doors “unprepared” to do the grammar work in their freshman year (they seem to be most concerned with verb conjugations), then the students would not be ready for the high school curriculum.
I remember when I was doing CI at a middle school that feeds Dakota Ridge High School here in the Denver area, something ugly happened. I was called on the carpet by the 10-teacher high school language faculty to explain what I was doing and I was asked to change my instruction to align with what DRHS wanted.
My explaining about the standards and how people actually learn languages drew little response. Rather, the response revealed a serious – very serious – lack of knowledge of the ACTFL standards and the research on the part of the high school. They wanted my Spanish colleague Lupe Garcia and I to “stop playing around” at Summit Ridge Middle School (even though the kids were loving such “play”) and get to the grammar. If course, that meant worksheets.
I would ask if anyone reading this has ever had any success using grammar worksheets in middle school language classes. They don’t work. Ever. With any level. There is a negative consequence to worksheets. Yes, five or six kids out of the thirty-five in the class can do the worksheets, but the rest languish and become discipline problems because they are bored.
All this – classroom management problems from bored kids, the inability of most of the kids (esp. now in the new online classroom settings) to do well on the useless common assessments which only give the appearance of resulting in language gains, etc. continue to provide the high school teachers with a lot of ammunition to make baseless claims about the middle school programs, like:
- “The kids don’t know anything and they spent 2 years in So and So’s class!”
- “I wish they had never studied the language in middle school because they are so confused about it now!”
- “Why can’t those middle school teachers just teach the way we do up here?”
- “What did they even do down there for those two years? Just play and draw maps?”
Often, the middle school teachers believe them! They believe that the claim made by the high school that “academic Spanish” (i.e. worksheets) is the pedagogy needed at both the high school and middle school levels, because they as high school language teachers were “serious” about their work.
Now, however, the tables are turning rapidly! Middle school teachers, especially those lucky enough to teach sixth graders, are having so much fun with CI and stories that the parents of those kids are asking for more of the same when their children arrive at the high school,
This is putting a reverse kind of pressure on the high school teachers to start delivering some CI instruction.
When they get to the high school the kids, having been indoctrinated in grammar and worksheets in middle school, think that what they experienced in middle school is what learning a language entails – getting A’s for memorizing verb spellings. And, since they figured out how to memorize for the test, they “liked” being taught with worksheets. It was easy!
Why actually show up in a communicative spirit/mode in a language class when you can avoid all that human communication stuff and get the easy grade by memorizing what is on the test the night before?
(to be cont.)