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6 thoughts on “Dori Vittetoe”
Thank you for posting your bio! It is always wonderful to read about our colleagues out there in CI land 🙂 It sounds like you are doing a great job. I, too, struggle with trying to keep all of the balls in the air. The other 3 Spanish teachers in my department are coming around to thinking that TPRS is the way to teach. Now it is just a matter of convincing the district to let us “do it our way”. There is hope! (I just uploaded my gravatar so we’ll see if it shows up here)
I love your bio, thank you for sharing! Like Louisa said, it sounds like you are doing great! I’m the only TPRS teacher in a district with about 8 Spanish teachers. I know that there are some districts around where I live where you have to be secretive about TPRS. The high school I graduate from, for example, is one of them. The superintendent used to be a Spanish teacher and she is very traditional, I was told by my former, retired Spanish teacher that TPRS is a “bad word” to use during an interview there.
Sorry to hear that you hit a deer. But so glad that you posted your bio. Today I was just telling someone that my second year students (my fault—I had not been confident enough to use CI with them last year until way late in the year) still use infinitives for everything. But my first year students with CI this year just don’t do that, because of the way verb structures are used in context. I like your verb songs idea. Are your verb songs original? I would like to hear more about them.
I am with you in feeling like we have our own department here, which is really appreciated and needed given the way things are going at my school.
Nice “to meet” you. Dori.
I loved your administrator saying “little philosophy.” Your situation sounds so similar to ours. Especially the students going on to a book-teacher next year. Congrats on that thriving French program.
Hi, and nice to meet you! I’m also in the same boat as you – having to send my kids off to a textbook colleague. So, if you could share your ideas on the verb songs, that would be terrific.
Btw, I am from a little village in the Austrian Alps. So I know everything about hitting dear (with a car, tractor or crashing into them on your skis). Just wondering, do you also call the local “Gasthaus” (= restaurant, the owner of which is also usually the local forest ranger) so they can put it on the menu? Venison with red cabbage is absolutely divine (oops, now I also outed myself as a carnivore). However, I do not advocate hitting deer for that reason 😉
For those of you who asked about the verb songs: I take popular tunes that they know and we sing the verbs. We don’t sing the words, though, we sing the letters. I’d love to sing the words, but they say they can’t remember how to write them as well that way, and my ONLY reason for doing this is to get them to be successful in high school. For regular verb endings, we sing the -er verbs to “In the jungle, the might jungle” from the Lion King. So we sing, e es e e ons ez ent ent. For irregular verbs, we sing the spelling of the entire verb: to the tune of Winnie the Pooh the verb vouloir: veux, veux, veut, voulons, voulez, veulent. For the verb pouvoir the Grinch song: peux, peux, peut, peut, pouvons, pouvez, peuvent. And etre is to the tune of Frere Jacques: suis, es, est, est, est, sommes, etes (and we do the gesture for an accent circonflexe ˆ), sont, sont. Nothing amazing; just helps them remember when they get to high school. I just think it’s ironic that the person who wants them to conjugate hasn’t given them an easy way to remember it so they still contact me! Whatever it takes to keep them learning language.