Tina sent this to me. Read it. Maybe share it. It reveals the dark bubble that traditional teachers live in, to the great detriment of so many students:
Seven Sources of the Big Grey Cloud in Downtown Portland:
My administrator warned me that I was in for a fight for CI because our community is sending their kids to the “Harvard of Portland”, Lincoln High School. I was there all day yesterday and I can say that the language classes seemed more to me like Macon Junior College than Harvard…which actually is kind of insulting to good old Macon Junior College, where I spent two quarters in 1995, because these French classes were so uncomfortable that I literally had a hard time staying seated. I wanted to stage a walkout. I have such a hard time seeing kids’ eyes glaze over and all the pain in the room.
The utter lack of energy was striking, as if a grey cloud hung over everybody’s hearts in that room. I literally felt embarrassed for the teachers as they worked so hard to engage kids in discussing pictures of French people from 2006 in the textbook, or in Cornell notes in English, on grammar, or in fill-in-the-blank sentences with verbs to conjugate.
I think I located some of the sources of the grey cloud, besides the latest storm system blowing in off the Pacific:
1. EVERY UTTERANCE in class was about something that someone else (textbook publishing company or teacher) thought up, so the level of creativity with the language was down around nil. Kids were asked to describe pictures in the textbook and respond to the teacher’s questions about the vocab. of the day (school supplies, what fun!) and the language that they used was severely limited to the thematic unit, which was a rather boring one and useless at that.
The lesson was all about going to the stationary store…sigh…I was thinking about this in France this past summer. When Ben and I were in the stationary store in Agen, we could have easily done all the business we needed in English or without talking, except for making copies on different sizes and colors of paper, and even then, if the store wanted our business they would have used gestures and muddled through. Why all the focus on buying stuff, people? Any self-respecting business owner will negotiate meaning with you if she wants to make a sale!
Why not focus on MAKING FRIENDS? Is that not what people want to speak another language for – meeting new people? In order to do that, to learn to make friends, kids need to hear language that describes their interests. No one is interested in getting school supplies. Unless they are Mr. Sketch markers, which I did not even see in France, so what is the point?
2. The teachers insisted on complete sentences and accuracy as they randomly called on kids in first semester Novice classes. I heard both teachers recast or explain the grammar rule the kid was breaking (the explanations were in French I might add, so I wager half the class did not even understand), sometimes even interrupting the poor dears’ complete sentences to do so. Kids rolled with it, cause these are high-achieving kids who do what they are told, but it was sad to see them cringing under the corrections and recasts.
3. Interesting distractions were seen as nuisance, not as an opportunity to have a little fun together. A kid came in super late, a kid sneezed, a kid literally FELL OUT OF HIS DESK, it started to rain incredibly hard…and these were addressed in English, with a feeling of “We gots to get back to our grammar kids! There is a big test on your mastery of these ideas Thursday!” Taking advantage of these moments of levity is a huge advantage of CI.
4. There is SO MUCH PAPERWORK for the poor teachers! Bell-ringers were passed in, which I assume are graded (to keep them motivated!), quizzes were taken, homework was checked, Cornell notes were taken and checked. So many grades to enter. So much work and so much time for so little results…no thank you.
5. The kids felt a heavy weight of dull boredom, like they were munching on a bag of sawdust that would last all year long. They are 25% through the bag of sawdust for this year. Next year, they will start the next textbook (they use the same series for three years) and they will get out their spoons and choke down another year-long bag of sawdust. They MIGHT elect to go back for a third year of this boring diet. But the majority of them will eject.
6. Grammar is painful and should not be administered in large doses, if at all. The kids’ questions revealed the depth of the pain in the room. “Why is that verb plural (tu parles)? It has an s on it.” Then a tedious explanation of the concept of conjugated endings. The teacher was also literally teaching them an INCORRECT and PARTIAL explanation of the rule of the week, the “Pas de” rule. There are important exceptions to this rule. You do not change un, une, or des to de after a negative verb when that verb is être. But you cannot teach that to the kids, it would blow their minds. Just changing them to de after all the other negative verbs is enough of a hassle. Just caring enough to give a rodent’s hiney is enough of a stretch, actually.
6. It was very much centered on the individual and not on the group. The way we teach, working as a group to communicate and create, the way we make our classes special, with inviting voices, cool things to talk about, and funny, meaningful nicknames for the kids, and inside jokes that often come from those weird moments in class (like that kid falling out of his seat, now THAT was hilarious!) …that is group centered. In these classes, the popsicle sticks were pulled one after one, and kids were made to talk, ready or not, in complete sentences, while applying
7. The rule comes first and the examples come afterward, and are in the form of grammar-manipulation activities, not input that shows how the language SOUNDS. The kids thus have very, very little auditory frame of reference to the language’s “sounding right”, and are not building very rich interlanguage. It is more like a mathematics class than a language class. The students learn a formula (when to use pas de or pas d’ for example) and then apply it. I am not all that into circling or targeted input to convey a grammatical structure or set of vocab, but man, I would have crawled across the desert on my hands and knees for just five minutes of old-school circling of some sentences with examples of “pas de” just to fill the kids’ heads with some representation of the language before forcing them to output correctly.