Tina wrote this to me in an email this morning about kids who have not been trained from the beginning with TPRS. I find it quite poignant:
…poor lil things. Those high school Spanish kids[I taught] broke my heart. They were beyond repair after two-three years of “regular” Spanish. I had to quit [ed. note: Tina now works in a middle school in Portland]. I am no longer doing that gig. It was soul-sucking. Not the kids per se, but the Spanish students they had BECOME. Plus, just seeing the worksheets piled up in numerical, dated sequence on that teacher’s desk was a real lead balloon mentally.