This bio is from Dirk. It contains some radical thoughts, even for us. I agree fully with every single point he makes. Dirk is a freestyle expert. Read why:
I just had a chance to go through the last month or of the blog entries. I apologize for not sending a bio sooner and not contributing to the blog lately but in the summers I really and seriously unplug from work. Plus I have a 3 and a 5 year old which doesn’t leave me much time for reflecting and writing at the end of a work day.
Having said that, I must say that I thought I was “doing CI and TPRS” for the past three years. I devoured all I could read, woke up in the middle of the night, endured criticism from colleagues, wrote to you a lot, and also spent a lot of time and energy bitching about how my school is too small and it just doesn’t work there.
This is the first year I have really done it. After 10 years of forcing output – never using a book thanks to a killer mentor I had – but just the same teaching grammar rules and forcing different kinds of output – and three years worrying about which words to use in TPRS and what order to follow – I finally get it. And I am having fun every day in every class.
3 things have been huge this year. These 2 things have made more of a difference than I ever imagined.
1. I push myself really hard and the kids really hard on the rules. I used to think you overstated this idea that there must be order before acquisition can occur. I used to try at the beginning and just give up, really. If acquisition is so unconscious, they will just “get it.” Bullshit. This is school in the U S of A full of teenagers. This year, I have called parents in class on speakerphone the first time people really screwed up with interruptions or comments. I called a kid’s mom down to the room from where she was volunteering and talked to her right there. I made a couple people stay in my room with me for lunch. Forget all the paperwork and clueless administrators. I take care of it immediately. Much much better.
2. The whole name circle in English time spent at the beginning pays off big time. I took a full week to complete the circles in each class. I always went last, I made mistakes, and I always laughed about it. But it paid off big time. Learning names gives the teacher both positive bonding / connecting power and very quick redirect power on the second week of school. Well worth the time “lost to content” in any subject. I never used to get this initial, low-stress interaction at the beginning of the year when I spoke only Spanish.
These two simple things – both based upon human connections, interaction, and respect – trump any sort of method for TPRS or CI. Whether or not one uses with PQA, stories, reading, drawing, or acting – the most important components are that the language be about the kids or their ideas and that they have space to absorb it that is orderly and focused. The rules and the research make this happen. If students are engaged to a point where they are most invested in the characters or events in the story / image / discussion then one is doing it right. That is the only real test. Today there was a near fight over a question over whether there were two big or one big rock in a shoe.
I declare that it doesn’t matter which M T W schedule one follows, which novel is read first, how many questions are on a test or any of that other stuff. We teach kids a language. We do not teach a language to kids. I am currently leading a general hodgepodge of one word images that get sewn together after a couple of days into a reading which can be read or dictated to them. Then we still do name cards and so we will move to bigger stories. But I think one good word or phrase is as good as three. Today we did “rock” and had a rock, paper, scissors tourney before creating a family of rocks traveling in a shoe.
3. A single list of the 135 or so wall words – I chose mine from the different topical categories in the Routledge Frequency Dictionary – which I laminated and shoot at with a Nerf dart gun. They all look to see where the dart will land. The same words show up over and over in the one word images, games, and anything I write. I can just shoot some darts and connect the words to make a skeleton of a story. No more monthly word lists that change and have low-frequency words. I can give the list to study hall teachers and email them to parents when they ask for homework or assignments.
Anyway I am tired and I gotta go. I wanted to check in and say hello and thank the collective on the blog for their continued wisdom and courage.
Take care. And thank you once again.
Dirk