Johnna (who just finished her third week of TPRS last week) sent me this email:
“You have to have your eyes wide open, you’ve got to be connecting with them, because otherwise, there’s really no point. They know if you mean it. They know if you’re telling them the truth. They know if you’re feeling it, and they’re looking for the love, the joy and the inspiration from you in that moment and we just create it together.”
This is a quote from Elizabeth Mitchell, a children’s songwriter and performer I heard interviewed on NPR today. She was describing what it’s like to perform in front of children as a singer, to reach them as an artist, but she sounds like she’s describing a TPRS teacher! But we perform everyday! We need to be so full of life and energy to awaken our students to the art of learning, which is so antithetical to traditional teaching. In comparison, traditional teaching seems devoid of life itself.
Thank you for a wonderful workshop…they were the best 2 days I’ve ever spent learning anything about teaching. I wish more of my grad studies (soooo useless and boring and theoretical…yawn) were spent learning TPRS.
My response:
Thank you for being open to what I had to say. I would just add, to clarify, that, in fact, the approach works perfectly for any personality. It is a myth that one has to bounce around the room to do TPRS. Blaine doesn’t. Jason does. Others are in between. CI is like that. And I know that’s what you meant Johnna, that being “full of life and energy” does not necessary mean constant ebulliance.
In fact, it takes a lot less energy to do a story than manage the blocked energy created when the light bulbs go off in the kids minds because their conscious mind is being targeted in English in the classroom, vs. what we do in targeting their unconscious mind in L2.