There is a topic that hasn’t been discussed here for years but it bears looking at by some of us who are still in districts that test in the old ways of the last century, i.e. – and I know this sounds funny – teaching connected to a textbook (sic).
What happens is that TPRS/CI teachers often fail to teach every single weather expression, or some other expression, because we don’t use lists and the kids don’t blindly memorize.
Rather, it is in the richness of real communicated language in class in which the kids are repeatedly exposed (in the real way) to expressions of time and weather and all that. The difference between the two ways of doing it is so stark! Little kids memorizing lists of “It’s warm” or “It’s cold” and all that, but being denied experiencing those expressions as part of a living language system as per these recent posts:
https://benslavic.com/blog/i-think-ill-become-a-teacher/
https://benslavic.com/blog/the-garden-of-writing-needs-plenty-of-water-and-good-soil/
So what do we do when we only do CI instruction and we forgot, by the end of the year, to teach:
Il fait frais – It’s mild
We just forgot. It never came up in a story or a reading. And yet it’s on the test, the Shitty Old Test from Yesteryear (SOTY) that some of us still have to deal with if our district still hasn’t yet made the change into 21st language instruction, what I call comprehension based instruction.
What I do is right about now in January I get out a series of posters with all that stuff on it. Lists of weather expressions and time expressions and all sorts of lists. “I thought you were against lists, Ben!” I am, but I also have a job and before I came to DPS I didn’t want some SOTY teacher’s kids beating my kids on SOTY tests at the end of the year because the district hasn’t yet grasped what the new tests of the future are going to have to look like in the 21st century. Plus, I don’t know who will be teaching my kids next year.
(I used these lists before DPS went to it’s new format, and I still use them now for five minutes in each class period, at times, because I won’t be there next year and I don’t know who will replace me. Anyone sending kids to grammar teachers next year needs to teach these lists this spring for CYA reasons as well. Just take five minutes at some point in each class and do it. Kids, especially seventh graders, love lists anyway.
(Note carefully: these lists do not work for most kids, but you can say you taught them. You would never do this unless you were in a school, which is the only place where testing of this vapid nature occurs.)
So where are the lists? In my classroom. I will try to remember to get them into one big poster form on the site here this week in a new CYA category.
Remind me if I don’t get it done by the time the Patriots arrive in Denver about Friday to get used to the altitude so they don’t suck air too much during the AFC championship game on Sunday.