David Young

I got this bio description today from David Young which is, in his own words, “ridiculously long”. He offered to edit it. I say why do that? My goal is to keep the group small, the trust high, and get to know each other. So  maybe get a big cup of java and settle back and read about, like we did with Ardythe yesterday, how life’s paths led David to being connected with us here. His pathway, by the way, is mine. Just change the places and it’s pretty much the same. I was amazed at thinking that another person has gone through what I have, the same professional stepping stones, as it were, toppling over the churning water and finally rescued, like so many of us, just in time by Susan Gross. So David:
Ben,
First I want to say that I have been a great admirer of your blog and have benefited greatly from the discussions and the postings on it.  I was very concerned when your blog was shut down for a while.   I can sincerely say that it has been my main source of inspiration the past few years.  I truly respect your goals and expectations for this new private blog. This bio will include a little about my life that is relevant to my being a foreign language teacher.
It really all began when I first went to live in Brazil in 1972.  After graduating from Purdue University with a degree in  Industrial Management in that year, the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to leave the U.S.   I joined the Peace Corps and told them that I wanted to go to Nepal or India and they said that all they had was Brazil, take it or leave it. The language training that I had was good. I suppose it was sort of audiolingual and light on grammar.  At the end of the Portuguese language training I took the FSL test and got a 3+ out of a possible 5.  The Peace Corps also paid for private classes for nearly a year. I worked as an industrial consultant with agencies of the Brazilian government promoting economic development in the state of Sao Paulo and also in the state of Bahia.  After leaving the Peace Corps, I worked as a consultant for an agency of the U.N. and then traveled around northeastern Brazil for nearly a year.  I then started a restaurant in the city of Salvador and ran it for two years. After losing too much money on the restaurant I came back to Indiana and ran an insulation business with my father and cousin and then worked industrial jobs for about 10 years.  In the mid 1980’s I moved to the Kansas City area and towards the end of the 1980’s I decided it was time for a career change and I went back to school to UMKC to get a B.S. degree in Secondary Education in Spanish. I then started and finished a Masters Degree in Romance Languages and Literature (Spanish) at UMKC.  This included a year of studies at the Universidad de Sevilla. When I finished the Master’s Degree I decided to continue with my studies. I began the Ph.D program in Hispanic Literature at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas in 1994.  It was very intense. I also worked as a TA, teaching Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. I also did the minor in Brazilian Literature within the Ph. D program.  We received a one week training course to teach Spanish. It was centered around a communicative teaching approach. It was big on paired activities and lots of grammar.  In 1998, I decided that I had enough of studying literature and especially literary criticism and had lost my desire to continue so I got a job teaching Spanish in a middle school and also began as an adjunct at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. I continue to teach at this community college. I worked at a couple of high schools and then as an assistant professor of Spanish at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph, Missouri for  two years.  I then took a position as a Spanish teacher in the Olathe School District in 2004.  This was the first place where I had ever heard of TPRS and none of it was good.  My department chair told us several times that she was working with the principal to hire new language teachers and that anyone who mentioned TPRS would be automatically eliminated.  In about 2005 Susie Gross came to give a presentation to the foreign language teachers in the district.  I remember that there was some very bad weather and they had to cut the time short and most of us watched Susie give a French class to teachers who had volunteered to be in her class.  I watched Susie give a TPRS class to other teachers while other teachers would tell me how silly it was.  I was not that interested in hearing more, especially with my intensive grammar upbringing as a teacher.
Everything changed when I decided to start the National Board Certification process.  I did a lot of videotaping of my classes and tried to follow what was required to achieve National Board Certification.  I showed my videos to the only other board certified teacher in foreign languages in Kansas at the time.  She told me that I should try to deliver a lot of comprehensible input and that was what they would look for in the videos.  She also mentioned that I should read a little of what Krashen (whom I had never heard of) had to say.  The whole thing about delivering input made sense and I was trying to think of and create ways in which I could do that.  In the summer of 2007, I became aware that Jason Fritze was coming to Kansas City to give a workshop on TPRS. I decided that I would give TPRS another try and maybe they had some ideas about delivering comprehensible input.  The workshop with Jason totally changed my life as a language teacher. He gave a little TPRS class in Arabic and talked about the ideas of Krashen.  I then went to the NTPRS conference that year in Denver and was truly energized and ready to implement TPRS as best as I could.  While at the conference a few pictures of me appeared on the NTPRS website and a few people in my district saw it.  On my first day back to the high school in Olathe, my department chair told me that she had heard that I had gone to the NTPRS conference. I assured her that I just wanted to check it out and that I was not going to implement it.  The foreign language coordinator for the district told me that the whole district was buzzing about my having gone to the conference.  I remember another teacher in my school telling me, “You know that TPRS is taboo in this district.”   I left that district shortly after that.  I was glad to leave all the racists and narrow minded people.
I took a position in Kansas City, Kansas (a very poor district next door to the very affluent county of Johnson County). My first year (2008-2009) I taught in an elementary school (K-5) for the first time.  I used mostly Hola, niños and Cuentame.  It was mostly TPR and a little bit of storytelling. It was a very good experience.  The district had some cutbacks and I was assigned to teach ESL during the 2009-2010 school year at Wyandotte High School (where I still am).  They were very big on my using a computer program that concentrated on intensive phonics. It was called System 44.  I had a day of training and I remember the trainer talking about phonemic awareness. I told her that I had never heard of that term but after thinking about it I understood what it meant.  The trainers themselves admitted that it was not really designed for beginning language learners but that we would use it anyway.  It consisted of decodable digests with pages full of things like SAM BAM FLAM BAM and other nonsensical things.  It was literally without meaning.  Language activities that are without meaning are truly painful for a teacher who believes in language acquisition based on meaningful input.  I fought a lot with the people above me except for my principal.  She loved what I was doing in my class and said that she would like nothing better than just sitting in a corner of my room and watching me teach.  One day a higher up in the district ESL department came to observe my classroom and was very upset when she saw boxes of books that were at the child reading level.  Most of these books were boxes of children’s books that my principal had somehow acquired and was going to send to the nearby elementary school.  She first wanted to know if I wanted them and I said yes that I would love them.  The district higher up in ESL then brought some of her assistants to my room on an early release day.  They began an extreme makeover of my room and began a scene which was reminiscent of the scrutiny of Don Quijote’s library by the local priest.  The ESL higher up took out a book of Care Bears and said, “Just imagine that you were living in Japan and your children were learning Japanese and you came to visit their school and found them reading Care Bears in Japanese.  Wouldn’t you be outraged?” She then explained that they should be reading books that the other mainstream high school students were reading.  Remember that I had beginning ESL students who had just arrived in the U.S., mostly from Burmese refugee camps in Thailand.  Their proficiency in English was a big ZERO.  The ESL higher up then repeated the scene several times over with books such as The Three Bears, Dora the Explorer, etc.  She then packed up two big boxes of books and marked them “Not appropriate for High School” and put them in a corner.  When my principal found out she was outraged. This ESL higher up was later demoted and sent to teach ESL at an elementary school despite being friends with the head of ESL.  During that year I went back and forth between doing what I wanted to (mainly using TPRS with the Beth Skelton book “Putting it Together”) and using System 44 with its focus on intensive phonemic awareness.  It was during this year that I voraciously read everything I could about what has been happening in K-12 education the past 10 years or so, especially with NCLB.  I read lots of Krashen and the various critiques of the National Reading Panel Report that came out in the late 1990’s.  I was totally fascinated by the works of Frank Smith. I first became aware of Frank Smith when he was mentioned by Krashen.   Frank Smith, with his works on the psycholinguistics of reading, perhaps even more so than Krashen, totally demolishes the emphasis on intensive phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.  At the end of that year, my principal gave me the option of teaching Spanish rather than continuing in the ESL department and fighting with them.  I really loved teaching ESL but I decided that it was not worth trying to keep on fighting with them and so I have been teaching Spanish this past year. I used the book Ven conmigo (which I used for a couple of years in my pre TPRS days).  I must say that it was a step back. I tried to do a few stories but it is very difficult when the whole structure wants something else.  I did however, very much enjoy the 3 classes of Spanish for Native Speakers that I taught.  I learned a great deal and I have also been reading the research on instruction to heritage speakers and native speakers.
About three weeks ago, I met with some of the other Spanish teachers to pick another textbook for the district.  I brought my copy of Cuentame but everything I had to say fell on deaf ears and we ended up picking Realidades. At least it has a lot of TPR stories in a book written by Karen Rowan.   We spent a whole day trying to align the district Spanish standards with a pacing guide and a textbook.   The district standards were full of grammar points and they say they were taken from the Kansas standards.  The Kansas standards are totally proficiency based and taken from the ACTFL standards.  What obviously happened was that a group of teachers who were totally grammar based took proficiency based standards and converted them into something that was not proficiency based. [ed. note: this is happening a lot in Colorado]
In my high school, my principal has formed a new team for the ESL students for next year.  It consists of ESL teachers plus some sheltered content teachers plus the new addition is me.  I will receive the totally new and zero proficient students and I will teach 3 classes called Transitions class.  I will get to use TPRS a great deal.  My principal also acknowledged that we have been failing the ESL students.
Trying to use TPRS for ESL has been very difficult.  I became painfully aware of the lack of resources and teachers interested in using TPRS for ESL.  I went to the NTPRS conference in Chicago last summer and talked with Blaine Ray for a little bit about ESL. I quickly became aware that he was clueless about what was happening in ESL classrooms.  There was a special session for ESL teachers during the conference. 3 teachers showed up.  One taught ESL to Spanish speakers (that does not count) and the other taught English as a  foreign language in France.  I was really the only ESL teacher at the whole conference. I was hoping to talk with Beth Skelton but she was not there.
Meanwhile I have also been teaching at Johnson County Community College  since I was won over to TPRS.  I teach first year Spanish classes and first year Brazilian Portuguese classes in the evenings.  I try to use TPRS as much as possible in my classes.   I also began what is called the Foreign Language Pedagogy Group during the 2009-2010 school year. It is mostly a soap box for me to talk about SLA research.  We spent several sessions watching and discussing a Krashen video and I also gave a little TPRS class in Brazilian Portuguese. Interest has been fading however.
I must admit that the NTPRS conference that I attended last year in Chicago was a little disappointing.  This was especially truly because the year before I attended the Fluency Fast in Denver.  That is where I met you.  I missed not having people like Krashen and Jason Fritze around.  I think that the whole TPRS movement has taken a step back.  I gave Blaine Ray the Diane Ravitch book (Death and Life of the American Education System).  I could tell that Blaine seems to have no real knowledge of or interest in what is taking place in K-12 educational policy.  Krashen, of course, is very much involved in the fight against the destruction of public education in the U.S. and the current dumbing down of our schools that has taken place with NCLB and Obama’s Race to the Top (NCLB on steroids).  The fact that your book was not on sale was truly a tremendous loss for every single participant in the conference.
This summer I plan to do some videorecording of my classes. My main interests are: 1) applying TPRS to the college classes I teach for Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese; 2) applying TPRS to ESL; 3) applying TPRS to my high school Spanish course with the Realidades text; 4) Spanish to native and heritage speakers.  Wyandotte High school is about 45% Hispanic, 40% African-American, 8% Asians and Africans mostly refugees) and about 8% white.
This summer I plan to attend the NTPRS conference in St. Louis.  I must admit that I am a little disappointed with the present TPRS movement. It seems that Blaine wants everything under his personal control.  This is very sad.  I really don’t know where else to go to. If there was something else like the Fluency Fast conference in Denver in 2009 then I would go there.  I suppose maybe I should use more the term comprehension based approach to describe what I do.   I also plan to attend the National March to Save Our Schools in Washington, D.C at the end of July.  As I am sure you know, Krashen has very much been involved in promoting it.
I was going to send this to you a week or so ago and then I saw that Krashen is coming to the NTPRS conference in St. Louis in July.  This is a very good  thing.  I think that it is vital for the TPRS people to interact with Krashen and to connect with what is happening in K-12 educational policy in general  and also relate to SLA research.
Finally, I must share with you a meeting that the Spanish teachers had with my principal at the end of this school year.  The meeting was devoted to scheduling and how we can promote the study of Spanish in our school.  My other two colleagues are both European born and I think that somehow influences their approach to the whole thing.  The teacher from  Spain said that students who study Spanish with her would receive some very necessary instruction on grammar, something that would help them with their English also.  The teacher that was born in Italy said that students who come out of his Spanish classes would receive a lot of discipline which would be beneficial to the study of other content areas.  I told everyone that I had some different ideas. I think that students should study languages with the aim of receiving proficiency in the language.  I get along with my colleagues but they are both only a year or two from retirement and have no intention whatsoever of changing what they have been doing throughout their teaching career.  It sometimes is a little depressing.
Fortunately the ESL teacher with whom I talk a lot and will work a lot with next year is a big fan of Krashen.   This is a tremendous breath of fresh air for which I am very grateful.
The other good news is that the newly named head of the foreign language department at a high school near Topeka, Kansas is a true blue TPRSer.  This is wonderful news and will help me promote TPRS in Kansas.
Thank you for your patience if you have been able to read all of this.  I hope that you will be at the NTPRS conference in St. Louis.
David Young