Jen

I got this from Jen, who started doing CI only just this past March:
On the heart-warming side, I got great honest and insightful feedback from my kids after our 8-week dip into the waters of TPRS/CI. Mostly I see that I just barely dipped my toe into a mere trickle of the class V rapids and I cannot wait to go for the wild ride. This quarter was my first “authentically me” quarter of my whole teaching career, and boy did it feel good to go into class each day knowing that we were there to enjoy each other and the language. It was so liberating not to feel compelled to BS. For the most part, the kids really “got it.” I even had 3 boys (yes, boys!) come up to me, unsollicited, and tell me how much they felt they learned this quarter: “On the test, I could just read the story and not even think about it and I totally understood it.” And “word on the street” was that my finals were fun. And they were, because I didn’t quite know how to do a final so I just did more CI.
Here are a few gems from my kids:
“You don’t realize that you’re learning when you are.”  (from a 7th grader)
“Songs help me to remember stuff.” (several people wrote this)
“I got more experience with new words, and since I read them I can learn at my own pace.” (9th grader re: reading)
“It made me look at whole chunks instead of single words.”  (9th grader who is super type-A and concrete/literal and very wound up…re:reading)
“It covers multiple ways of learning instead of just a textbook because everyone learns differently.” (same student as above chunk comment…This awareness is HUGE for her)
“This gave me an opportunity to try and figure stuff out instead of memorizing.” (8th grader re: reading)
“We didn’t have a ton of stress with little homework but we learned a lot of the language ” (8th grader re: overall experience)
“When I’m constantly listening to Spanish I start thinking in Spanish.” (senior, 4th year student re:constant input in class)
“I feel like for these few weeks I learned as much as I did the whole first semester.” (same senior as above re: overall exp.)
AND**** omg omg omg omg….from a “barometer student” the wisdom of all wisdom:
“Don’t get stressed or think about it too much. It’s not memorization! Just kinda abosorb it. (9th grade barometer re: advice for next year students)
“I think it’s good because it’s enough time to accomplish something but not so much to stress you out so when you’re doing it you can take time to enjoy what you’re doing. And that’s how I learn it. (9th grade barometer re; input homework 30min./week)
“I like this a lot because if ever you were in a situation where you needed to speak French it wouldn’t be in a workbook. It would be more natural like the stuff we did.”  (9th grade barometer re: input homework)
“I liked it! It isn’t like much I’ve ever done before, but it made me feel like the language wasn’t ‘just a class’. I was adding more to my character.”  (same kid…ok, this made me weep 🙂