My wish is that this membership community be private to protect it from instrusion. I know that sounds a bit defensive, but I can cite two instances where colleagues joined this group for less than honorable reasons (to spy on a colleague) and were ferreted out and kicked out, one by pure luck and the other after a ton of strife where the colleague downloaded comments made here by someone and took them to the principal, a principal who didn’t get the pedagogical arguments but did get that two teachers in his department were feuding.
I know, I know, it sounds dramatic, but what is dramatic is that if you are in a split department or one in which you are having great success as the only comprehension based teacher and someone really does that. And that happens a lot as teachers begin to fully get what we bring to the foreign language education table and that we are not going away.
Anyway, I really would like people who have not yet sent in bios to send them in. You don’t have to comment but at least let us know who you are. Chris Minkoff just joined and promptly sent in a wonderful bio and here it is and thank you Chris for doing that. It’s nice to sense people’s truths:
Hi Ben,
I wanted to introduce myself. I’m going into my 3rd year of teaching Spanish in San Diego. My first year of teaching was very difficult… large class sizes, a toxic school culture amongst students (the local surfer kids and the underprivileged kids being bussed in from the southeast part of the city made for an interesting school climate), and classroom management problems. After getting pink slipped, I was fortunate to get a job at a charter high school. This past year was day and night compared to the first year. I began to collaborate closely with a colleague who introduced me to CI and TPRS. It changed my perspectives on language instruction, and I actually began to have fun teaching. The first few weeks were absolutely magical, and we brought our kids much further along in one year than I did my first year of grammar-slam instruction.
We work on the quarter system, so things are accelerated and we expect our kids to be able to produce the language creatively. This certainly smacks the “silent period” notion in the face, but I must say that my students stepped up to the plate and stretched their language use by cicumlocuting and connecting learned vocabulary to structures. I had high expectations for their language use, but made sure that the task was level-appropriate and interesting to my students. This year, we had more students sign up for Spanish 3 than ever before. I’m only 25 and want to be master my craft, but know that it will take time, patience, experience, and lots of research. Anyways, I look forward to learning a lot on the blog this summer. It’s great to have a practitioner who can back up his great ideas with his actual practice. Thanks!
Chris Minkoff