We can stop with the freaky focus on the stories. It’s over. It’s not about the story. It’s about the reps on a limited number of structures.
It would be about unlimited reps on unlimited structures – that’s how it was designed – but we don’t have the kids 24/7 and I firmly believe that the LAD was originally designed for 24/7. Since we have a fraction of that time – 1/42nd – of a week, we need to focus on a limited number of structures per week.
And get a shitload of reps on them. A shitload. Who cares about the story? It’s overrated. What is NOT overrated in importance is the reps we get in Step 1 and the reading that results from them in Step 3.
So three weeks ago we decided that sBI was a new concept that must infuse our teaching, and some of us turned our attention to the importance of getting thousands and not hundreds of reps, or at least trying to do that.
Now, I am adding to that another point, a kind of twin point that illustrates and defends sBI. We need to see that we will get more bang for our buck by focusing more on Step 1, and we need to see that the story can remove our focus from the reps we need. It shouldn’t, but it does because so many of us mess up the story with English and other bullshit.
I am not explaining this very clearly, but it is a breakthrough point for me, and James if you make a template for the Three Steps (I have Blaine’s permission) we need to make a note at the bottom of how Step 2 is unimportant as long as we make it clear that it is my opinion.
Let me try to explain it this way – Step 3 is not just a nice finish to the three step process of TPRS. It is the goal.
Just imagine that we are reading an author. We extract the best passages and largely skip over anything we haven’t gotten enough reps on for the passage to be intelligible to our students. It’s all about Step 1 reps setting up Step 3 reading.
If it’s a Blaine or Carol novel, we learn to focus on parts of the book, not all of it. If it’s a song, we frontload (some use the term backwards plan) the reps by creating PQA from every structure in the song in order, spinning PQA, working our way doing PQA with the structures that occur through the song, then playing the song, without any story. Somehow it feels right to advocate less focus on the story.
The story has hurt the confidence of so many teachers! How cool to use sBI to get massive reps on structures and then just play the song, which is really the reading only in the form of sound.
I know I said that I would only allow discussion on Form and Function here for awhile but am allowing this into the queue. Maybe some will resonate with it. Sorry it’s confusing. It is huge to me. Let the obsession with Step 2 go. It has screwed up enough teachers, and made them lose confidence. All we need is reps and then reading.
Now back to the Form and Function discussion. Sorry if your article is stuck in the queue. But we will have discipline in the fall. We will have discipline in the fall. We will.