Matt sent a nice bio:
I teach both Chinese and ESL, and am presently teaching at Fei Tian Academy of the Arts—a small, private, performing arts school in NY.
This is my first year teaching ESL in a while (and at this position), after teaching full-on TPRS Chinese before this year and enjoying some wonderful results. I’m forever sold on TPRS & CI. Students literally would cheer when I arrived to start class last year. Bizarrely enough, they actually looked forward to assessments (or “successments,” as we called them). Their acquisition amazed me; we were seeing 100 word timed-writes in nearly-perfect Chinese by mid-year. And this, with me stumbling along, still learning the methods… But alas, the long commute was just too draining.
Anyway, the shift this year has been challenging in that my now predominantly Asian students have in most cases been reared on grammar lessons and vocab lists for years—or as long as a decade, sometimes—before they get to me, and aren’t by nature extroverted. I’ve been indebted to the insights and perspectives here in the PLC this fall as I’ve labored to figure out new approaches to delivering compelling CI.
I anticipate being a more active member of the community in the months ahead; I’ve just inherited a new, younger group of students that are far more open/amenable to TPRS & PQA, and will be able to (hooray!) use the methods more fully once again. I had to focus largely, instead, on acquisition-through-reading and CI-based activities this past fall with my older students. We were still able to see some neat things happen, however. A number of my kids matched or surpassed, in their first five months, the levels of others at the school who’d been studying for 2 to 4 years. The two others in my dept are similarly sold on TPRS now, and the administration is excited about what’s happening. It’s neat to see.
I’m delighted to be part of the community here, and humbled to be in the company of such committed teachers.