Maine

I’m back from Maine. On Thursday, I modeled the various CI activities that I like to do to build up to stories, and then on Friday I modeled an Anne Matava story (“Don’t Drink The Water!” – thank you Elissa!). Anne then did a story in German – so fluid – I think she could teach a story for five hours in a row. Mike Walker couldn’t be there but was able to send a teacher who is new to his school who clearly is a real talent at this – Donna Irish, who also got in on some acting and seems to be a natural to this stuff. And then we ended the conference yesterday with some practice in reading, how to sequence that, etc….
Also on Thursday, two teachers, Peter Nutting in German and Johnna Little in Italian, worked some CI – actually they worked a lot of CI! Peter did a One Word Image and Johnna did some Circling with Cards. (I say circling with cards here because the sports balls is what middle school kids do – they all play sports – but when we work with teachers they do other stuff, so I’m calling it Circling with Cards here – we can use both terms).
In my demo preceeding the work by Peter and Johnna, the group and I co-created Skip sleeping in a big box in an orange train station in Miami. We were just about to figure out who was there in the box with Skip, and wonderful Patty was just about to start dancing around the box, much to the consternation of Skip, when we all had to take a much needed break because we had been doing straight silly CI for over two hours at that point.
Then Marcus from Vermont (a.k.a. L’Empereur Insolent) asked for people who spoke other languages to work/be coached, because he said that trainings in other languages help him better learn/observe the ins and outs of the CI process better than hearing languages he already knew. It was a great idea because it set up, for me, the high point of the workshop – Johnna Little from Boston.
Johnna is fluent in three languages and had met Paul Kirschling in Chile when they both took students down there a few years ago. Paul called and told her to come up to Lewiston. She has been doing TPRS for all of two weeks! But the Italian teaching she did – those moments of work that she said were very scary but she sure could have fooled us – was stunning.
With virtually no experience and in less than an hour, Johnna made us love Italian and yearn for more. First, Johnna is a real teacher, in the truest sense of the word, and that explains some of it. Also, Italian and Johnna are both very demonstrative, animated, vibrant, full of joy. Combining that sense of joy, and a teaching format like TPRS/CI, was a match made in heaven.
This is what happened. Johnna danced the lesson. She danced it. Somebody suggested Mozarella in response to one of her circled questions, and, at the mention of the word mozarella, the thing just took off into a dance.
We talk about music a lot, and I have thought a lot about how to get music actually into my classroom more for real, but I had never even thought that a TPRS class could be danced. I’m talking movement up and down the central aisle, then dancing with full joy over to the board to support some meaning with Point and Pause, stuff like that. Not dancing to show off. Dancing because the language in that setting demanded to be danced.*
The coolest thing was that whenever the CI came to certain particularly energizing Italian words, Johnna did  pirouettes. As I drove home from the airport just now (yeah, Saturday – I missed my connection in Atlanta by 3 minutes last night because the plane was late out of Portland), driving home thinking about the teaching I saw (so wonderful to see Peter moving around between the students and the board and the actor, controlling it all with a sense of fun and big approval of students’ input, going nice and slowly all the while), I kept thinking about how atypical these two days of teaching were.
It wasn’t teaching  in the old sense at all. It wasn’t about “trying to figure out how to do TPRS” (gag me). We didn’t talk so much about teaching. We just had fun. We just used language to have fun. At least that was my own experience – it is what I have taken with me from the past few days.
The danced Italian was teaching in the new sense. It was a metaphor for the kind of work we need to do in the future to really “get” this approach. I saw in what those teachers brought to the table in Maine something different. Johnna and Peter put it all out there, in spite of how nervous that must have been. They went for it. We worked together. I can’t explain it any better than that.
We learned a lot of stuff together. At one point, Therese made a really valuable suggestion about keeping the board neat (the way Linda Lee keeps a board) by using blue masking tape to make columms to make the all-important visual piece work better. Other things were suggested, one about the use of technology – I am waiting for that blog entry to share it here and I’m sorry I can’t remember that teacher’s name but it will help a lot of us who like to mojofy stories using technology.
We all learned other stuff together – we learned about a little pig named Porculus from Jenn, a Latin teacher. He’s a little pig but he’s a good pig and there are already Latin kids in New Hampshire who go to his Facebook page and everything. But I hope that Jenn lets him become a multilingual pig. More on Porculus later.
So it wasn’t so much a workshop about me presenting stuff, but rather one in which all of us just worked together to get better at it. It sure is hard to convey even a small part of what happens in those workshops. I’m sure the people who attended the Japan conference feel the same way – it can’t be put into words. Something just happens. 
I’m really glad I went to Maine. Thanks to Skip and Beth Crosby for their hard work setting it all up. Skip wants to make the Maine TPRS site more active. So let’s do that – let’s start visiting and posting at
http://classjump.com/mainetprs/
And thanks Rebecca, Annemarie, Patty, Katie, Queen Shit, Bethany, Caroline, Laure, Peter, Beth, Nan all the way from Florida, Adam, Liz, Donna, Jenn, Deb, Steve, Johnna, Alice, Stacie, Anne, Kerry, Maureen, Cheryl, Dave, Dan, Therese, Alex the Goat Expert, Joan and Kerry and Marcus (romantic friends of Donna Irish who became a man on Friday and who clearly, like Johnna, has a background in acting), Elissa who was also in LA, and anyone I didn’t include here. I learned a ton. The sense of warmth from y’all was unique in my experience. And, the main thing – I saw something I had never seen before in TPRS instruction. Danced Italian. How cool is that?
*Yes, we know that comprehensible input can be chanted, sung, rhymed, yelled angrily, whispered romantically, etc. We’ve all done that and it adds no insignificant amount of mojo to our lessons. We are not robots and comprehensible input cannot be provided by robots, as Dr. Krashen has specifically stated. But that CI can be danced as well as verbally mojofied is something I am not going to let go of. It is a completely unopened chapter in the book we are all discovering together – this chapter written by Johnna, who wrote it without even being fully aware of dancing the CI since her mind was on the (unfamiliar at first) circling process and so it goes with all great inventions – they happen independently of the conscious analytical process. Thank you Dr. Krashen!