I got this yesterday from a blog member:
I’m going into my 2nd year teaching, but it almost feels like my first because last year was very traditional and textbook based but this year I am jumping into TPRS after going to a couple of workshops and reading like a maniac about TPRS. School starts Wednesday, the 24th and I am scared to death and freaking out about the school year starting.
My response: Congratulations. That last sentence, in a way, speaks volumes about your honesty with yourself about this new journey you are about to embark on. My own first day was today. I made a Big Circle. One class had 40 kids. I had the kids say their name and to either tell the truth or lie (most lied – I successfully taught them right there in the first minutes of this class to lie to me – yea!) and make up something that they like to do. During that time I would very occasionally change into French and circle stuff (“Vanessa eats sharks, class!”), using English then to explain my rules (posters page of this site), and tell them that in this class there is no homework, no big tests, only frequent easy little quizzes on stuff we do in class so “you have to come to class for an A or a B”, no notebooks, no books, etc. We had fun. It took the whole period to go around that circle and we never finished. Most teachers know this activity – it is where one kid starts with “I’m Andrew and I ride a Harley” (in English) and the kid to Andrew’s left has to say who Andrew is and what he does and then does the same and the kids to Andrew’s right in the circle are hating it because they have to describe what 40 people’s names are and what they do. The Big Circle:
1. changes the focus from you to them and gets them looking at each other instead of you the entire period, so that they can get that out of the way.
2. calls roll.
3. personalizes your classroom from the first day by giving them their first identity of the year in your class.
4. teaches them that they have no books, notebooks or homework and that they can succeed because their teacher is going to walk the walk on the research for real and not do outdated shit from the past century on them.
6. teaches them that lying and furnishing cute answers in this class is important.
7. makes things fun.
8. teaches them the rules (on those few occasions when you start circling new information just to show how the class will work all year).
9. Since they are standing in a big circle, friends will stand together and start talking in little side conversations. Then, when they are sitting at polar opposite sides of the room in the very next class, they, your potential trouble makers get it real clear that you aren’t going to let them talk to each other in class. I think that was Nathan’s idea – to let them sit together right away as a way to find out who the jerks who like to pair up and try to ruin your class with those devastating little side conversations that if you allow you are a fool. Make no mistake about it if you are a new teacher – those kids are not talking to say anything to each other. They are doing that to see if you will let them do it. (You can’t let them do that in a TPRS class and the only time you can teach them that is now.) So, cleverly, you let them do it that the first day. But only to out them so that, on the second day, when you stick them so far apart it hurts, the rest of the class sees that you mean it about rule #2 that one person speaks and the others listen, and, those kids thus outed on the first day of the year, when, again, messages about discipline are either delivered or they never will be delivered, and that they will never as much as see each other for the rest of the year, I think this is a run on sentence.
10. gives you a chance to give the first job of “kid who calls roll in class” (I look up GPA’s before class and pick a high GPA kid for this job), which frees you to walk around and encourage kids to speak up and all those little things that you need to do for the real shy ones to feel comfortable, to be given special supportive attention by you so that they know that they are important to you, while the whole thing is going on.
11. explain your grading policy.
12. show them that the class is going to be all about them and not about some kids in Paris named Pierre and Marie who are sitting having breakfast using words that, in the last century, messed their grades up. (How can your students like Pierre and Marie when they don’t exist and when the croissants and forms of coffee and all that junk on the table are going to mess up their grades?).
I could go on but the point is , I hope, clear – this Big Circle version of first day of class, done almost entirely in English, is a good way to start your program of comprehensible input out on a positive footing.