Ben,
After reading David Maust’s post I was inspired to give my own report from the field. I am teaching two sections of Spanish B (2nd year of middle school) one section of Latin A and one of Latin B. The circling with balls has been great for simplifying my life these past two weeks of classes as I haven’t had to worry about extensive lesson plans, but rather simply focus on what structures I can incorporate given my student’s interests. The hardest thing for me has bee switching between Spanish, which I am fluent in, to Latin, which despite 20 years of experiences does not exactly dance off my tongue. This is my first year using TPRS extensively.
First and foremost my kids are loving class and I am also going home from school each day exhausted but inspired. The most successful part of class thus far has been the use of the class timer to mark how long we can stay in TL. Students are fighting for the honor of being the timer at the beginning of class. I have been putting each class’ record up on the board and they are quite serious about beating the other classes (I had to remind one class that we are all on the same team when they began to heckle and berate the unfortunate student who had blurted out English!). Surprisingly enough the Latin B class, where I feel MUCH less confident in TL has the current record. I am changing the rules on the fly, however, to allow brief English questions after the clarification signal and brief English explanations from me. The students just pause the clock and start again when we switch back.
I have to say that there is absolutely no chit-chat or side conversations going on at all. Your advice to go over the rules in English and start hammering down on them in the first week has been extremely effective. I taught my Latin B class last year without TPRS and they were a great bunch of kids but wild and nearly out of control. The difference this year could not be more marked. They do not chat, let alone leave their seats, and their level and consistency of participation is much higher. Now comes the hard part of maintaining the consistency in the discipline.
The biggest challenge that I have had is getting enough reps in on the structures that we are working on. I explained to the kids that the goal was 70 reps in a class so that they can really get the language without having to think about it. However, I kept only getting 30-40 per class according to my structure counters. Honestly, it has been quite frustrating. Finally, yesterday I decided to tell my classes that this kind of class is new for me as well and that I am not doing a great job because I am not giving them the reps that they need. I asked for their help in getting up to the 70 that we need, and I decided to make this a competition as well and put the record number of reps up for the class on the board. In the first Spanish class I was a bit more successful, hitting 40-50 reps talking about the kid who sleeps 39 million hours in math class – the kids ate up my tearful questions of whether or not they slept in my class as well. And in the second class, everyone erupted in cheers as we reached over 80 reps with each structure, including 86 for “he is afraid”. It was a great moment for the class. I still have my doubts whether or not I am capable of getting to that level consistently, especially in Latin.
Regarding some of the other conversations about the use of different tenses, I have just started incorporating some of this in my class in the PQA and it seems to have been pretty successful. I had a student put down that he is afraid of spiders, but I didn’t want to use that so I said he isn’t afraid of anything now, but he used to be afraid of spiders. We circled both parts of it ad infinitum (see 86 reps above), and the kids were doing a great job of distinguishing. Another girl said in her survey that she wanted a jetpack so I circled “she is going to fly on a jet pack¨ and circled that with the kids, asking where they were going to fly to, when, etc… Honestly, it felt like a natural language, not anything forced just to teach them a tense, and I think that was the reason that it worked. I went to a workshop this summer with Scott Benedict and he taught us to use the past tense while telling the story to the class and the present while talking to the actors. I would like to try that, although I can see how confusing it could be.
Finally, I am on a quest to personally contact each of my parents (via email) before our back to school night on Sep.11 with either a positive update about their kid (all the better if I can throw in personal detail that we PQA’d) or a friendly kick in the butt. This is a much easier task for me as I only have 60 students, but it is still something that I have never attempted before. The more parent support I have the better, as I am “out there” on an island in my department.
best,
Dave