“Last night I had a dream that you were no longer our teacher. And the new teacher was trying to teach us grammar and it was horrible. And we asked for you back, but we couldn’t get you.”
An 8th grade girl came into my class today and this was the first thing she said to me and to the rest of the class.
This student’s nightmare comes from the fact that all my 8th grade students have to take a horrid placement exam. It has 2 sections, each with 100 questions. 100 discrete grammar questions, the instructions of which my students can’t even understand (e.g. match the correct definite article to the noun) and 100 multiple choice questions on the textbook vocabulary. That’s it. Nothing else is tested. When I was giving my kids some of the sample questions (they haven’t yet taken the exam), they also saw how ridiculous it was. And to get into Honors Level 1 they have to get an 80% on both sections. I have students who are more fluent than I was after 4 years of traditional instruction, but they may not even qualify for the honors track of level 1.
I told them: “During your time at the high school if you ever feel like you can’t do Spanish, I want you to think back to this class and remember how you felt it was easy and the good times we had.”
And I’m working on uniting the elementary teachers and standing up to all of this, while I also send more and more info to my Assistant Superintendent and Principal. Thing is, the admin is being careful (or is it weakness?) and the elementary teachers are so used to this and feel powerless that they seem passive and though they have good intuition about how to acquire a language, they lack the research background and TCI/TPRS experience.
Eric
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
