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34 thoughts on “F16s”
Hey Ben,
Thanks for the warning. Even though I sometimes still feel like I’m in enemy territory, or at least flying solo in neutral territory with the gas gauge heading towards empty, I am entering the new year with optimism.
I met with my new principal at the beginning of the week. I had e-mailed her some reading to do about TCI/TPRS so she’d have an idea of how I teach. In our meeting she asked me if many people taught this way. I told her that I had just come from two national conferences worth of people who taught this way, but that I didn’t know many folks in our neighborhood who did. In that conversation, I focused on how isolated I often feel being the only one around. Now, in my Art of Possibility frame of mind, I’m thinking about another, more upbeat reality for our enrollment-seeking independent school: we’re the only elementary school around who teaches language with TCI/TPRS!
My colleagues in other divisions are not yet on board, but some of them are thinking more about what we do and why. Was it here on this blog that somebody recently cited SIL’s guide for New Language Learners? They wrote: “A language is not an academic subject. A language is something that happens between people in flesh and blood. That is where it is. That is what it is. No more. No less. Individuals experience the world individually. That is called perception. Communities experience the world together. That is called language.”
I love that.
-a-
Mind you, I’m writing this now, having had my first school anxiety dream of the season last night. It was about trying to work with the high school department chair on sharing new ideas with colleagues. In my dream, it was not a successful conversation. I woke up totally tense and fuming.
I like this optimistic feeling much better. I’m going to stick with it.
-a-
So–I’m not the only one having school anxiety dreams! In mine, which have been increasing in frequency these last few weeks, my students don’t pay any attention to me at all while I’m trying to engage them in Spanish. It is as if I don’t exist! And school starts in three days.
Warning: long ramble about dreams and teaching. If you choose to read it, you may want to get a cup of coffee first –
This could become a whole new thread or even a category here. Send in your dreams. I mean it. Try it. We can become amateur dream interpreters. Anything that helps us get better at teaching, right?
Dreams are unopened letters from the unconscious mind, according to Carl Jung. If we open them, however, if we make that effort by writing them down or recording them as soon as we wake up, we can see the unconscious mind synch up with the conscious mind in an accountability process that leads to greater consciousness of ourselves, which is what we want.
By becoming aware of dreams in which students refuse to listen to us or in which we stand in front of our classrooms in our underwear, or in which we arrive late to class if at all (I’ve had all of those, we all have if we’ve been in the field more than a few years, even if some of us wouldn’t admit it), then we can move to a greater understanding of what our fears are (not being listened to, doing our jobs badly, being seen as not good enough) and we can embrace them and ask what we can do to make the opposite happen.
We can ask ourselves, “What am I doing as a teacher that brings this fear into my deeper mind that they won’t listen to me?” We can ask, “Do I live with this fear daily?” If the fear of the students not listening to me is unconscious, is it conscious as well?” “How does this fear affect my work in my classroom?”
Those are pretty big questions. The grammar teacher who asks those question has an easy answer, “You are teaching grammar.” But the teacher who has discovered and is willing to stumble through the baby steps and on to greater and greater levels of CI has another set of answers waiting – ones like, “You are speaking to your class in a way that they don’t understand you.” or “You are going way too fast.” or “You are not checking for understanding with every utterance.”
Lori said in another post here this morning that videos didn’t do the trick for her but that practicing the method in her classroom did. That is a mature response to the real professional growth process.
She, we all, need simply to embrace the awkwardness of it all and go for it for the Big Change that it is. But the dream part, those horrible dreams that Anny and lori admit to but that most of us, if not all of us, have, are easier to refuse than to open. We say we forget them but I say that we refuse the letter, we send it back with the postman to wherever it came from.
I would love to know how many of us do this – refuse this magical process of becoming more conscious of our teaching by paying attention to all the information that we are given free of charge from our unconscious minds.
The deeper mind is trying to tell us something in these “teaching fear dreams”. We should listen to it. When the students don’t listen to us in a dream, do we cower in fear from that idea and determine to make them listen to us? Is that a proper reaction to fear, squeezing down on people? Political leaders are doing that all over the world right now. Should teachers do it as well? Does that work?
Leaders of all kinds, teachers included, very often govern by control and oppression. Do you know of any colleagues who do that? They call it data gathering, but it is all about their needs to control. Maybe now that we are talking about our fears here – thanks to Anny and lori – some of can start a dialogue that would help others in this group.
Most of us won’t be able to because we have been taught not to do that, not to depend on others, not to appear weak, not to trust others. We are strong classroom teachers and by George (who is George? King George? Probably. Just another authority figure) we will run our classrooms with authority and our principals will run us with authority and the district superintendents will run our principals with authority and control it all via testing and the world will be safe from the chaos brought by those uncontrollable hormone filled pot smoking kids.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend my life seeking to control kids. It’s too much work. So when I dream that I have lost control of my kids, as I have many times, then why can’t I just take that as a good piece of advice that is saying, “Hey Ben, you may want to relax a little and do things a bit differently. You may want to adopt another mindset about teaching, about reaching your kids, that may work better.”
That, in my opinion, is all that those dreams are saying. They are invitations to change, nay, suggestions to change. That is their function. It’s nothing bad – they are not sending us anything bad, but we have to accept that as true and not live in fear anymore.
I can’t be the kind of teacher who is all-wonderful in the building. I can only be my timid self. I can be myself, be timid, since I am not like those great teachers out there who bless the building with their greatness, but I can learn to live within my timidity and not freak out over my fears.
When we refuse the suggestions to change brought by our fear dreams, and instead get nervous about the coming year and all that we are going to be required to do, and when we buy into the idea that a teacher must control the classroom, be the authority, we die a little to the true potential of our profession.
Teachers age very fast due to the nature of the job. But I say that those dreams are wonderful messages that offer us balance in that we can see what our fears are in the dream and CHANGE WHAT WE DO in our classrooms, thus removing most of the stress. I know that it can be done because I have done it with CI, and so have others.
How? How can we change? We can just be with our kids. I tried that before I had heard about Krashen based instruction but was then totally unable to just be with my kids in the classroom and teach them anything. The method I was using at the time prevented me from becoming human with them. I was trying to bitch slap knowledge into their minds and it only worked with a few kids.
The building I was in, any American school building, was built (and most of them still rest) on a pack of lies, the Big Lie being that teachers can actually teach anyone something.
It is my belief that no one can teach anyone else anything. The learner has to be interested in what is being presented, created. And they have to be in on the creative process. We can invite, but we cannot force learning. All the wonderful pictures in the textbooks that fill our classrooms, those books that even jumped back into jen’s room this week without her even knowing about it, are NOT INTERESTING to the kids.
Using books to teach languages is just so 20th century! And using computers to teach language may not be very 20th century; it may look very 21st century, but it’s not. I’ll tell you what I think it is – bullshit. Using computers, unless they deliver interesting comprehenible input (there are such programs but not many), is bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. There, I feel better.
What IS interesting to kids is life. Their lives. Their interests. In any language. Watch what happens when you talk about them. Watch your fear dreams of teaching kids who won’t pay attention disappear.
Write readings based on stories that THEY created with you and watch everything change. The kids will be interested. The fear dreams will evaporate as you move to a much more conscious relationship with your job. You will stop having those dreams. If you desire to control kids, change professions. Become a juvenile detention officer. Work for the courts. But even that won’t work. The kids won’t listen to you. They are programmed to listen to things that enhance life, and don’t destroy it.
Kids will only listen to you if you drop keys* for them and invite them to pick up the keys and open the doors themselves to what you offer them. We can’t do that with grammar but we can do that with storytelling. So become a storyteller instead of a teacher.
I would bet that Tommy Scott Young and the other storytellers rarely have dreams where they wake up drenched in fear that their kids don’t listen them. When I worked in South Carolina I invited Tommy as part of a Fine Arts Week I produced at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School to tell some stories to our kids.
I met Tommy in the parking lot outside the school gym and walked him toward a gym full of about 200 kids. He remarked, “Hey, that’s a lot of kids in there.” And I apologized that I didn’t make it clear about how big his audience was going to be. He didn’t bat an eyelash.
An hour later, the kids had just spent the time with Tommy in rapt attention the entire time, going with him through time and space to places in the American South that were better than any books could have been for those kids that day.
We may not be able to get to Tommy’s level, because he doesn’t have to teach languages when he tells his stories, although, like Mark Twain, he uses a ton of dialects, but we can get to our own levels.
That’s what those dreams are there for, to get us to our own levels and beyond. Without fear.
Another ramble. I might as well apologize in advance for all rambles this year. It’s one of the reasons I created this space – to learn. I learn by writing, by talking, and thanks to Anny and lori, I am reminded that I can learn by listening to the masterfully crafted letters I am offered almost every day from my deeper mind, lessons which help me become a better teacher by suggesting, in clear if not pleasant terms, that I change.
I should just admit here that I have always felt that teaching is too hard for me, has always been too hard for me, and has always been too full of fear. But if we think of it all as part of what Jung calls the process of individuation, that is, becoming who we really are by working in the world, then we can just get ready for another year of rowing our boats gently down the stream, remembering that life really is but a dream.
*Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/05/27/dropping-keys/
Ben, I’ll meet your ramble. π
When I was an undergraduate many years ago, I had a psychology teacher who talked about dreams. In addition to the Jungian function of dreams as “letters from the unconscious” that express fears and desires, he believed dreams are also the brain’s trash compactor. Sometimes we have to recognize that a dream is just how the brain processes what happened throughout the day and jettisons the junk. I suggest that if we have a dream connected to an attack or antagonistic encounter that day, we just let that dream go along with all the negative emotions connected to it. That isn’t to replace but supplement your excellent discussion on dealing with dreams that express our fear of facing the class – and yes I have had those dreams, too. We don’t go back to school until after Labor Day, so I’m sure mine will come. Those dreams can express so many of our fears: loss of control, feeling unprepared, fear of the unknown, “image”, etc. Opening and unpacking them can help us deal with those issues, but so can recognizing the junk and tossing it. There is no need to keep rehashing, either consciously or unconsciously, the negative comments of colleagues.
You wrote above, What IS interesting to them is life. Their lives. Their interests. In any language. Watch what happens when you talk about them. Watch your fear dreams of teaching kids who wonβt pay attention disappear.
I’ve been doing some thinking about this during my trip, and I think we need to tweak our thinking on it a bit. In the California World Language Standards, they describe the Stages of the Language Learning Continuum and the emphasis that applies to each stage. Stage 1 is “all about me”, then subsequent stages move gradually outward to encompass family, friends, school, then community and nation, then the world. But that describes a 13-year process starting in Kindergarten.
For little kids it really is “all about me”, but I don’t deal with little kids; I deal with teenagers, often on the verge adulthood. Yes, they are interested in themselves and their friends, but they are also interested in the larger world. Some of them are passionate about the environment, the economy, poverty in America, South Sudan and other global issues. Yet, linguistically they are still little kids. I want – and need – to be certain they find a way to express their greater interests and tell those stories as well. That is not a fear-inducing challenge but an energizing challenge. Sometimes I think we as teachers – all of us, both CI/TPRS and grammar based – limit our students because of pre-conceived notions about their interests. I know that I am often surprised by the choices my students make on our virtual trip project. Sure, there are the fun and crazy things like “falling into the Danube” in Vienna, but there are also some very serious things related to their “work at UNO” or their “studies at the Uni”. (For this project they play older versions of themselves.) By giving them freedom to choose, they get a taste of real life through a virtual world.
I’m not a naturally good storyteller in person. People find my writing interesting, but that is different from live performance. That’s why “storyasking” is such a wonderful strategy. At the church I attended while at university and a few years afterward, there was a lady who was a consummate storyteller. She was a Sunday School teacher who could hold her classes of third and fourth graders spellbound. She held the adults in the church spellbound as well whenever she presented in a service. While she was a natural storyteller, she worked hard to hone those skills and just got better and better. We need to work to hone our skills – and I’m glad Ben has created a non-threatening environment for us to do some of that – but at the same time not beat ourselves up if we aren’t perfect or as good as one of the superstars. If the 10,000 hours to mastery concept is valid, then it will take years for any of us to “master” the method. I just did the math: 120 hours per class x 5 classes per day = 600 hours of practice per year. 10,000 Γ· 600 = 16.6+ years to mastery. I know I’m not there yet. The actual amount of time is less than 120 hours per class because of testing, assemblies, time lost to coming and going, “school business”, etc. That doesn’t mean someone with fewer hours is bad, just that mastery takes time on task – and you don’t have to be bad to get better.
You also wrote It is my belief that no one can teach anyone else anything. The learner has to be interested in what is being taught. We can invite, but we cannot force learning. This is so true and expressed in many ways. At the TPRS conference in the Dominican Republic, Susan Gross talked about philosophy of classroom management. She used the adage, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Many teachers use the adage, “Lead the horse to water, and if he doesn’t drink, smack him.” Others use the adage, “Lead the horse to water; if he lowers his head reward him, if he raises his head, smack him.” The only one that works is, “If you want the horse to drink, make him thirsty.” Or as Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it,
βIf you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the seaβ. (BTW, did you know that all of his works become public domain in 2014? Death of the author + 70 years.)
You also wrote, The building I was in, any American school building, was built and rested on a pack of lies, the Big Lie being that teachers can actually teach anyone something. I think that most teachers recognize the Big Lie at some level. That’s why they are constantly looking for new games, strategies, etc. to entice the horse to drink their bitter water. Or they become “deliverers of instructional services” so that they are no longer responsible for the reception by the students. What they fail to do is 1) make the water drinkable and 2) make the horse thirsty. We are trying to do both. If we truly understand the nature of language and the principles of Teaching with Comprehensible Input, making the water drinkable is relatively (important word there relatively) easy. Making the horse thirsty can take a lot of work because of factors that lie entirely outside our control. A horse that’s running for its life isn’t going to stop and take a drink. Our classrooms have to be those places where the horse feels safe enough to be aware of the thirst.
See, Ben, I told you I would match your ramble. Don’t apologize for rambling; we’ll just ramble along together and then be ready to rumble.
Rambling here and rumbling at work. Love it. I also love the math you did. Thus, I will get to mastery of this stuff in five more years. Except that I cheated and only taught CI maybe half the time, overall, since I first tried it in 2000. Oh well. Next life. CI Jedi master.
To address that one point about dreams being junk drawers – so important to say that! If we can’t jettison that unconscious debris it creates junk in our unconscious minds, which goes into our faces. The kids take one look at our faces and see in there the junk of decades of teaching the shitty way, and they turn off their minds. So yeah, let’s empty the recycle bins of our unconscious every night, get some balance, and thereby become happier people (not fake happy, not teaching to the forehead, the real stuff) in our classrooms, trusting in the process.
This business of worrying if we will get caught not knowing what we are doing, hence those dreams discussed above, has its solution in trusting the process of what we do with CI. We jettison the fear and we learn to trust. If we fear that we won’t have the right words, then we just listen to Huck Finn, who said on p. 219 (Bantam) of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
…I went along, not fixing up any particular plan; but just trusting to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come; for I’d noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if I left it alone….
and also Robert you said:
…they are interested in themselves and their friends, but they are also interested in the larger world….
I hope to get there some day with CI. I have never been able to take kids through all four years with CI, and so never enjoyed the experience of being able to have those discussions in the TL that you and Bryce and others are able to have as upper level teachers who have been able to raise your own plants from seedlings, as it were. Oh well. But yours is a point well made about encouraging more general discussions about topics of global interest, and thank you.
While you were gone we decided to make, as one of our top five focus points of the year here, upper level teaching, as many of us are just finding our plants high enough now to make it a thread here. So expect to be bothered with questions about upper level CI instruction. I do have a combined 3/4 class this year, but they did worksheet driven instruction all those years so I will be doing the same lessons with them that I would be doing with a first or second year class in terms of speed of processing language.
Wish me luck with that, by the way. The last and only time I taught kids who had been raised on the book it was a disaster – they wanted the easy A for no effort and that one mind-numbing year with them gave me more bad dreams than I have ever had in my entire career – just around that one class.
They couldn’t believe that I wanted them to actually listen to and communicate with me in French! It blew their minds. They went to college with four years of French and zero knowledge. That was at East High School. I’ll get over that class one day. We all have ’em.
Thanks for the honesty. I don’t feel quite as peculiar now. I appreciate these words in particular:
“I should just admit here that I have always felt that teaching is too hard for me, has always been too hard for me, and has always been too full of fear….I canβt be the kind of teacher who is all-wonderful in the building. I can only be my timid self. I can be myself, be timid, since I am not like those great teachers out there who bless the building with their greatness, but I can learn to live within my timidity and not freak out over my fears.”
And so–I will learn to live within my timidity. My students seem to understand my imperfections and are more forgiving of them than I am myself. It’s OK to admit that I am not going to be successful every day–and to forgive my students for not being successful every day. What a burden imposed perfection can be….
And lori my little non-researched secret but a gut feeling all these years is that I became a teacher bc I had these perfectionistic tendencies (not the good kind of there is even such a thing), not to mention a big bad need for approval. Count on teaching to not be able to deliver that, bc we get:
a. little money
b. unmanageable daily environments (nothing is worse professionally, I feel)
c. lots of insults from higher ups who don’t know shit
d. fear dreams
e. colleagues who darken rooms with their own issues and needs, many of which they used to be able to transfer to kids but can’t anymore bc their foundation is eroding so fast
f. disappearing retirement plans
g. politics from hell
h. etc.
We could make a really long list but let’s don’t. I don’t mean to make a list that cannot possibly help us get psyched up for the year, but I would like to remind us that if we want to be perfect, we may have chosen the wrong profession.
I would like to suggest that this idea that we are not super teachers be added to our list of professional targets this year – to keep it ever in mind. If we can’t learn to forgive ourselves and our students, reflecting what lori said, and if we have to be the best CI teachers in the world, we just join the ranks of those other teachers who may not do CI but still manage to ruin their lives with the feeling of not being good enough, and whipping themselves and their kids into a frenzy about it. That’s not what I want. Not anymore.
We need to remember to work in Katya’s success with the method in Monterrey.
Ironically, chill, I just sent an email to a former student at East High School who got 66 of 70 questions on the level 2 National French Exam only he was in level 1.
That was two years ago. Since then, he has dropped out of school, served a prison sentence, and is now trying to graduate so he can go into the military.
His name is Luigi. Our emails have been about his precociousness in languages and how I know someone – Katya – who has just turned the Defense Language Institute on its head as per Susie’s comments about her in Las Vegas.
This kid is a genius with languages. He is going into the military. I will have to remember to put him in touch with Katya. Don’t let me forget.
Katya was the Russian teacher at the TPRS conference in the Dominican Republic. She is simply amazing. After a day or so of class with her and then hearing that she teaches at the Defense Language Institute, I asked, “So the Defense Language Institute uses TPRS now?” She replied, “Yes, but they don’t know it yet.” Ben, if your former student makes it into a class with Katya, he will have the opportunity to become phenomenal in Russian.
Yes, Katya taught at the first TPRS conference I attended. I still remember how excited I was that I could read a page of transliterated Russian after 3 hours with her leading about 75 of us. I was hooked!
I had my first pre-year school dream last night, and it’s still three weeks before we go back!
Before I tell you the dream, I need to set the stage. This coming year I will have 88 level one students in two sections; that’s 44 students per section if they are divided evenly. It astounds me that anyone at any level thinks effective teaching in any subject can occur with 44 freshmen and sophomores crammed into a classroom. (It’s just another example that school buildings are not conducive to teaching.) I also am concerned about classroom management with that many level 1 students.
So my dream: I am outside, teaching about 200 students, who are seated at picnic tables and benches and spread out. Even though we are outside, there is a wall with a doorway that divides the group in half, so I have to keep going through the doorway to address each half of the group. There are other adults around, but no one is doing anything remotely connected with my class(es). I’m trying to do some PQA with the two groups and get some kind of group dynamic established. Of course, I realize I’m going to be frazzled if I keep this up. Then, Jason Fritze walks by and says, “Why don’t you try . . . ?” (Sorry, I don’t remember the words of wisdom.) I look at him and think, “Of course!”
And then I woke up.
I think I’m going to go with the idea that my subconscious was processing the anxiety I feel with two large classes and recognizing that the help is there. I just need to take advantage of it.
I slays me how much time, energy, money and gurus are spent on trying to “fix” education. We then proceed to overlook one proven key to effective teaching-learning – a low student-teacher ratio….
How can this be?
I also struggle with Blaine’s words constantly in my ear saying that with TPRS classes of 40-50 are not only acceptable they are preferred…. I wonder if anyone has experience where huge classes actually are beneficial and “preferred?”
40 to 50 preferred? I’d rather try to spin plates on the ends of sticks for an hour.
What kind of bullshit is that? 40 to 50 is “preferable”? In my opinion it’s not even acceptable.
“I am outside, teaching about 200 students, who are seated at picnic tables and benches and spread out”
Why did I just picture Socrates and Plato when reading this?
Hi Robert,
Welcome back! It is so nice to have you back! I too am starting to freak out about 1st day of school with the kids in 3 weeks, and I wonder what kind of crazy dream I will have. Jason Fritze was probably suggesting you to pull up some props, sing and dance, while doing a handstand. I saw him in Breckenridge this summer, and I don’t know how any teacher can sustain that level of energy day in and day out. I’ll take whatever he is on!
Robert maybe the dream was set outside bc you want that – a less cramped or cooped up feeling with your kids. Clearly. the wall separating the kids was a suggestion from the unconscious to solve the problem of class size by breaking it into two groups.
Hi Anny,
Yes, that quote was on this blog. I’m the one who posted it. It’s one of my favorite quotes about language. Another one comes from American poet Hart Crane:
βOne must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.β
I experienced that several times this summer. My first week away I was at the TPRS conference in the Dominican Republic. During that week I chose to take the Russian class. We met for about 2.5 hours per day and heard Russian for well above 90% of the time. On Friday, I told a story in Russian. Because I had been drenched in Russian words. the right ones formed themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. One of the conference participants who teaches Russian was in tears of joy because I was effortlessly using “advanced grammar” after such a short time. (I know I’m a fast processor, but this isn’t about me; it’s about the efficacy of the method.)
Later, I was in Spain and consistently found myself uttering the right words when they were needed, even though five minutes earlier my conscious brain couldn’t dredge up the word out of the memory banks. My subconscious had it ready when needed because I had previously been soaked with Spanish words.
In many ways I think the two quotes embody the essence of what TCI is about: communities experiencing the world together and priority of comprehensible input (i.e. use of target language).
I really like your idea of making TCI/TPRS a drawing card for your school. When word gets around the community that students actually acquire the language and can use it to communicate, parents will be interested. No more “I took four years of Spanish, and all I can say is ‘taco’ and ‘burrito’!”
Nice to have you back!
I read this post earlier today and have been thinking about it since. I wish they had elaborated some. This leaves me with an uneasy feeling too.
I have been thinking how for me this method was precisely what enable me to stay in teaching. It was a life jacket that enabled me to not only survive but approach teaching like Bob Patrick – with zeal and passion. I know that TCI has breathed new life into many many teachers.
I am going to assume that they left teaching for other reasons…. I can’t imagine leaving after finding a method that makes teaching young people such a pleasure!
It’s sad. But school climates are so poisonous and some colleagues spew so much poison, it can be too much for some.
I don’t anticipate being another young TPRSer to quit. I should probably learn to fly under the radar and keep my mouth shut, though. Tall order!
The Hart Crane quote is where it’s at for me. Gotta make it into an article. It’s Krashen 101, the Short Version.
I think that teaching, or at least working as a teacher, is one of the most difficult and misunderstood jobs out there today. It is grossly underestimated. And teachers are grossly under-prepared, under-supported and over-taxed (no pun intended, but hey…it is an election year ;o) )
It takes much more energy, focus, concentration, creative ability, instinct, intuition, flexibility and patience than one would think. And all of them at the same time.
It takes many kinds of skills: organization, timing, “people”, public speaking, and more.
It takes knowledge: subject area, pedagogy, political maneuvering, assessment, psychology, physiology, etc.
It takes self-respect and self-discipline to know when to give and when to take and when enough is enough.
It takes faith. Tons of faith. Faith in the process….even when there is little faith in the system.
It takes a sense of wonder, a sense of humor, a sense of self ……..
It requires a moment-by-moment adjustment of where barriers and boundaries are and where an entire group is headed in relation to those lines.
It also requires the ability to be judged and evaluated daily by 20-150+ personalities (depending on your student load) AND THEIR FAMILIES, and your colleagues, and your administrators, and other building employees. Without cracking, without taking it personally and with the ability to change if they point out something that really needs to be improved.
It demands that one constantly stay updated in the field by attending conferences, reading (and purchasing) journals, showing up for “professional development”….and more.
If you teach adolescents, it is a given that mood swings and hormonal adjustments will be happening at the same time but in different directions within each class.
It is assumed that you can make your content-area material more interesting than anything else a student may be doing at that moment. Oh…I mean that every student may be doing at that moment.
It demands that you put state and district-based standards and benchmarks in visible form and somehow connect them to every moment of every activity.
It also now requires enormous amounts of computer data entry and paperwork, in addition to the creation/adaptation of materials and grading.
In many, too many, cases, it also means doing this with less time, more students and on a smaller salary.
It is no wonder that teachers are leaving the profession.
However, despite all of that…
if you are cut out for it,
if you love it,
and you feel successful at it,
and someone will support you,
it is still the best job in the world.
with love,
Laurie
Laurie, that is SO beautiful and SO encouraging!!! π
Robert, I loved that Hart Crane quote and have copied and pasted it into Word so I can somehow make a big poster of it for my room! thank you.
Ben, thank YOU for reminding us to shut the (bleep) up in our teacher rooms, dept meetings, etc. — I am dreading going back this year….for the first time in now 5 years of teaching, I am DREADING going back……last year I was so excited since I “found” TPRS (and SKIP!!!) and had such a life-changing AH-HA event over the summer. But now, remembering the the comments and requests to “prove” my efficacy, I am downright scared. That is why I am so looking forward to your and Bryce’s and Sabrina’s coaching next summer. AND to Skip’s coaching THIS summer, in less than two weeks!!!!
Skip, thank you SO MUCH for offering and being willing to do that for us folks here in Maine!!! Being scared, it makes me lack confidence, and then I falter even more, so I am so happy to be able to get some assistance again before school starts.
I am pretty confident though, that I will not just quit — I really LOVE teaching these kids, and talking in Spanish, and talking about the history of Spain and Latin America — there’s no one else in this area that I can do that with – hahaha!!! But I am also confident that I won’t quit, because I now have a TON of friends here on this PLC to help me through this struggle and never-ending journey of acquiring a language (my Spanish has also greatly improved just in the past year of using TPRS!!! – bc of READING…..thank you Steve Krashen!) But, I will not deny that it is difficult to hold my tongue when what I see I am doing is working, and the others complain that “their” kids “just don’t get it!”. Now I know to just ZIP IT.
Thank you Ben, Robert, Laurie and Skip!!
mb,
I was going to send you this in an e-mail but since your post mentions the coaching session on the 23rd i thought I would share the thoughts i have had on that day…. I am going to send this out to the group to have everyone comment on it regarding their needs/expectations.
Here is what brainstorming has led to so far for our time 9-??? was it 3 or 5?:
1) basic skills, Personalization, contrastive grammar, going slow, comprehension checks
2) Reading strategies
3) first days of school ideas
4) word walls/technology?
5) Peer coaching
What do you think? I think it would be great to have others weigh in on what a “coaching” session could/should look like.
skip
This sounds fantastic! Skip, I just got back yesterday and am only now getting around to emails. I hope it is not too late to register or whatever. I will get back to you via email π
…and skip this morning I prepared the Maine blueberry pancakes you so thoughtfully brought out here to me this summer. They were delicious – they even had a little tin of Maine blueberries and Maine maple syrup from Poland, Maine in there. I mixed the pancake mix in with a little beignet mix from the Cafe du Monde, I will admit. And I drank my coffee out of a Grant Boulanger cup that he brought to Breckenridge for me.
It was a great breakfast and reminded me of the deep links that we all must share to be able to do this work thousands of miles apart from each other through the medium of a machine. So happy this morning. I had my Maine and Minnesota breakfast after a hard bike ride early. Life is good and, in spite of all our fears, WE are going to be good this year in our classrooms. We just are.
And if we get down, which we most certainly will, we can just ask mb to put a little fire into some words for us as she has above. Mind you all, mb has exactly one year of CI under her belt. Just because she got a new boat this summer doesn’t count – she has reason to fear this year.
But she doesn’t. She is a warrior. That’s it. We’re all warriors bc we accept and embrace unavoidable change. We know it’s changing anyway. Why fight it? Just roll with it. mb, skip, jen and even those of us who don’t spell our names in lower case letters, we’re all in it. It’s a good thing. We are freaks, feel our power!
Hey Skip = you had said “3”, but I love your agenda, so “5” is looking even better!!! π
Really — I like what you have outlined for an agenda — I need it ALL! I wasn’t kidding when I said I was scared about this year (yeah, Ben, the boat isn’t helping — I’m enjoying hanging out on it and forgetting about school! π You know it’s bad when I get excited at the Dollar Tree buying cleaning supplies for it!! hahaha)
So, Skip, feel free to email me — I’ll be up on the boat this week, but I’ll be checking email off and on.
mb, keep up the faith! you are so strongly rooted in your passions that despite the toxicity in your dept. (i’m not saying it’s easy by any stretch) you are reaching kids!!! i remember the stories you told me in the airport, and those are the reasons we do this, because we connect with kids. so for what it’s worth, try to remember that by visualizing the particular kids. it might help in the tough moments.
hope to see you on the 23rd π
Thanks Jen! and welcome back!!!! how was the DR???? Will you come on the 23rd? I’m looking forward to seeing you!
Some of you may know Jeff Forney from New Jersey….he just posted this article on Facebook. Applies to this discussion and is a great read: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/10/my_public_school_beat_down/?fb_action_ids=4021187342467&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map={%224021187342467%22%3A10151071595382114}&action_type_map={%224021187342467%22%3A%22og.likes%22}&action_ref_map=[]
Sorry that the url is impossibly long…
with love,
Laurie