Kate sends us her bio. She is part of that awesome group of leaders up in Maine:
Hi Ben et al,
My name is Kate Legere and I teach French to grades 3-12 at Islesboro Central School. Islesboro is a small, non-bridged island in Maine. I’ve been teaching 18 years in 4 different districts in this state, and I have taught French for 14 of those years (long story, maybe for another day). I learned French at home, the Bangor School Department and the University of Maine – I think I am a 4%er.
As soon as I began teaching French I used TPR and found it effective, but after teaching a number of physical commands and classroom words, get up, open the door, show me the pencil sharpener, I would move away from it. I had a book, by Asher, I think, that had some pretty good stuff in it, but I couldn’t figure out how to get my kids to the point where they could carry out the commands. Over the years I have worked really hard creating and organizing visuals, finding cool manipulatives, gathering costumes and props, making up games, dialogues and all that. It’s not awful, kids like it, some of it actually sticks (not as much as I would hope) and it burned me out. I think about all that I used to do and I just get tired. Really really tired. My fatigue in trying to be awesome while using traditional methods with grades K-12 made me not want to go to work.
And, more than once I have allowed myself to go off-topic, out of TL, to discuss movies, sports, school events, current events, etc. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
Blah blah blah. Well anyway. I had dismissed TPRS because I didn’t know what it was. Until recently I thought it stood for Total Physical Response Storytelling. Which sounded like something I could not do, gesture every word while telling a story? Are you kidding me? I looked at LICT and again thought, I just don’t think my kids will go for this story about a kid who throws some girls cat on the ground, making her sad.
So I thought TPRS was a cult to which I didn’t belong. All these years I would avoid conference sessions or trainings with TPRS in the title. Then last spring at my state’s language teacher conference, I went to a session called something like,” How to Stay in Target Language 90% of the Time,” put on by Skip and some other Maine TPRS rockstars. Note that TPRS was not in the title.
This is where I started to get it. I started researching and piloting some of what I saw of CI in my own classes. Seemed to work well so I did more research. Over the summer I joined your PLC, as well as got your teaching videos and a bunch of other stuff. Attending training is a challenge for me – I live on an island and I have kids and a husband who works away from home a lot of the time, so the blog and the videos have been absolutely essential.
This year, I am using TPRS with all seven of my classes, from grade 3 to grade 12, and even the oldest, traditionally taught kids are going for it. I started using stories almost right away with French II and up. I use Matava and Tripp scripts, they work LIKE A MAGIC CHARM and each story seems to get better than the last. With the true novices I use the CWB and questionnaires. I do use Raconte-moi with the 3rd and 4th graders, which helps to keep the focus -I only see them once a week so there isn’t much time to train them.
I really do have a new lease on life by changing over to TPRS. I use ideas I see on the blog and classtime is filled with French, I can still enjoy talking to the kids, only in French because we are making up stories. A French II student who guessed ‘faire des achats’ means to make something out of cats became the star of a story and had the kids and me crying with laughter, all in French. The different classes are bragging to each other about how hard they made me laugh. I’m lucky to work in a very small, friendly school with a climate that would amaze others.
I’m so grateful that I now have a method worthy of my students that doesn’t make me want to go to bed and never get up. For the past several years, when folks would ask, “Are you ready for school?” in August, I would always say, “No, I want to run away and join the circus.” Well, I HAVE joined the circus, and it is better than I expected.
Kate