Hi Ben,
It’s the end of the year and I have to say it’s been a good year. I’ve done TPRS the majority of the time and we’ve only used the books once in a great while – usually for cultural stuff and review before the final exam.
I’ve noticed that this year, my students have really been slacking off. Of course, it’s the end of the year and we’ve only got 8 days left (but who’s counting?). Still, those 8 days are full of final exams – I have to give a writing, speaking and multiple choice final all in the last week and a half of school. It’s exhausting for me AND the kids, but it’s a district CRT so I really don’t have a choice.
My issue is this – I am having a very difficult time walking the line between being the understanding teacher who “gets it” that acquisition occurs at different paces for each student and the pushover teacher whose assignments are blown off because the kids know they can always do it later.
My students have had lots of CI this year – lots of reading and listening. Not too much output practice, although they have had about one simple diaglog each month and one writing assignment every 6 weeks or so. Nothing particularly stressful, and I’m always available to help students when they need it. If they want to do a draft and then have me help them, I do. I also have been having them turn in their assignment, then I look at them and see what issue we need to work on as a class, then they fix that one issue in their papers and re-submit them for a higher grade. Lots of times it’s something really easy that the kids just forgot, and once reminded they fix it.
They have also done monthly vocabulary quizzes on the vocabulary the district says we must do. I allow them to retake the test – but I also tell them do not even come to me for a retake until they are sure they know the words and will get either an A or a very high B on the test. It’s a waste of my time and theirs if they only do marginally better on the retake.
So while I’m trying to be understanding and to work with them so that they can learn at their pace, it’s also become clear that they don’t feel any necessity to really put forth much effort in doing assignments right – because they can always come back later and retake them or redo them. They’ve developed the attitude that because I’m not a rigid taskmaster with worksheets and textbooks like their English or math teacher that they don’t really need to bother doing a good job.
I have more failures this year than I have in the entire time I’ve been teaching. It’s not that the kids don’t get it – they are able to understand the stories, and read pretty well. But they’ve decided that the small amount of work I do require of them is just too much. The laziness is horrible this year, I have student who are fully capable of being A students, but because they can’t be bothered to do any work to earn that grade. They are like the student who signs up for Spanish 1-2 as a native speaker and then fails because they don’t take the tests or do any of the assignments.
Is this something that other teachers are noticing in their students? The last couple of years have been amazing for me, I’ve had students who are just wonderful and do a great job. But this year…they’ve all checked out, and they’ve been checked out for at least a month. I can’t help noticing that around the time the last of the high-stakes tests were given is when they tuned out.
My main dilemma is that I do want to allow students who take longer to get it to continue to acquire at their own pace, but at the same time I don’t want them to feel that they have carte blanche to blow off the class because they just don’t want to work. It’s such a fine line and I am looking for ways to walk it in the best way. I have some kids who are just now getting it (including one who didn’t seem at all interested or capable all year, and then BAM! came out with some amazing stuff this past month) and I’m glad I haven’t been making them feel awful all year. But I also have so many who can and should be able to do it – as I KNOW they can because I’ve seen/heard what they can do – but who are just coasting along, perfectly happy with a D or an F, and it makes me sad to see this when I know they could do better.
I’m probably rambling a bit, but I really am interested in knowing what other teachers have done about this issue.
Heather
[ed. response: my own response, Heather, is that students have little sense of discipline and obligation because their world has been repainted to make them think that hard work is not necessary. People say, well that is always how it’s been, but I’m not sure that that is a good thing. We can at least try to organize a society in which kids respect what they are being given in this free democratic society. All the great free access to information now, something recent in our society, has fundamentally changed the role of teacher from source of information to facilitator of contact with that information. Except in languages. You can’t learn a language from the internet – it is a human thing. Nor can you learn it from a book, but we’ve all known that for twenty years now. But, we would probably all agree that kids’ worlds, because of the internet, are changing how they learn and changing their sense of social responsibility. Lack of social skills. When they actually go for jobs, they will not be hired, because they won’t have those skills and they won’t know anything, because adults have only asked them to do schlock (i.e. memorize and call that knowledge), which they know is schlock, and they respond by giving it to their teachers without effort or heart. Then, when they come to a teacher like you who actually asks them to do something real, they don’t know how to respond. The Ds and Fs reflect a social inability. This will all come out later. It will last for many decades until the United States has fallen into deep chaos. What we are doing now with data driven education in schools will lead to our downfall as a nation. Narrative methods don’t work in schools – don’t work in schools – have not been embraced in schools – largely because too many of the kids – 60% or more in some classes – lack the social skills necessary to make them work. Forget the difficulty of learning how to do narrative teaching. The kids run things now. They put a head on a desk to avoid their social responsibility to the larger group and they get away with it. They are smart but bored by the current data driven mushroom cloud, and we who ask them to actually interact with us in class, because that is what language is, get the false impression that we are failing, when really it is the kids who are failing, failing due to the massive failing of them by most of the adults in their lives. Kids’ need social skills, not knowledge. All the knowledge in the world is a click away. They need social skills, not content skills. We teach using social, not content, skills. No wonder it doesn’t work. It’s all content driven now. It’s sad to see input teachers whose kids have learned a ton more than book kids not be recognized for what they have actually done because some end of year test that the book kids have been studying for since August makes them look equal to or better than the narrative kids who have “only” been hearing and reading the language. Is there even a place for narrative teachers in schools? Honestly, in my gut, I don’t feel so. I am certainly worn out from the arguments with book people. Let them have the schools. Our stuff works in weirder places, like businesses where language outcomes, not fake testing outcomes, are required. My thought, Heather, is that we have encouraged the kids to become lazy. They wait anxiously for the end of each day so that they can really learn from their new teachers – the internet. Some don’t even wait, but text away in class. What can we do? Keep doing what we are doing. They need us. We who are pushing narrative methods in this dark world must never forget that what we have perceived as some of our greatest successes as teachers have really been failures, and that some of our greatest perceived failures have really been successes. Some of our darkest hours in class this year have been applauded as they happened by angels, if no one else. It is not the results, but our daily intent with these incredibly tough, hurting kids. I say this every now and again on this blog and here it is again – we all deserve medals. We are all lions, tin men, and scarecrows.