We have a set of questions here that need our attention and responses:
Ben,
This is year 2 (really semester 2) of my Spanish 1 TCI odyssey and I’m feeling some serious self-doubt. I am curious if, when you were getting started, you felt overwhelmed, a bit lost, maybe a bit random in terms of what you were teaching, and felt like you were failing big time at this? I am OK at the jGR classroom management stuff but I feel like some kids don’t perceive it as real or, they don’t care. I don’t know which. Also, I feel like some kids view my class as a waste of time because along with stories, I’ve been pulling structures out of Pobre Ana and following your cRD process. I even feel like it is a bit random but I also feel like learning language naturally is kind of random. Also, I have to give actual book quizzes and tests along with this and nothing we do with stories and Pobre Ana is ever on the tests. Am I giving them the perception that all the work we do with the stories and Pobre Ana is worthless because it isn’t formally assessed on these quizzes and tests?
I also have been doing a free write periodically and I have some kids writing 145 words in ten minutes. But, largely they are only using the really early stuff we were doing like saying people’s names, describing them, saying how old they are, how they are doing, and not really writing a story. I’m not seeing many of the structures from our class stories coming up in these free writes. What is going wrong?
Then, Friday, we were doing an essential sentence activity with the chapter of Pobre Ana that we just finished the day before. To prep for the chapter we PQA’d a couple structures they didn’t know, did L & D with a painting on another structure they didn’t know, and finally read the chapter. It seemed to go well. I was hearing a pretty confident choral reading from the class without hesitation on the new structures. But, when we were working on the essential sentences, I saw a girl who was just sitting there. I walked over and asked if she was stuck on something and she said she didn’t really understand anything. And I mean anything. She wasn’t even recognizing “is.” This made me feel terrible. The rest of the class just worked without making a peep so I assume they understood it all but how did this girl not understand the very first word we learned in class and have used thousands of times???? WTF have I done?
How, when we are reading and doing stories do I really know if the kid understands? Can’t they just hide behind their more vocal classmates the entire time? I have tried to find out if she understands something by focusing directly on her but that just freaks her out so I stopped doing that. I try to look into her eyes when I say something but how do you really know if she understands? She’s got a fifty/fifty shot to answer most of my questions correctly and in the midst of everything it’s hard for me to remember to look at her after every question. She will never, ever give me the stop signal. She will never, ever tell me outside of class she doesn’t understand. I asked her if she is just completely lost during stories and she said no she understands just fine.
A similar thing is happening in my other class. I have some enthusiastic kids who read loud and proud. So it’s hard to tell if everyone is reading along with them. Do you stand there and look at all of them watching to make sure you see their mouths moving? I’ve been plowing ahead trying to do my best to make myself comprehensible but how do I really ever know if they are so good at fooling me?
I have no desire to go back to the book because that is a complete and utter waste of time. What I fear is that if rumors fly that my kids feel like they aren’t doing anything, it will be ammunition against what we are trying to do. I don’t want to be one of the teachers that gives TPRS/TCI a bad name because my inexperience doesn’t give me the foresight to see where they are headed. I’m really just flying by the seat of my pants. I know it would be a small outspoken minority of kids, if anyone, that would speak out against me but, that is exactly who seems to run things everywhere in our society these days. The loud selfish ones. This was a long rant and I apologize. I didn’t really want to put it on the forum. I just need to get these things off my chest periodically because I have no one at my school that understands what I’m trying to do. They just smile and nod.
Thank you,
J