Hi Ben,
Here’s my bio. Sorry for the delay!
Growing up, teaching language was not part of the plan. I was a smart hispanic kid in a tough, urban school district with big goals and ambitions. My parents are both from Mexico, and though I acquired English at a very young age, Spanish was the primary language at home. I graduated near the top of my high school class wanting to become someone purposeful — a doctor, lawyer maybe. It wasn’t until my junior year in college that I reconnected with my one and true love for literature, and I settled with English as my major.
Teaching Spanish was honestly the easiest and most logical career choice for me at that time. I was 22 years old when I began teaching level 1 Spanish to a largely unmotivated and kind of volatile group of kids from my alma mater. I’d rate that period of my life as one of my worst — not only did I not know what I was doing, but I was just engulfed in student apathy. I spent extraordinary amounts of time making spiffy-looking Power Points for the zero amount of students who actually cared. To them, there was no value in learning a language whatsoever. Who could blame them anyway?
So what do most language teachers do when students don’t care? We make elaborate worksheets. We play competitive, let’s-conjugate-that-verb type of games. We use complicated tech presentation tools to wow our kids. In the end, we’re just using gimmicks to force output from students before they are even close to being ready to produce TL. We’re shattering their confidence starting day 1 — how can we expect for the majority of them to find value in what we do?
This is my third year teaching. I’m a total newbie, and everything is still a learning process for me. I’ve never had any formal training in second language acquisition methods, nor have I ever attended any type of FL workshop. I began a blog for my students during my first year as a teacher that eventually became a way for me to meet other struggling teachers. This is how I came across TCI and this PLC.
I began standards-based grading and TPRS with my classes this year, and although it has not been an easy journey for me, I have seen first-hand that CI works. My students feel less stressed and seem to enjoy class much more. I haven’t shown a single Power Point on grammar this year, and my students don’t seem to miss it either. I currently teach pre-AP Spanish 2 and 3 near Austin, TX (any other Texans out there?) in a pretty flexible department of which I’m the first to ditch the textbook and use CI methods. There’s just one other teacher in my department who hates what I do and claims it’s not the “real way” to teach a language. Whatever. I’m not going back.
I look forward every day to reading your wonderful, helpful advice! Very nice to meet you all!
Crystal