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Report from the Field – Annemarie Orth
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8 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Annemarie Orth”
Thank you Annemarie. You know that this is where my deepest heart of hearts lies in education, with kids like that, and so you thought of me and sent this report and I am grateful.
The other kids are probably going to make it just fine. This one, we can’t know. So for you to be as a teacher a role model for her (she didn’t just come for the book, she came for you), to get some of your energy which she most likely isn’t getting anywhere else in her young life.
Or you could have become a stock broker….
I don’t know about other language teachers, but this is why I stay in the game. God bless that kid is all I can say.
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
I think Ben is right when he says that this student came not so much for the book but to connect with you. Hearing about how you’ve been able to reach and interest that student is very inspiring. Thanks Annemarie.
It also reminds me of how the English or Language Arts classes in our schools lack easy, compelling books for our students. It’s frustrating.
Annemarie this goes in my book, ok?
OF COURSE!
Another thing that I missed on the first read about this girl. She said she enjoyed the book because it was effortless to read.
This is such a big piece that we always seem to ignore. If it’s effortless for the child it exactly aligns with how the research says acquisition happens. But so many CI teachers just ignore that piece, preferring to make the kids “work” in various ways that don’t align with the research. I mean, Krashen didn’t say that effortlessness is a cool thing that we should think about building into our instruction. He said it’s an essential condition.
This student is dear to me. She has spoken out before about how she loves this class because we do “activities.” She’s the kind of student who just blurts out stuff (in English-I really don’t mind, because it’s always super positive.) She struggles with staying in other classes and often tries to leave more than once in mine so I finally I said “YOLO”-You Only Leave Once. And now when she needs to leave she just asks, “Yolo?” Cracks me up.
Many of our English language learner teachers are struggling with trying to catch up their language learners in English too fast. I’ve been helping out an ELL teacher at one of the high schools. She teaches the newest arrivals-most students are from Angola, some from Central America.
After she attended the TCI New England Conference she was so jazzed about TCI that she asked me to come in and “do a story.” OMG it was the best day of my life, doing storytelling in English. “So and so was on the roof of her apartment building dancing with a fat cat and her mom yelled for her.” I did a brief circling with balls and then a One word image with this one student. The students were super engaged. So engaged that this teacher has changed the way she is teaching them English. She told me she feels like she’s being a rebel:) She tells me how main stream teachers aren’t able to make content comprehensible for even native speakers English
Annemarie said:
…many of our English language learner teachers are struggling with trying to catch up their language learners in English too fast….
If we could make it clear to them that this is a fact – trying to teach more and faster than is possible according to the research – that applies widely in the ELL world, it would help awaken the ELL teachers, who are currently deep in slumber and ignorance.
I once got a meeting with the newly hired head of all 2000 full and part time ELL teachers in Denver Public Schools. She rebuffed me and told me how proud she was of the new books she had just ordered for the teachers. There is such a common ground between us and ELL, but a big wall remains between us. The big wall is their inability to be open to new ideas, and to stop giving mere lip service to Krashen’s ideas. I was reading a book about teaching ELL once, years ago and can’t remember the name, but it purported to cover all the ground and yet Krashen was mentioned about eight times in one paragraph at a time – hardly mentioned at all. ELL seems to be all about making things in the research work for their own currently limited book-based vision, not necessarily the facts about how ppl acquire languages.
Love what Ben Fisher said about choice of ELL materials being determined by skin color. Why am I not surprised? And let’s not clutch pearls and say it’s not true. It’s true.
I don’t mind them teaching as they wish; it is their right. But not at the expense of children.