K continues with her description of what she does as a French teacher/French 2 student in her school, with a teacher who is open to these [Krashen based] ideas. Below she describes, in a bit greater detail, the lunch scene that we have been reading about in previous blogs:
Lunch stories:
This schedule depends on what we would like to do. Lots of stories that are taught by other kids, culture discussions and TONS of writing. They really like to write. I am truly friends with these kids and this group started as more of a social thing until we discovered that we really didn’t like the way French was going and decided to speak French by ourselves. We have made it our goal to try to speak French as often as possible, which is way cool. Lots of these kids started writing to me in journals about their lives which gave me the idea to do an “About me” story which I decided to call a biography. These kids tell their own stories. It’s hard to describe because I think that you have to see it to believe it. All I will say is that there are days when I feel like they could take a picture of us for a diversity poster . We are all very different but we all love to speak and learn French. It’s pretty amazing.
Yes, this story thing is really something. A middle school friend saw me the other day and asked what had happened to me. I was always so quiet and now I am questioning the way things are and so far the outcome has been great! I responded that I didn’t really know, however I think it may have something to do with the few funerals for kids that I’ve gone to in the past year. Life is too short to follow the rules all the time especially if the rules prevent you from doing what you like. I wanted to learn French , so, I broke a few rules and the result has been wonderful. In fact, I was called to the principal’s office today and was told “Thank you”. Apparently, one of the kids who does stories at lunch used to get in fights with other kids and didn’t go to class a lot. Now, this year, he has not been suspended once. He goes to class everyday and is passing every class. The principal told him congratulations and then asked what had changed. He said that he started having fun telling funny stories at lunch and that I had told him like you told me and everyone else in my class last year that this method works best if the individual wants to learn and wants it to work. So, he said he thought that fighting and not going to class didn’t show he wanted to learn, even though he could see that certain things in school were worth learning, so he showed that he wanted to learn and here we are.
K