Erik sent me a longer version and a shorter version of his bio. I chose to put the longer one here. I just love hearing the different stories!
I was born and raised and am still living in San Francisco, California. In middle school, I decided I wanted to learn French because I liked the sound of the r’s in Perrier and derrière. I took French all through high school (got off on the grammar, but only managed B+ grades) and ended up majoring it in college when pre-med turned out to be a rat race with a finish line (being a doctor) that I wasn’t after for the right reasons.
I spent two years in France. The first one was my junior year abroad in Grenoble, a great little town in the Alps. The second came after college when my dreams of a jet-setting life as a flight attendant were dashed on the rocks of the recession of the early nineties. I wasn’t ready to settle into a career and I wanted to spend more time in France so I got a job with the only American company over there that I was qualified to work for: Disney. I got to live in Paris by day and bus corn cobs and rib bones to the plonge (dish washing area) of the Chuck Wagon restaurant at the Hotel Cheyenne at night. I also had to teach a few French colleagues how to pronounce h’s so they could greet guests with a real “Howdy” instead of an “Audi.” Over those two years in France, I finally acquired the French language whose basic grammar rules I had mastered in school.
I came back to the States and took the Praxis (subject matter competency test) in both French and Math (my best subject in high school and one I had an outside chance of finding a job teaching) and went off to get a CA teaching credential and Master’s of Ed. I went through the credential program as a math teacher and, after the program was up, got a job as such at Capuchino High School, the public high school about 12 miles south of S.F. where I did my student teaching.
I was teaching IMP, the Integrated Mathematics Program, which was a radical, progressive approach to math teaching that got more girls and minorities to take higher levels of mathematics and all students to actually think mathematically rather than just try to remember the correct algorithm for a given problem. Of course, it wasn’t fabulous for timed, standardized tests, but we had more students continuing through years 3 and 4 of math and they scored at similar levels as students learning traditional math. Sound familiar?
One year later, the overburdened French teacher gladly handed over the reins to the two French classes (French 1: 32 students, French 2/3 combined: 16/8 students). She had had it with 4 preps (Spanish 1) and combined classes and actually taught 5 sections of Spanish 1 the next year! Can you say “Groundhog Day?” I, having had no training in teaching a language, simply taught from the book as I had learned in high school and muddled through the first couple of years. I learned a lot more French grammar and vocab just doing that, but with no middle school feeder program, I knew there was no way I would ever be expected to get kids to A.P.
Cut to six years later. My program had grown to 5 sections, but I was starting to get burned out on the multiple preps. On top of that, we were becoming an International Baccalaureate school. I finagled a way to have a veteran teacher come in and take over the upper levels so that I could have just the two first year French classes and 3 geometry classes. Two preps, are you kidding me? I was over the moon! First time with less than four since my first year of teaching. Non-Spanish teachers aren’t going to be blown away by those numbers, but there are math and English teachers who wig out if they don’t have 2 preps. It’s just another world.
I had heard murmurs about TPRS and seen little paper wolf/fox creatures on sticks at various conferences over the years, but I never dipped my toe in the water. As I was getting ready for this luxurious two-prep year, I decided, for some reason, to try out a TPRS conference in early August. The presenter was Susan Gross. You can guess the rest. I was hooked from the get-go. The whole approach seemed so logical. What sense does it make to learn the grammar of a language first and THEN learn how to understand and speak it? I dropped all books, workbooks and ancillaries and taught out of Blaine’s books (got a grant for ‘em) that year.
The French program has grown to six and even seven sections at times. Since I’ve gotten turned on to Ben’s blog by Diane Grieman, I’m slowly moving away from Blaine’s stories to some of Anne Matava’s and my own. My I.B. seniors pass the test at a rate of 80% or so and I haven’t taught math for about 5 years. I don’t want to go back to that department again. It has reverted back to traditional methods and the pressure on them to get yearly and even quarterly test scores out of the kids is horrendous.
I’ve been working on maintaining 90% French in my classes, but I do drop into English more than I should. My teaching style is energetic and fun-loving and thus I do have difficulties at times with class discipline and going SLOW enough. The biggest factor in my teaching right now, however, is that I have two young boys at home and that is where my real focus is. But I’m doing my best and looking forward to improving every year as I come out of the tunnel of early parenthood.