I got this email from Jennifer a few days ago. It is pretty interesting:
“Ben, I wanted to thank you again for all your time and energy over the last year and a half, on your blog, and in Denver this summer.
“As you know (and warned me about this summer) this year has been hard as I left Colorado’s welcoming TPRS arms, and went to a completely automated educational system where each day’s lessons are scripted out for me. I fought students who didn’t want to be held accountable for actually learning, and teachers who wanted to keep the same pace, and a district whose pacing guide is tortuously complicated and gives us one day to cover major “topics” like Indirect Object Pronouns. Yes, in one 86 minute class, our students are expected to “master” a topic that most have not yet mastered in their first language. And then, they are expected to regurgitate that information correctly on an exam two months later, all while keeping pace and switching teachers at the semester. [ed. note: In my opinion, what Jennifer is describing here only has the best interests of a very small percentage of students at heart. It contributes to, does not help reduce, the Achievement Gap.]
“The stress of the exam and switching students at the semester finally got to me, and I have switched to my old “eclectic style” of teaching, wherein I have tried to negotiate a compromise between what I believe to be true about language acquisition and what I need to do to keep my students “on pace” with the other classes. I think that if I had them for an entire year, I might have kept fighting… but that’s another story.
“It has been interesting. Some students have thrived under the new structure. They like the rules, the charts, the known elements. Other students have plummeted. [ed. note: Yes, this is the disaster. We lose those kids of a certain nature who just want to play for fun and not suck up and memorize rules, and that loss is huge overall, to the school and to the class and to the child. Those kids are no longer included in the same way.] Oh, I still care about them, and show it in many ways, but they are no longer involved in creating each class. Now, as the semester draws to a close, I am hearing feedback.
“The students are worried about their oral exam. They don’t know how to speak in Spanish. Their comprehensible input has been reduced to nearly nothing in class, as I have tried to explain complex rules they are expected to manipulate on the exam next week. They are not ready to speak on their own, and they have not been hearing anything to know what sounds right.
“Students who fought me hardest through November, who argued with me that I was “wasting time” telling stories, asking questions, giving Free Writes, FVR, etc. are now realizing they did learn a lot. They are apologizing to me for their poor behavior. They are asking me if they can request me for second semester. (They can’t).
“My students with learning disabilities are heart-broken. They have earned high grades in my class and had fun (except for the last month, which they are happy to forgive me for!) They are treated like human beings, not like they are stupid, or like their needs are a special burden to me, their teacher.
“My creative kids, those who just refuse to fit into a box, are horrified at having to go to a more traditional teacher.
“And so, since this is a transition time for me, I am thinking and pondering… and the rest of the year is MINE. Oh, they have to take an exam in April, and one in June… but they don’t go immediately into a new teacher’s class. I don’t have to worry quite as much if I keep to the time frame. So, I’m going to relax. And do what I know is best. No more incomprehensible input for me.”
[ed. note: Jennifer your new district in Maryland certainly isn’t like what we now have in DPS and I am so sorry to hear that. I was thinking, with all of your TPRS training, that you would be able to use it over there on the East Coast. This is a waste of your talents. Those who are running the show there sound so rigidly in control of the curriculum and the instruction that they are strangling the free spirit and magnificent potential of the proficiency guidelines as we have adopted them from ACTFL into Colorado, guidelines which allow, even compel, us to use a more-input based approach. For ease of reference, here are our new Colorado standards, with thanks to Diana Noonan:
http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/UAS/AdoptedAcademicStandards/World_Languages_Standards_Adopted_12.11.09.pdf
Jennifer you mentioned pacing guides. I think that pacing guides, in general, prevent any real instructional freedom and any cogent alignment with the research of Dr. Krashen. I experienced this in Jefferson County before I came to DPS. Now that the new state standards have been adopted, this oppositional pull is going to be played out over the next years in countless districts. At the state level (at least in CO, CA, OR and the other states that have now fully aligned with ACTFL), wording of new standards will have to align with the categories of novice low through intermediate mid (ACTFL), but the people who make decisions about foreign language curriculum at the district and building levels will likely balk at that and stay aligned with the pacing guide approach, especially with current budgetary limitations. The kids who drop out of language study will be the kids who are labeled incapable of going through to the higher levels of study, even though we know perfectly well that they can succeed just fine in the right setting, as proven by the fact that many of them are already fluent in two languages. Rarely will one find a district coordinator like Diana Noonan who will fearlessly align a district like ours in Denver Public Schools with the state and national standards simply because she knows that it is the right thing to do. I asked Diana about the monumental refusal by districts to align with national standards and ACTFL. My question was about who is going to hold the set-in-stone districts accountable to the new national changes. She said, and I think that she was referring to our own district but it applies accross the nation, that it is up to the principals. If a principal is aware that the foreign language teachers in his or her building are not aligning with the new state standards, they can either investigate it and demand that change occur, or just turn away. Many will turn away, because the lack of involvement of principals in foreign language curriculum in general terms nationally is well-known – they just let the department do things that result in nine of ten kids dropping out after the second (required) year and shrug their shoulders. Thankfully, that is not the case at East. But student attrition will only worsen as the new rules governing language requirements locally take hold.The problem at the building level is compounded by the failure of the foreign language people at the district level – thankfully not in DPS – to axe the use of such anti-ACTFL curricular instruments as pacing guides, a failure based in ignorance that language acquisition is different from any other kind of learning. VanPatten, for example, suggests that the brain treats language differently from normal human cognition and therefore should not be studied cognitively, which is how it is typically taught. The pacing guides used in Maryland, that are used in Jefferson County here in CO, and elsewhere around the nation are not best for teaching languages – they are seriously flawed curricular models, but who is saying that, who is talking about that? We cannot let go sight of what we believe is right and best for our kids.