I’m reposting this. I feel it is going to be an important thread here this year. I will follow this with a related post tomorrow. In it, Alisa asks a few questions that would make for some good group discussion.
Last year at the American Embassy School in New Delhi I spoke with my principal at our end of year conference. During the conversation, I found myself struggling – after 38 years of teaching! – to articulate and define my work as a language teacher. The principal had observed and approved all year, at one point even commenting after a class, “That went deep to trust!” I remember that sentence because it told me that the particular home run story we did that day reached this person deeply. the kids were on fire with creativity and engagement, and I felt really good to hear that from a principal, instead of the usual suggestions about how I could do better. BUT the principal in our formal discussions seemed to have a quizzical look on her face, because I couldn’t actually EXPLAIN right there in our meeting exactly what I had done in the story. I mean, it’s kind of hard to actually explain it in a school setting, right? In schools everything is based in mind, and what we do is based in mind/heart. I guess I could have said, “Well, the way I did that was to open up my heart to the kids and have fun and just goof around according to a way of doing stories that those very kids helped me invent, because life is short and the kids aren’t having much fun in school, so yeah…”. But that probably was a little too loosey goosey for a formal meeting about the serious business of education, so I didn’t say that. Even after all those great observations all year, I still felt small, small like Tina said she felt when she had to deal with explaining what she does in her classes to her principal last week. (I might add here that, for those following what Tina went through last week in her building, in the light of what we all know about explaining this work to dense administrators, Tina’s victory – her ability to back down the attacking dogs and even go on the offensive – takes on an even greater significance.) So anyway I wrote the principal this response last May, to try to get through to her what it is we do with CI:
Why, since I understand what I am doing in a deep way, can’t I explain it to you in the context of such a simple thing as an end of year conversation?
You kept squirming around in your chair trying to get a “read” on me but couldn’t, which frustrated me as well! To be thus exposed is unsettling to a teacher who has thought about his craft 24/7 for 38 years in a row!
As I said at the end of our conversation, it seemed to me that we had just been in a wrestling match that ended in a draw. Wouldn’t it instead have been nice to end our conversation in victory and both smile and shake hands and congratulate each other on our dedication to the profession?
Clearly, the fact that we cannot communicate about a simple fact as how I plan my teaching, and how I execute my lessons, speaks to the level of division that currently exists in our profession. If we can’t communicate on such a simple thing as what my curriculum is and how it works, then what is to be done?
I don’t know how it works. I only know that it is elegant and graceful and that the kids love it, as you have seen in my classroom. I just speak in French to them and it works!
That is actually the key to the whole problem! When things are fine and beautiful and good, how can we explain them? We can analyze ugly things all day, but with things of beauty like a wonderful story we can’t explain it. We can’t explain awe.
But I hold that the reason my classes are good is precisely because I can’t explain why.
At least three times yesterday you asked, in clear frustration, “Well, Ben, how do you plan your instruction and bring your instruction along in their thinking to the next level so that you can track their learning and make a plan?”.
The answer is out of reach. I don’t know. Maybe the research will help us with it.
Noam Chomsky talks about a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which is like a sealed black box in the deeper mind which, out of reach of any thinking at all, in a part of the mind that is completely and totally unreachable by the thinking part.
In this widely accepted model the conscious mind hears the language but it is too fast for it to process, so it wisely hands the input off to the hard drive from the cluttered desk top, so to speak. So in TPRS when we tell a story the student is not aware of the language streaming into the deeper mind, all that comprehensible input that can only be handled by the big supercomputers in the basement.
The language goes in big chunks holistically into the LAD supercomputers and then at night the LAD processes it by parsing out each word – each word – and some words are accepted into the growing language system and some are not.
The LAD thus organizes everything it heard in the target language that day in ways that I nor anybody could explain to you in a meeting like we had yesterday but we do know that when enough language is in the computers, just like with any properly set up computer program, output (speech) starts to happen and nobody knows how it happened. But do we know how the computer works on which I am writing? I don’t. It’s beyond me.
Isn’t that how it happens with small children? Nobody hears a word out of them and then one day suddenly, at a different time for each child depending on the kind of processors they are running, the kid starts speaking as if by magic, without any instruction in the language whatsoever.
So in that sense there is no identifiable curriculum, just the spoken language.
In one pathetic effort yesterday I told you (or the AP French teacher Mr. Slavic that I was for 25 years told you) that there are eleven verb tenses but I only really use five or six for lower level kids and then I bring in the more complex last five or six later in upper levels. That’s not even true. I was just trying to make it sound like a plan.
But the fact is that in the first month of a level 1 class I use most of those tenses and the kids have no trouble understanding me because they are not even focused on the verb tense but on the meaning of what I am saying.
So the answer to your question, “Ben how do you plan to bring them along in their thinking?” is that I don’t and that is why I am successful. I hand the responsibility of teaching over to the “big boys in the basement” who are built for it. My job is easy.
In my former life my AP self had it all planned out lesson by lesson. You would have loved me then, with a passing rate of 65% with privileged white kids in just four years as I took them through from 9th grade to 12th like a coxswain on a crew boat all the way to the (truly complex) pluperfect subjunctive in a series of mind boggling lectures that only one or two children could even understand.
But there was a downside to that all those years. My “academic French” (that is the euphemism given by elitist teachers) caused most of my students to drop out of my program somewhere along the way. Oops!
So I hope I am explaining it, shining a bit of light on why I can’t give you an answer to the question, “Ben, how do you plan what you teach? How do you plan their thinking and “bring their thinking along”.)
To repeat. I don’t know. It’s beyond me. I just speak French to them in a way that they can understand it.
The most respected researcher of them all, Dr. Stephen Krashen, says, just like Chomsky, that the language acquisition process is off limits and out of bounds so why are we even talking about it? We can talk about how to teach a storytelling class, but we can’t talk about how the kids learn the language in one.
Children learn languages because they want to know what happens. That’s all I got.
Now do you want to talk about assessment? We in TPRS are still in the dark on that. We are learning more though. It’s finally happening.
Basically, if curriculum and instruction and assessment all align, we are good. But as I said I am just learning what that even means as we speak.
I do know that I haven’t given a test in 11 weeks (don’t tell the principal – oh you ARE the principal) and my kids are learning a TON which anyone can see by all the French flying out of their mouths during class. But I don’t know how to assess (don’t tell the curriculum directors in the Office of Learning who in the case of languages need to rename it the Office of Acquisition because until they stop thinking that a language can be LEARNED CONSCIOUSLY vs. ACQUIRED UNCONSCIOUSLY they will always feel compelled to scowl at me when they see me on campus as they have this year which is just childish.
And that my kids are happy and loving the class is a side benefit. If all my sixth graders stay at AES until their 8th grade year and don’t move to other countries, I can tell you that you won’t have five 8th graders in “advanced” 8th grade French but 30. (Trust me it’s not advanced. Those grammar trained kids know less French and write worse than my sixth grade “beginners”.)
Yep, no tests in 11 weeks and yet the kids are LEARNING!
Beth some things cannot be explained. I do apologize. But I will never be able to answer your question, “Ben, how are you bringing your students along in their thinking?” Beth, I don’t know. Please don’t shoot the messenger.
P.S. I’m sorry I can’t provide you with a solid curriculum. It’s because every year I have new students, and they, not any list of words, are my curriculum.