Yesterday was the last day for students after 35 years of teaching. Really 34.5 because I was half time this year, and how nice that is. I earned it after those 34 quite difficult full time years.
It’s nice to be able to get up, have a cup of coffee, go for a bike ride, hang out, talk with you guys, and show up at Lincoln High School at 11:30 on my bike with very little cares except doing good CI. I get to avoid all the regular school bullshit.
I’m going to interview Annick on video today and put it up here so you can get to know her. She is a spectacular CI teacher and few know her. She will be at iFLT but not in Las Vegas, as she goes to Taiwan that week.
I would like to interview on video a lot of our DPS TCI studs and studettes. Tomorrow our group meets with Diana after school to process what we all did with our Professional Development Units this year. Denver Public Schools pays $1000 for a successful PDU by a teacher and, since Diana decides if they pass, all WL teachers in the district – all 100 of them – pretty much have to research and talk about CI if they want the money. Most just watch and comment on the videos on SchoolTube that some of us made last year at this link:
http://www.schooltube.com/channel/dpsworldlanguages/
Maybe I can video that group meeting – it is more a social occasion – so you can meet our Denver TCI group. Honestly, the young ones are frighteningly good. They have taken it to a new level bc they don’t have all the baggage we old ones have, trying to pry out the barbed wire of traditional teaching from our skin while learning something new.
I’m talking about people like Reuben Vyn and a few others whose scores on the district test are so high that it kind of blows people’s minds. They take regular urban kids with limited backgrounds, especially in reading, and just blow the roof off of the tests.
Another one is Kathryn Kuypers. And Joe Dzietzic. He is the one with the green tattoo sleeves up and down his arms. And Jesse Sandschaper, a big cowboy looking kind of guy from Oklahoma. I want you to meet our DPS young rock stars. Actually if you hit that link above and search some of their names – I think I spelled them right here – you can see them teaching using CI.
Also I forgot Mark Mallaney, maybe the best of all and a bona fide master of SLOW. And Paul Kirschling and Annick Chen and Nina Barber. Watch ’em all.