My first two classes with Karen Rowan observing (yikes!) stank. But good kinds of stinkers, because I learned from them. I was trying to be too cool, too adept at a way of teaching I am still learning. I was pushing things. I wasn’t entirely listening to my students, I was thinking about demonstrating skills and how I looked – so I wasn’t in the moment (skill #22) with the kids.
Plus, two or three kids were just so down. I asked them after class and they told me stuff I didn’t want to hear about their home lives. One kid who is usually very good in class “went out” on us, and I will ask, not force, her to apologize to the class tomorrow for not doing her 50%. She CAN do it and chose not to today. But, anyway, I always learn from all my classes. Here are some possible reasons for some of the stank:
1. I tried to cram in too many skills into the story.
2. I was working with a script that Anne called a home run with her Hogs in Maine, but those Hogs are world famous fourth year kids and mine were first year kids. I really have to remember to ask Anne, in her next two books, to indicate best levels for each story. So, yes, the story was too hard for my kids.
3. I went too fast. Big surprise.
4. I didn’t do a very good job of getting reps through the three paragraphs/locations. Anne always provides those parallel paragraphs in her stories, and I kind of ignored them and went all over the place as I tend to do. The three locations have tremendous power in keeping the new structures up front in the minds of the kids during the story. I remember back when I was learning how to do TPRS, and how I always benefitted from and noticed the power of following the three locations. It’s not that hard, I just space out and go off in different locations, and haven’t been able to corral that tendency.
Among those things, the two big ones were #1 and #3. Really, #1. There has to be some real letting go of the skill set thing in TPRS. You can’t do all of those things right and wonderful all the time, because, in the wanting, is a closing off to what actually IS HAPPENING in the story, instead of what you WANT THERE TO BE (kind of like life, maybe?).
I remind myself when I get into that tricky “I have to do the skills right and get them all in to the story” mode is to ask myself why I am doing TPRS in the first place, not how I am doing it – I am trying to make myself clear to my kids in French, not do all the TPRS skills, which are there just to guide me along and not dominate everything.
In terms of SLOW – I remember the old days on the list serve when we used to all come together in the evening and process stuff about our stories that day and it always seemed to come down to that word SLOW. Omg is that a big word in TPRS. Whenever kids don’t understand, there is that word, and it’s usually about 90% of the problem. I learned that again today.
I am again struck with how daunting it is to deliver good and interesting CI to teenagers. Esteban McMillian, my department chair, and I were talking about how important personalized hooks are. Esteban was saying how in one class he just had the kids provide lines in English from their i-pods and just circling those lines and seeing if they go into stories. I need to try that. The importance of the hook can’t be overstated.
One thing is that when we don’t get the hook, or the story isn’t a home run, many of us, being perfectionists (why we became teachers?), can really beat ourselves up, telling ourselves inside that we suck and all of that.
So much internal criticism in this deal. But we are heroes. We are breaking a cycle of mediocrity and much less in teaching languages and we are reaching for the stars and they are a long way off but our vision – CI – is there. We won when we got out of bed even on those days that our CI sucked.
Karen, by the way, was very encouraging in that she was trying so hard to just learn French. In a note after class she said, “Thank you for teaching me French!” as opposed to “Thanks for the nice verb conjugations!” or “Thanks for speaking French 5% of the time today – I didn’t really understand it but it was nice to hear the language a little!” or “Thanks for letting me get an A on a test that really checked for very little else than how much I can memorize!”
Karen modeled an observational posture that was not judging at all, but one of just trying to learn. It was a good experience. At least the CI was fairly clear and many of the kids showed me some real French talent in their retells and in their acting. We always learn more about CI by doing CI, no matter what happens. It is the amount of hours of CI that makes all the difference. It is when we don’t do CI that we resemble those whom we will soon replace, when the tipping point is reached.