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Report from the Field – Chris Stoltz
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8 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Chris Stoltz”
This is a major event that only looks like a minor event. It’s major bc it proves what Krashen says and absolutely destroys, flattens, trashes and crushes any argument that a traditional teacher could ever hope to make about how we acquire correct grammar. It’s a powerful argument without getting into all the theory. That’s the best kind of argument.
Even better: Michelle Metcalfe’s teaching partner Bess, at West Van Secondary, asked her 3rd year kids to answer (in writing) this question:
¿Qué problemas hay en el mundo?
One of then wrote– without looking at his textbook (I was there watching this):
“Hay mucha contaminación en nuestro mundo, y es importante limpiarlo.”
This sentence has adjective agreement, pronoun properly placed etc etc. Again– these kids– taught for 3 years using only CI (mostly TPRS)– have NEVER BEEN TAUGHT GRAMMAR. No worksheets. No idiotic verb conjugation exercise that make anyone feel like a fool. No cleverly-disguised grammar-focused games. Just shitloads of comprehensible input and fun stories and music.
Oh, and to the teacher Jennifer has to deal with:
A) shouldn’t teaching– and what is taught– reflect real life? So…
B) When was the last time you met a French–or Swahili, or Spanish– speaker who said to you “uhhh, sorry man, your third-person preterite endings arenused ambiguously”?
C) When was the last time the newspaper you picked up had an editorial using only the present tense and zero direct object pronouns?
D) When your kids were 2, did you worksheet them to make sure they learned their indirect object pronoun positioning? No? You didn’t? Well how the fark could they POSSIBLY have learned that perfectly with a good ole Grammar Grinding?
E) When you signed up for the teaching profession, did you do it because you were psyched to bore people? Did you say to yourself “fark yeah! Teaching for the test!”?
F) “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” — J.M. Keynes
I know, right? This is all so true. How many people do not know a lick of English grammar yet speak the language fluently? Do we interrupt non-natives (unless they have asked us to) and correct them, or are we like –I get what you are communicating?
I have spent this year in HELL because of this confliction. The Spanish 3 teacher thinks that the students “have to know their verb endings.”–I teach Spanish 2– In fact, he spends every Friday on in the lab on Conjuguemos (barf!). I also have a group of kids that do not know me (my first year and hopefully last at this school) and they really gave me shit for my CI ways. I could’t take the emotional stress and I gave them what they wanted sacrificing my moral beliefs as a teacher. I DO NOT believe that there are more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to language teaching. We cannot have this attitude that we need to be okay with everyone’s style. I am sorry, but, as fun as the lessons are, the teacher doing Kagan style coop learning is using TOO much english in order for the kids to learn how to count. I am new to the school so I have kept my mouth shut and put in for a transfer. I cannot continue like this. If the next school is just as bad, at least the parents will not be so bad. They will not complain that I never used the workbook that the students were forced to buy because this is the only school that does this.
The rote memorization may get the test materials taught but there is not a compass for meaning. This is why my friend that took AP Spanish in high school knows more about the grammar than about how to communicate in the language. This may be okay for linguistically oriented people, but that is only 4% (or less) of the population and it is simply no longer acceptable.
LOL! Gee, first of all I want to thank Ben for making my comment a main topic on the forum. Second, Chris, your alphabetized list above is great and especially letter “F”. Third, I’m going to start saying “fark”. Fourth, I don’t think even a good defense like the ones kindly given to me would help sway this particular individual. All language teachers (me included) have the gift of the gab, love to hear themselves talk and are passionate about what they do.
We need more of these awesome examples! I’m totally printing this out and hanging it up by my desk. 🙂
Farkin’ – A!!!!
I am totally putting this list up in my room too! And also adopting the word “fark” as my new fave. I love example C…hahaha only present tense and zero direct object pronouns!!! I sometimes say stuff like that to my kids…”sooo…when your little brother, or the kids you babysit say things like ‘he hitted me’ do you rush over to them and remind them about the irregular past tense? Yah, not so much.”
I don’t mean to rain on parades, but when my kids come up with this perfection (they are after all “babies” in the language) unless we have learned the exact grammatically correct statement, I would say translator, especially if it was homework. This is just my cynicism.