Here is a post that I wrote in the past few days, after reading something Tina wrote and then talking with her for an hour about it. But it was written from anger and so doesn’t fit into the goals we are identifying for the PLC for the coming year. So if anyone sees me posting this kind of venomous stuff please call me on it. This is from an endless pit of anger and frustration about the state of our profession:
New teachers to TPRS/CI are being CRUSHED. Why? Because they go to conferences, learn how to teach in alignment with the research, return to their buildings, and get CRUSHED by colleagues and admins who then tell them to teach to align with local building/district documents which however DO NOT align with the research nor with the national standards.
Being between this rock and hard place CRUSHES teachers who are earnestly trying to learn how to teach in a new way, with all the requisite skills and new habits of mind that they must internalize during that process, and then go and be forced to align their learnings with the way people used to teach in the 1960s. It’s cruel and unfair.
It CRUSHES them and makes them want to forget that they ever heard of CI because it is simply so hard, almost impossible, for them to use CI as a tool to drill language pieces from the published curriculum into their students’ brains when it was really designed to facilitate an elegant unconscious process that cannot be mixed with conscious learning.
T1 is junk and yet it has been allowed to become the TPRS/CI of the day. And Krashen…..
I need to stop writing stuff like that. If I publish anything like that in the future, please call me out on it. The reflection here is about having a year next year where we focus on strategies that make us better teachers, and in my view the NT piece will surely do that, and leave the venom behind.