Yes, Blaine has said that TPRS only works with motivated students. and we must not forget that on a Monday morning. It is accurate to state that most of our students are honestly not interested in learning the languages we are trying to teach them.
It’s not their fault. The smart ones have a goal in college and parent pleasing. Those come first. The grade comes first for both the college and the parent. The actual learning, in most smart kids, doesn’t even enter into the equation. It’s just school to them.
The medium level intelligence kids don’t care. Many won’t go to college, not these days, and so they don’t have the motivation to do much more than just go to yet another class in an unending series of classes that all look and feel the same, just one of the thousands that they have been told that they have to attend or they won’t graduate.
Suddenly, it is no longer a mystery to me why:
- 1. What I have been working at with such passion over many years has not been embraced with more open arms in schools.
- 2. Why the deliverers of instructional services who provide worksheets, etc. to passive students continue to thrive in schools.
The product works for the clientele.
The fact that the students and parents are not up in arms on this topic is not, as I used to think, a product of ignorance. Rather, it is the result of what is almost a kind of collusion, an agreement to keep things simple for the grade, which rules all.
The only reason there are any waves at all on the stagnant pond that has scuz all over it – and that only lately – is simply because of the recent alignment-with-standards push across the board in schools. Before, language standards, ACTFL, etc. just got ignored, but the push on standards in other disciplines is finally bringing the focus also to languages, where standards have been brutalized for decades.
Notice that the push for reform is not coming from the kids or the parents. Most could care less. As long as the parents see the decent grades, everybody goes on happily about their business. Robert described an example of this a few weeks ago, when a parent misunderstood Robert’s grading system, thinking that a 47% was a failing grade, when it is a C. Once the parent knew that the grade was not an F, the conversation with Robert evaporated.
Therefore, heaven forbid that a teacher show up in a classroom a try to teach a kid to show up as a human being in a classroom and have real language acquisition activities occur. People who want to actually teach and students who actually want to learn are in the very small minority in schools.
Why am I going and saying something depressing on a Monday morning? Just to save us from our own enthusiasm. We can’t go into our classes waving the TPRS flag in front of a bunch of kids who want to game the system and stay in robot mode as per the link from Jody published here last night.
What we can do is be cheerful, speak the language in our class as much as we can, do the best job we can with comprehensible input, and not get all bent out of shape if our kids don’t want to learn.
Maybe some time years ago in our lives, most likely when we were growing up, we bought into the idea that as long as we worked really hard at something, we would succeed. That may not be necessarily true if we are language teachers.
It’s not us, y’all. Notice that the great experts at TPRS like Blaine Ray and Susan Gross, are no longer in the classroom. They’re no dummies.
