Here is Chris’ bio. Chris is a young TPRS teacher typical of the high octane quality coming into the field that doesn’t really care about hearing about how it was done in the last century:
Hi everybody! I’m a 2nd year Spanish teacher at a fairly large suburban school in Ohio. It’s my second year teaching but sometimes feels like my first again because it’s my first year doing TPRS, and just plain doing EVERYTHING differently from last year. I teach at a middle school: 7th grade Exploratory Spanish in 9 week rotations and 8th grade Spanish I for high school credit. Like I said, it’s my first year teaching TPRS but I’ve been familiar with it for a little while. I attended a 40 minute session on TPRS at a conference a couple of years ago and though it was cool and effective but had no clue how to do it. This past spring I went to a 1 day workshop on culture based TPRS with Barb Cartford…I learned a lot more but still didn’t feel ready to jump in. Then, over the summer I went to a 2-day TPRS workshop, gained a lot of knowledge, felt ready to jump into TPRS when the school year started, and then the school year started and I wasn’t sure where to go from there. They always make it look so easy at the workshops!!!
Last year, I was a textbook/communicative teacher. I was forcing output on the first day of school “my name is ___”. Everyday I had students doing “communicative activities” that forced output. After going to some TPRS workshops and doing research on language acquisition, I realize I had it all wrong. Then when my 7th graders from last year came in this year as 8th graders not remembering anything from my Spanish classes last year, I really realized I had it all wrong. This year I feel that in my mind I have it right, but in practice I’m a work in progress. Although I feel I suck at TPRS right now, I do think that this school year is going to be a lot better than last year. Another thing I had wrong last year was my “Spanish I recommendations”. For as long as they’ve had Spanish I at this middle school, it’s always been the “cream of the crop” kids who have been able to take it, the kids with straight A’s, the gifted kids, etc. I had that mindset last year when recommending students so the Spanish I classes this year are filled with all the “really smart” kids. That will be different this year as I’ve already seen just in these first 6-7 weeks that there are students in my 7th grade classes who last year I would have never considered recommending for Spanish I but I will be this time around.
I’ve found this blog to so far be a great help and I already plan on making changes this Monday based on things I read yesterday and today on here. This blog has helped me a lot so far with classroom management and as a result of some recently read comments, I plan on making some parent phone calls this week. I look forward to collaborating further with all of you!