We are making it through April, which is big news in itself. To various relative degrees, we are all hurting, certainly. Teaching does that. I think it was Hazrat Inayat Kahn who said that spirituality is right adjustment to other people. I hope that includes teens.
April saw us bust open the SBG topic, led by our whiz kids, James and Nathan. That was quite a discussion here over the past few weeks, and threatens to grow into a long process of defining and illustrating what we want with those other two modes of communication.
That’s a good thing because look what we got when we did that with jGR! We’ll see what happens with that thread – it needs to cook now. It would be nice to be able to have all three modes addressed when we go back into our classrooms in the fall.
I would like to announce how proud I am of my student, a ninth grader at Lincoln High School, Diana Rodriguez, who placed tenth, a top ten finish, in the level 2A National French Exam in CO/WY. What is significant is that not once did I focus with Diana on the exam in or out of class. In fact, I rarely talked to her at all as she is one of those super quiet kids.
I was very surprised when I found out that there was a section of discrete grammar on the test – one of those paragraphs with blanks that offer four choices of adjective agreement or object pronoun forms, etc. I had been told that they didn’t do that anymore but I guess AATF can’t keep themselves from testing grammar. Diana missed 12 of 70 questions, 11 of them were from that one section of 25 grammar questions.
As some of the group know, after five of my eighth graders grabbed the top five scores in CO/WY some years back on the level 1 exam, I chose to stop doing that exam for lots or reasons, so why did I allow this competition? Many of my kids are poor. More than poor. So if I see some way of adding to Diana portfolio for college, I’m gonna do it. Same with the AP exam. Use it in the service of kids.
I really like that we are talking about next year. I know that many of us are just trying to get through to June, but we have to look forward. There is too much we have done this year, huge work, in so many areas, and we need to get it up and running by the time school starts again. It is the big challenge of this PLC format, to keep our hands on the good stuff and implement it in our classrooms and not forget it.
The other big thread for this past month for me has been Greg’s success. No need to expand on it, for those who know what happened. Just wanted to mention it here. I don’t know of a situation like that in my experience with comprehension based instruction. Greg showed us something really valuable in terms of courage over the past few months.
Get to a conference, national or local, meet up, organize locally like they are doing in Chicago right now, and don’t let your fears of not being good enough get in the way. Our mental health needs are paramount these days, after Boston and Connecticut. We can do this. Remember, we are not so much working on how to teach but how to teach in a way that benefits kids. We can see ourselves through this as a nation. We are Americans.
Any other comments are welcome on where we are as we wind down and get ready to rest. Perhaps that is the most important thing to mention right now – the need to rest. The same forces that cause us to be relentless in seeking out what is best for our kids and us in the classroom, and the hell with the rest, can also cause us to stress needlessly.
One important thing I need to convey in this update. I absolutely need some time to get the beginner’s training videos going. The suggestions you gave for content on those are excellent and I intend to address it all, but it means less focus here. So just announcing that. I write too much here anyway.
We have 3,753 articles here back to 2007, with 20,309 comments. Plenty to read. And I think that the more it changes the more it stays the same, as Beaumarchais said. The basics are always the same – we establish meaning, gesture, discuss in a personal way, create something in L2 based on that information, and read it.
So go back into the archives, but wind it down, maybe put it on automatic pilot through May (that is what everyone else is doing), and just rest. I always start summer vacation in March – it is a mental discipline I have developed. I keep getting better at it. By June, I am really relaxed. Nothing is worth losing our peace of mind over.
I’m going to focus on Chris Roberts master’s thesis here over the next few days, and then I want to mention Bob Patrick’s work in a few articles. Then we’ll have a bunch more bios to read as we end the month, plus the various other articles. If you have sent me stuff for publication here, rest assured I am trying to push things through as fast as possible, but it is a crowded queue right now.