A great bio from Leah in the great state of Tennessee:
Hi there, Ben! I hope you are well. Thank you for all your hard work on the blog! I’m only just starting to see how beneficial it can be. Here is my bio:
I work at Springfield High School in Springfield, TN. It’s about 45 minutes north of Nashville. I teach Spanish. My primary focus is teaching levels I and II, but have, by popular student-demand, taught level III. I’m here because in 2004, I took a French class taught by Dr. Shelley Thomas at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) where she was using TPR. I had innocently enough signed up for the class just to get a basic idea of the French language. Little did I know…
It always impressed me how well I had learned the vocabulary from that class and I still remember many of the words to this day. Fast forward 7 years…
During my first year teaching in 2010, Shelley came to the county where I work to give a one-day professional development about TPR and TPRS. In that moment, everything clicked. I remembered how well TPR had worked for me and I knew that this was the way that I would help end the annoying adage I hear time and time again from adults I meet in all parts of my life, “I took x years of y and I don’t remember anything.” Every time I hear it, I can’t help but think: what a massive waste of time for the students and for the teacher. All the planning and thought (or at least we hope) that teachers put into their lessons for the information to be lost, many times from one vocab quiz to the next. I knew then that if I am going to work hard on my lessons, the results might as well be getting stored in my students’ long-term memory. Since 2010, I have attended two of Shelley’s Summer Institutes through the Center for Accelerated Acquisition, gone to the National TPRS Conference in Las Vegas and will be attended in Dallas as well, and I am currently enrolled in an Arabic class using the TPRS method hosted by Shelley at MTSU. To this day, I have attempted 5 stories and have only felt good about 2. I use TPR much more often, but I’m not in a TPRS friendly-environment, so I don’t get to practice as much as I would like. However, I know that one day I will be able to teach my classes with a bit more freedom, so I keep plugging along, trying to carve out some time as best I can to practice, working toward my master plan of teaching ALL my students Spanish and creating a legacy of adults who DO remember the language from their Spanish class.
Leah