I got this from a colleague who needs our help. It’s a great question about being exhausted that ties into the simplicity thread (actually a category) that has shown up here recently:
I am the French teacher at a small high school. I teach 8th grade [through] French 3/4….We use Blaine Ray’s Look I’m Really Talking. I use Look I Can Talk and Look I Can Talk More respectively for the F1 and F2 classes. I’ve been to three of Susie Gross’s workshops and one of Von Ray’s. I’ve read Blaine’s Green Bible and I’ve read both your books, TPRS in a Year! and PQA in a Wink!, as well as your conference handouts. I’ve been working with TPRS for about seven years, realizing that it is the best way to teach language. This year, I am trying the Monday and Wednesday storytelling days, with Tuesday/Thursday reserved for reading and dictation. I also implemented the 3 notebook plan of CI, Quizzes, and English speaking infractions and that seems to be going well. Fridays are readings from novels and tests. I can see a big difference in my classes in terms of wanting to learn and being involved.
The problem is that I am exhausted and I feel that I must not be managing something right. On Monday and Wednesday for homework I have them write the words/phrases that we are learning, plus the definitions, 10x each for practice in writing. I also try to write new stories based on how the story line developed each Monday and Wednesday night, for the readings on Tuesday/Thursday. I have 3 different levels with 3 story lines and different sets of vocabulary words.
Do you have any suggestions? How do I make my schedule more efficient?
My thoughts are these:
1. The schedule of forcing yourself to do two stories and two readings a week (which Blaine was telling us to do five years ago) is no longer done by most people. It is too much. We have learned in the past five years that it is almost impossible to get more than one story in per week. I have suggested a new schedule (“Weekly Schedule New 2011”) – find it in categories on this page. I have been doing a single story since last Wednesday (part of it is on video here) and, today after five days of CI, we have only done the PQA and are not even finished with the first location of the story, let alone done any reading. So, my first thought is that you are packing too much into your week.
2. Many of my colleagues kind of agreed over the summer to chuck the notebooks this year. They cause a lot of extra work and the writing – especially the writing that you outlined above – doesn’t really help except at the upper levels.
3. I say that assigning homework is nuts. The whole thing is that your email makes me realize that the old ways of doing things, using notebooks and assigning homework, only throw a wrench into TPRS. They are not necessary, have no pedagogical value, and just gum up the daily working and natural flow of the method, which is very very simple and elegant if left to its own devices.
4. This method is exhausting not in and of itself, but because it doesn’t fit well in schools. It is like making a butterfly fly around in soot. So the combination of the old and the new, one so clunky and one so sleek, is going to be exhausting for anyone who is trying to fly with the method. I am tired of talking to administrators about how TPRS can’t be evaluated with the current assessment instruments they have. In a way, therefore, your fatigue is not really avoidable as long as you have to give grades and deal with kids who are jerks and negative colleagues and bosses who don’t get it. Sometimes I wonder if we are going to lose this patient, honestly, when many of us just throw our hands up in the air and walk out of the buildings and leaving the teaching of languages to those teachers with whom we are all too familiar. But that would mean giving up on the kids and we can’t do that. It’s not an option.
Others please chime in.