Jeff has a question connected to the When Attacked thread so I’ll add it here, with a few responses from us:
Jeff’s question:
A few of the kids I have say that I am going to slow for them. They are of course the best of the best.
Do you have suggestions to keep them engaged? These are the same students whose parents are upset with me. Upset kid equals upset parents.
Jeff
David gets right to the best response, without wasting any words:
I would say, to start, give them some class jobs.
John Piazza offers this:
I have a spectrum of 4%ers in my classes. On one extreme are those who understand what I am doing, know and that it benefits them and their classmates, and learn to relax and enjoy the process and/or work ahead on their own; and on the other extreme there are those who think they learn by memorizing and therefore think they have “acquired” a word the first time they read it, and their boredom leads to rudeness and distraction which is especially ugly because there is some serious ego entitlement behind it (and their parents are probably contributing to this). What’s sad is that they can’t relax and enjoy the truly human interactions going on in Latin, and most likely their parents are to blame for this as well.
I would try to bring them all to the better end of that spectrum. Appeal to their intelligence, and let them know that you recognize that they get it quickly, but that you are the expert on how people learn language, and that it still helps them to hear the reps. Also, ask them to take more risks using the language actively in class, that you expect them to have the maturity and the initiative to go further with the language IN the language. Also, put them to work with jobs. Have them make lists, not only of vocab, but of conjugations, declensions and tenses that you use during class. Then you can start to throw them curveballs–you’re sheltering vocab, so everyone understands, but hit them with a subjunctive or a supine, with a wink to your 4%er, saying with your eyes: “between you and me, try to figure that one out, punk.” I have a genius kid like this in my class, and he’s allowed to have Orberg’s LL out on his lap (an 8th grader, at cap. 20 on his own, using Neumann’s college companion), and I often check in with him with a grammatical whisper, and sometimes, I’ll even ask him for an ending if I’m using some form that I’m rusty on. e.g. this week, Moses smacked the Grinch with the Red Sea, and I forget whether it’s mare or mari rubro. So I turned to Alex and said, can you check that out for me? and he did. The point is, there are ways to work with these kids, if you can get them to respect your intelligence as a fellow 4%er.
However, don’t let them intimidate you. As with Ben’s recent experience with the three students who put their heads down on the desks simultaneously as a sign of protest, disdain and flat out rudeness (and ignorance of how rude this is), these kids need to be reminded that being born with an analytical brain is not a pass to be a jerk (at least in your class), and jGR will take them down.
Or, if you are not going to get anywhere with them for a variety of reasons, from parent and administrative resistance, to exhaustion on your part, you could set up a little group of them to do bookwork, prep for the NLE/AP, or have them writing stories on their own, or something on the computers, etc, as long as they agree to participate positively in class when you ask them to. I think in some cases, especially when you have students who have learned the old way and are on the way out of your program and on to more of the old school crap, it is not a sign of failure to make these kinds of compromises. Ultimately, you should do whatever will least prevent you from doing good CI in your classroom with the majority of your students who will benefit from it.
I hope this helps.
John
Here is my submission:
Jeff, I had to deal with my three Fellas Who Feel Smart this week. Their message to me, since all three are 4%ers, was that I go too slowly for them. What I did with that made me feel great. I gave them the Amsco book as a reference, gave them a stack of old level 1 French exams from thousands of years ago, and gave them that to chew on in class. They seemed very happy to at last be doing some real work. Of course, when the inevitable question came if that new work could count instead of taking the story quiz and the two reading tests scheduled for today and tomorrow, I acted surprised that they would even ask such a question. “Of course not!” I said, “This extra work will also be graded, in fact. Of course you will be responsible for everything we do in class also!”
We all have at least one or two of these kids who, had they any social skills at all, would be superstars. These so called 4%ers aren’t really even highly intelligent, they only think that because of a seven or eight year run of success in school due to their ability to memorize and think in concrete sequential terms only. They think that their parents are always right, and if a parent knocks a teacher at home – and it happens all the time – for whatever reason based on whatever information, accurate or not, the kids believes all of it and carry it to school with them each day.
These kids just don’t want to play. They don’t want to exist in the messy human mix of attempting to negotiate meaning during PQA and stories in a lighthearted way. They don’t want it to be true that we learn languages by listening to them. They want to take the language and flay it and pigeonhole it. They are the wrong kind of 4%er – the bullshit kind. They want to perform autopsies on the language and are especially happy when give meat that has been freshly killed each day by the grammar teachers whom they admire so much.
In the end, these 4%ers will only master aspects of the language that don’t count much. Their idea of mastery is where they beat the language to death and make it a testing trophy, because that’s what they do – they collect trophies for having memorized stuff and they call that learning. No wonder such kids are such a pain in the butt to teach using CI – it’s too human for them, they can’t be the classroom winner with CI. They would have to love and enjoy their classmates. How odd we must be to them and their parents!
