Reuben Vyn will be teaching French 1 at iFLT. Watch this guy. He is our best in DPS. He never uses English in the classroom. His exit scores are off the chart.
There is an IB program at GW, which has at times been ranked as the #1 IB program in the U.S., because, like East High School, GW has rich families zoned into that area. So you would expect Reuben to get those scores.
Except that Reuben doesn’t teach in the GW IB program. He teaches in the regular school, and his students are mostly high poverty, in the regular track at George Washington High School.
The IB white kids’ French scores are very low compared to the mostly Latino and African American kids’ scores. It’s a colossal fail by the IB traditional teachers. They can’t get those bright privileged kids to learn half the French that Reuben’s CI kids learn.
I have heard it said that private schools (or IB public schools) divide communities down social and economic lines. Anyone working in the area of social justice would have to conclude that, based on Reuben’s work, this is not true in at least one American school, and that is due to CI.
I might also mention that while showing off our young CI talent in Denver Public Schools, Joseph Dzietzic who is now at North High School (these are battle zones, people) and who used to be with Reuben at GW, did a study on CI that was quoted by Krashen in a recent iFLT article.
Both Reuben and Joe will be in San Diego. Come hang out with them and definitely watch them teach their morning classes. It’s a better way to learn CI than sitting around listening to lectures.
