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Craig West – Question
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28 thoughts on “Craig West – Question”
Craig I have two suggestions:
(1) Get out of that credit recovery type of class, like you said. Sounds harsh but I am working with another teacher on this thing about lost classes privately and the truth is that there are classes that can’t reach the bar of decency and rule-following, no blame but it happens a lot and all teachers have to decide on their own limits. You may have reached yours in this situation.
(2) But there are few jobs elsewhere, what to do? So now we have to explore a second avenue of inquiry for what’s going on. This is important stuff. We know that with the Invisibles NTCI system we have a tremendously effective vehicle for reaching kids. But there is more to this, more in your question.
What is that “more”? I think it has something to do with the avenue of communication with the kids. The community building part. Obviously we can’t go into that in a comment field here, but my hunch is that your lesson right now might lie in looking at what your kids are seeing in their teacher. What do they see each day?
Well to be honest they’re seeing some frustration right now. A person who’s struggling to try to “get them to do something” which when I write it makes total sense why they are resisting so much.
This is a self aware thing to say:
… when I write [this] it makes total sense why they are resisting…
EVERYTHING depends on reaching them, building the bridge with them, and doing that depends on self awareness of the message they are getting from you. So stating that you are aware that they are seeing your frustration is a big first step.
So the next step in healing this is to answer, “How can I appear less frustrated with them? What things must I do to remove that perception by them?”
Dude, this is the hard work. Let’s take this one comment field at a time and see how far we can get into this real stuff. We can’t change others. We can only change ourselves.
I wish I could observe in your room and we could come up with a concrete plan. The Invisibles is plenty powerful enough to heal this, but we need to figure out how you are using them, so that we could find out and tweak the little details in the sequence of your classes that might bring a flood of energy to lift the class up.
I would record your class and share it with Ben, it’s the only way really. You also might want to consider Matava scripts done in the Sean Lawler style. He’s the king of CI chill-ness.
Here is his presentation at Edcamp Lake County
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lkceINi_wc
With these types of classes I would focus more on reading activities and also the “pencil and paper activities” in Ben’s books than I would on the aural stories.
Extend your FCR time to 15 minutes instead of 10 minutes. Slap the kids who don’t read with a bad grade.
Have them write you stories in English and then you pick the best ones and translate them to Spanish and do reading activities with them.
You might also want to try Storylistening with a prompter and then give a quiz each and every time you have a new story (you can have the students grade it in class- this really burns time). Circle the crap out of each sentence when you are reviewing the answers and you will see the class totally subdued.
For these classes I am also learning that brain breaks are very important- check out what Anabelle Allen has on Youtube in regards to brain breaks.
Craig, if you are interested, on my Teacher’s Pay Teachers page I have my class storybooks with accompanying native speaker audio.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Ci-Guy
Send me an email at gregoryschwab@gmail.com and I will give you all my readers (with the audio) for free.
You can put on those recordings, have the kids read along and then do activities with that. (True/False, Ordering activities, comprehension questions, L1 retells etc). Being that it would be coming from a recording it feels more traditional.
Those recordings and generally everything that Greg produces is high quality stuff from an experienced teacher so I support Greg’s materials 100%. One thing about Greg is that he knows that the game is all about creating. materials that get us safe and sound through to the end of class, first and foremost. So Craig what we need to craft with you is (1) the right materials/activities for your particular group of kids, and (2) the right mindset to allow you to change their perception of you, which is entirely dependent on you taking a look at how you are being seen in class by them.
Thank you all for this support it has given me a lot to think about. It really is a mindset thing. Yesterday was an off one for me but today I’m back. Classes went much better today. With these students I’m finding a definite “in” while talking about any cartoon character they loved as kids. Put up some questions about Mermaid Man and Barnacle boy and you have a solid 30 minute discussion.
Craig, maybe when you have a few days running of good class vibes, you video record yourself and observe your body language and the interactions with your Ss and between Ss. It takes (at least for me when I see video of myself) a strong stomach but I have learned that I sometimes get really intense, and my voice tone and body language can get that way, too. Seeing myself like that helps me strive to chill out, relax my body, voice and overall demeanor. I have also allowed myself to fully laugh – not just a perfunctory smile – when something is funny, and let the dopamine (or whatever is released w/laughter) do it’s system wide chill-out thing. Finally, connecting with your Ss at the beginning of class can help reset the tone – a funny anecdote; a corny joke; so they see you as a multidimensional human being and not just the Spanish teacher this year…
…I have also allowed myself to fully laugh….
Me too. I know exactly what you mean. It’s healing, this work. I actually fell on the floor a few times and I wasn’t faking it. Some of the happiest moments I can remember were in my classroom. God is good.
Hey Craig. Thanks again for you help a couple of years ago in preparing for a job interview.
This thread is exactly why I like this PLC so much. You getting real and raw with us, Craig, is what doesn’t exist in PD elsewhere.
Older students can be so jaded. Almost impossible to reach. So many layers to peel back. And like a onion, lots of tears shed in the process. Sounds like you found a way to reach them, with those childhood cartoon characters. What a great idea!
Speaking of letting go, Alisa, I also let go when the students really has something they want to talk about in English. I’ll entertain a conversation in English here and there. Major bonding points are scored when I do that.
I consider infrequent classes talking with the kids in L1 about anything both dangerous and valuable. I used to do it all the time but not in this environment today. Younger teachers often make that mistake and pay for it in the morning in the principal’s office who then has to straddle the fence with angry parents. Tough stuff but yeah Sean it’s great for bonding. I just don’t “go there” (politics, religion, drugs, etc.) and I only ask questions rather than pontificating.
You guys have the really hard jobs. My job appears to be light in comparison, then why do I feel drained almost every schoolday after only four lessons. And on the other hand, I love teaching and being with the young ones (ages 6 -12).
Maybe it has to do with getting older. I’m 61 now. But it feels a little unfair that in my free time I often can’t really relax and enjoy what I’m doing. Enough complaints! Life goes on. Just my thoughts on a tired Saturday night.
Udo you’ve been here in the group for some time now. You said A LOT above. You give so much to your students, I know that from things you’ve said here over the years.
Are you giving too much? This sentence you wrote is common among those in our field:
…I often can’t really relax and enjoy what I’m doing….
I think this applies to most of us. Our jobs carry with them a kind of psychic/psychological danger. No easy task to relax, esp. for those of us whose middle name is empathy, bc we are not takers. We want everyone to be happy. Perhaps too much?
There is a book that has really helped me deal with my people pleasing empathic ways lately:
Dr. Christiane Northtrup
Energy Vampires and How to Dodge Them
It kind of blew my mind. Super insights for exhausted people, though not written directly for teachers. One of the most important books I’ve ever read in my life on the topic of mental health.
Thanks Ben,
and right you are. I tend to give too much.
The kids are the future and they are bombarded with all kinds of intelectual and I believe especially emotional garbage that it can be very hard for them to find a true, deep sense in life. I try to not overburden them with learning tasks but at the same time learning enough so that they have a good foundation for the rest of their school career and their exams and joy and humour is also essential for me in my classes.
Udo you said:
…it can be very hard for them to find a true, deep sense in life…
This is so true and reflects your Waldorf teacher values. You bring alive this statement from Kierkegaard:
…if I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible….
If that is what drives us in our work, then we cannot help but emerge victorious one day. We finally have everything we need to reach kids in the real way in our language classes. WE CAN REACH OUR KIDS NOW. All we have to do is go into our classrooms the next day no matter how we feel and keep doing it. Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos battalions!
Udo it is absolutely exhausting (and at the same time exhilarating!) to teach young children. I think it’s because so many things are happening at once. We are parenting them and providing the language, managing the activity (too young for really helpful class jobs), keeping them engaged (shorter attention spans), with shorter periods of instruction. Listening is almost a lost art – the visual culture has made our lives even more challenging.
Sometimes my brain break is just some simple stretching with the kids to relieve my own tension really. Cut yourself some slack! Smile, breathe, walk among the kids and high five them – and find a sunny vacation spot for winter break.
Thank you Alisa,
and yes, the art of listening is certainly not increasing. I need to give myself more slack – working on it!
All the best!
Teaching little ones is very exhausting. You have to be “on” all the time! It’s lots of fun to teach them but it’s a lot of work also. Be gentle with yourselves and make sure to take care of you!
This thing about being “on” all the time. It doesn’t have to be that way. We have to learn how to change that script. We can.
What I mean about that feeling of having to be “on” all the time is that between the jobs, the 7-layer questioning sequence and working from the images (either ICIs or CCI/OWIs) we should not have to feel that kind of pressure. What I have found is that the Invisibles and all the details about how to make them work in one’s classroom as explained in A Natural Approach to Stories completely re-distribute the energy/work load. They just do.
I haven’t found a way to leverage the workload in elem yet – though I haven’t experimented broadly with jobs. It’s on my TO DO list, though.
I’m having this rebirth of interest and confidence in ANATS. After all, it laid 90% of the groundwork for ANATTY. The images plus the jobs plus the 7-Layer = CI magic of a kind I’ve never seen before.
I’m so glad I found this thread today. My own “essential question” continues to be “How can I feel alive in my life, and not simply “teaching and recovering from teaching?”
I find that on breaks, I just fold inward, hunker down by the woodstove with a book and a cup (or multiple cups) of coffee or tea or plain ole hot water. It seems that when I am not “lost in a book” or whatever, my mind spins incessantly on how to be a better teacher. I’m trying to get away from social media since I find it increases my anxiety and feelings of ineptness. I have to catch myself often, while walking in the woods and say “WTF? Get out of the classroom…you are not in the classroom now, you are in the woods…be in the woods FFS!
A big discovery from the day before Thanksgiving break came in the form of my so-called plan of “a marathon of games!” It was snowing hard all day and I knew kids would be whiny about not having a snow day. Heck, I was kinda whiny myself. I said “Yeah, I get it! But we’re here, so might as well enjoy ourselves…ya’ll I go a marathon of games lined up!” This was met with a big ole “YESSS!”
I need to imprint this on the back of my eyelids. I know on some level we had a great day all day (even in “that group that refuses to get along” ) because I set the tone internally and was not havin’ it with any type of drama…but my “not havin’it ” came from a true sense of joy to be had that day rather than a defensive attitude strategically formulated from within a fortress.
My hope is that I can summon that commitment to myself, so that more days can be spent laughing and just having fun in Spanish with a bit of English sprinkled in. I realize we did not really do anything out of the ordinary–we played “the partner speaking game” then got up and did assorted versions of rock paper scissors and other random and silly TPR, then some version of a true false game, then sang some songs and we ended with kicking back watching a new Señor Wooly vid. Easy peasy. Fun day all around!
***AND*** more to the point of Craig’s question, is something I learned recently from Jon Cowart, which is for classes with toxic chemistry, just keep things kind of generic. He suggests a cultural topic or something a bit more “academic” so that the focus is on meaning and learning something new and cool but neutral. For example, I have a group that can quickly get very judgemental to the point of bullying. I was trying way too hard to “get them to be BFFS during class. Now I stick to impersonal topics, movie talks, and the like. I avoid PQA and just stick to the topic provided by the video, etc. This has helped a lot. And also by using some compassion-inspiring vids (ie, anything with animals or pixar) I can feel the energy softening a bit. Maybe eventually we can get softer with each other, but for now, I am content to appeal to their humanity in alternate ways.
Jen just before I read your comment I was working on a little video that Teacher’s Discovery asked me for to promote The Big CI Book and I found myself saying exactly what you say above. But I had to edit out all the stuff about how “our mental health can improve if we use the simple CI strategies found in this book” because TD (luckily) put me on a two minute time limit for the video.
So yeah, my sister in the game that we call “Teaching Languages” but should be renamed “It’s All About Our Mental Health!”, I thank you for this heartfelt comment. It’s so true!
And I definitely agree with your point about social media. I’m done with it. I’m just happy to be here by the home fires in our little group, just like it’s been for the past eleven years….
By the way, this is one hell of a sentence right here:
…it seems that when I am not “lost in a book” or whatever, my mind spins incessantly on how to be a better teacher…. I have to catch myself often, while walking in the woods and say “WTF? Get out of the classroom…you are not in the classroom now, you are in the woods…be in the woods FFS!…
Thinking about teaching too much can be like an illness! I’m so glad that you have always said these things, for so many years now. It makes me feel not so alone. For years I thought that I was the only one obsessing over something that is really nothing more than a dang job!
Jen I don’t know if everyone appreciates what you say above but I have to say that there is real wisdom in your words.
This:
A big discovery from the day before Thanksgiving break came in the form of my so-called plan of “a marathon of games!” It was snowing hard all day and I knew kids would be whiny about not having a snow day. Heck, I was kinda whiny myself. I said “Yeah, I get it! But we’re here, so might as well enjoy ourselves…ya’ll I go a marathon of games lined up!” This was met with a big ole “YESSS!”
I need to imprint this on the back of my eyelids. I know on some level we had a great day all day (even in “that group that refuses to get along” ) because I set the tone internally and was not havin’ it with any type of drama [AND] my “not havin’it ” came from a true sense of joy to be had that day rather than a defensive attitude strategically formulated from within a fortress.
What I hear you say here is that it’s not the method we use that counts so much, it’s the attitude of not bowing at the Alter of Curriculum and putting the kids first that counts. It’s all about bringing in some HUMAN relationship mojo into the time we spend with them and if that means using simpler classroom instructional strategies and more English than that’s fine!
It’s that old adage about how they won’t care about the learning until they understand that we care mainly about THEM.
…more days can be spent laughing and just having fun in Spanish with a bit of English sprinkled in….
And I would even suggest changing that to read “…with MORE THAN a bit of English sprinkled in…”
I mean, who cares? Honestly, are our kids going to become fluent while they are with us? We’ve had that discussion here a hundred times….
And I hate to break it to any young superstar teachers out there, but nobody cares about how you teach that much. YOU do, and that’s good for the kids, but honestly, what are we getting so worked up about? People aren’t going to love us more because we’re great teachers. We are loved already anyway, so what’s the big deal? We don’t have to go out and “work” for approval and love for others. It comes with just being on the planet….