Lynette St. George (Lang) is the WL dep’t chair at Valor Christian High in Highlands Ranch, CO (south suburban Denver). Valor is our own Diane Neubauer’s new school as well. (Like Sabrina, Lynette and Diane are both from Chicago.) So today I rode my bike over there and spent a very nice hour and a half with their language faculty, at Lynette’s invitation. Valor, by the way, for any football fans in our group, is to my knowledge the only private school in the country to ever win a 5A state football championship, last year.
So I got three big takeaways from our meeting:
1. This is from Holly Venegas, who compared the process of acquiring a language as an unconscious one to breathing. Do we think about our breathing? Do we talk about it? Doesn’t it just get done? If we interfere with it, doesn’t it just mess it up? Likewise, when we hear a language, we are wired to understand without even thinking about it as long as we don’t interfere with it. I thought it was a great comparison.
2. This second takeaway is from Diane, who suggested that a good way to deal with the smart ass kids who think that they already know it, so why should they pay attention, would be to ask them on the spot to produce what they know. Of course they can’t, and we know why but they don’t, so we seize on that little fact to tell them that maybe they don’t really know it and they should listen more and if they listen enough and get enough reps, then maybe they can produce it. We tell them that at that point, when they can produce it, we will tell them that then they can go read a magazine or do whatever they want in your class, but until they are outputting the language, they probably need to continue to do what we ask and continue to pay attention and not sneer because they’ve heard it only ten times and they “know” it, as opposed to the rest of the students in the class, who are slower than the smart asses. A nice takeaway from Diane, who will teach her colleagues some Chinese next week!
3. The third takeaway came up at the end of our session, and it was about the A word – AP. I had made the point that children are under so much pressure to memorize in all of their classes but no matter how much language they memorize, no matter how many high level vocabulary lists the commit to memory for the AP exam, they don’t have enough hours to show any kind of contextual mastery of the language. There just isn’t enough time, when they have around 400 hours in high school and then need well over 10,000. So we all agreed that Valor’s administration needs to be re-educated on that point as fast as possible, and to be informed that the real reason the AP exams exist, against all the research, is really to make money for their shareholders, at the expense of children, which in my opinion is a crime based in ignorance. In this way, Valor is unique, because each of the nine teachers there committed to make this glaring insult to children and to their mental health an issue in their school. To be clear, for all but a few very kids, the AP exam is not something that makes sense in terms of the research. It is not good for high school children. Yes, with TPRS, kids can get a score of 3 on the exam with limited effort and no homework, but such a program has to be CI from the start, and most schools aren’t there yet. But there is a huge difference between a 3 and a 4 or 5 on the AP exam, and the cost of driving a group of kids hard to get the 4 or 5, even in a CI based program over four years of using CI, is not worth it. It changes the tenor, the focus, the quality of the class, and therefore impacts instruction in a negative way.