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Report From the Field – Ben Slavic
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12 thoughts on “Report From the Field – Ben Slavic”
Right on! How affirming for you and inspiring for us 🙂
Well deserved validation for so much hard work.
Wonderful to read.
Thanks for posting.
SLAM DUNK!
you know, it may not need saying, but how wonderful to be reminded that you not only “preach it better than most” you “teach it really well too” 🙂
No surprises here but it is always nice to be reminded….
Thanks for all you do amigo
skip
Breathe this in. Nice.
Wait — sorry –but I am curious…. wasn’t she the teacher who wasn’t able to give them any/much auditory skill? 🙂 What’s the backstory?
Of course you should accept the compliment, as the others here have stated!
Leigh Anne she was that teacher. But when the district went from being 5% TPRS to 80% over these past years, slowly she ended up on our side. No matter how old school you are, if you go to enough presentations by Carol Gaab and Jason Fritze and Diana Noonan, you will finally get it. I want to be kind. With each passing week, she sees more and more what all the excitement is. She is pressing on with CI and is getting good at it. She is a truly fine person.
People can change, we can’t change people.
I had a wonderful experience today that I wanted to share. Our “communicative” grammar-organized French teacher has had to become a TPRS Spanish teacher in order to keep her job. Her program had “elite-d” itself out of existence and our admins. have recognized that our Spanish dept.’s strength is the manner of instruction. It was not a choice that she wanted to make. It hasn’t been comfortable. I have not been as patient or understanding as I could be. This is her first year of teaching a class of second year students, attempting CI, in Spanish. She teaches this class during my lunch period and I can hear her several times a week. She has really tried to reuse and reuse and reuse high-frequency structures and vocab.
About a month ago, she came running down the hallway screaming, “It happened! It happened!! We were talking and it was …it was…it was magic!” About a week later, it happened again. Bright moments, but not easily achieved. And then it was as if she took many steps backwards. It’s hard to watch.
Today we were correcting midterms together with our new hire so everyone could be on the same page with the writing rubric. I had the opportunity to correct the papers of a colleague who couldn’t be there today and kept finding these great lines in the kids’ writing. So, I read them out loud so that our new teacher could get a feel for what the other papers were like. Such great sentences. When our ‘convert’ starting reading her papers to us, I had to laugh…her students’ writing sounded JUST LIKE SHE DID when she was speaking to them: the same repeated phrases, etc. She remarked that reading these papers was like listening to her sons where they were little; she could hear herself coming out of their mouths.
Ka=ching!! You could see the pieces falling into place for her. They had acquired what SHE had fed them. She felt not only successful, but connected in an entirely different way to these kids. It was the coolest thing to watch. A woman who formerly would have been very upset with a spelling or conjugation error was marveling over writings of 200 or more words, laughing at their stories, rejoicing in compound sentences using conjunctions and correctly placed direct and indirect object pronouns…without ever having taught them pronouns. It was blowing her mind.
Taught me a serious lesson about patience. This is an individual journey for teachers as well as students. It can’t be rushed. It can’t be forced. It can’t be scripted. But it is beautiful to see.
with love,
Laurie
Great story and a good reminder about how this process is going to unfold in real time with real people in the real world and not because we start yelling about Krashen from the mountain tops. What you describe is exactly the way the change is going to happen. Lots of tough times, ugly conversations, glances filled with mistrust, really hard days, but with those little moments of “Eureka!” in there too. Thank you Laurie!
Congratulations, Ben. What a great tribute.
It was wonderful to read this Ben…we love what we do, but it is gratifying to hear from a COLLEAGUE that it is going well. Sort of the equivalent of a Screen Actors’ Guild Award!! Particularly from a colleague that hasn’t come from an input mindset. It says a great deal about your skill and your passion my friend. It also demonstrates that you are an active part of the “building and connecting” that is happening at DPS. Kudos to all of you on Diana’s team for that. It is no easy feat, especially in a district that size!
hugs and love,
Laurie
Thanks for sharing, Laurie and Ben!