This posted appeared here originally in March of 2008. Here it is again:
Is it possible that TPRS may exist someday in forms that are unrecognizable to those who originally designed it? Could a lack of consensus for what TPRS is eventually lead to its disappearance from the scene? Could it be that the term TPRS will one day convey nothing more than a vague image of a teacher running around a room waving their hands at out of control students?
Over the years what used to be a sleek method has been force fed so much nonsense that, like cows fed growth hormones, TPRS has come to signify another word for confusion, having been sucked into different forms (all conveniently labeled “TPRS”) by the vacuum cleaners called curriculae and the traditional teachers who push them. Teachers are going around saying that they “do TPRS”, but it is usually just a vague reflection of TPRS that only very rarely reflects the original model and that is in most cases nowhere near what Krashen or Blaine proposed originally.
I have been lucky. For the last eight years [ed. note – now twelve] I have been around a form of TPRS that has really made sense to me, when Blaine, Joe, Jason, Susie and Diana Noonan have stood up and championed interesting, meaningful, comprehensible input in a way that made my heart want to learn how to teach THAT WAY.
There was a time that I could say that I felt like I was riding in a 737 jetliner with a lot of really neat people in it for a while, cruising through the clouds in the magnificent skies of real acquisition, with Blaine and Susie up front, in firm control of the plane, Krashen navigating, me sitting back, amazed by the wonderful yet freakish fact that I was effortlessly understanding Jason Fritze, who was up there spinning a story in his inimitable way, expanding one of Blaine’s extended readings, and all I had to do was listen and marvel at his style, and at how much I was learning, without even being aware of it.
I was aware that on the ground there were a bunch of people in school districts gazing up at the plaine with weird looks of consternation on their faces, and, in order to get our attention, did the remarkable thing of taking a bunch of rocket launchers and launching books at the plaine from the ground.
Each time a book hit the plaine, a dent occurred, and Susie looked at Blaine and Blaine looked at Susie and Susie said, “What the hell is that?” and they kept the plaine flying, but and get ready for a long ass run on sentence it kept getting more book dents on the fuselage, and soon the plaine was almost unrecognizable, the once-freshly painted letters TPRS on the side of the fuselage and on the wings having started to fade, looking older and less recognizable with the book dents, and each book that hit then fell to the ground and it began raining books on America’s fine children, and some kids got hit and knocked out, and the frequent posts from Blaine on the listserve, and Susie as well, the ones that kept me going through the muck and mire of learning the method, became fewer and fewer, as people began instead on the list to talk about other stuff, and newer people, not as skilled in the method, started taking over the list, and the plaine started to lose altitude, and a bunch of hot air balloons went up in its place, each one different, each one with little bespectacled French-looking scholars going up in them, twirling their mustaches, each balloon with TPRS on its side in big clear letters, for all to see, but loaded with ballast in the form of books (more books to fall from the sky later!) and as the plaine began to land, trying not to keep its massive wings from ripping apart any of the balloons, because Blaine really does what is best for teachers, I knew that we in TPRS had come to a crossroads, a changing, a diffusion of the original thing, and so I told Blaine and Susie and Krashen thanks for the ride, it was by far and away the best of my career, and I told Jason he was the one who turned the key for me, and I thanked Joe and Susie and Dale and Bryce and Lynette and Laurie and Diana and all the others for the trip to Oz, and I told them I had to go back to Kansas now, and that it was alright and not to worry, because I had had that ride in the original TPRS plane, and that my life would never be the same, mainly because of Susie’s great, fantastic, uncompromising leadership, and that now the film of my life as a foreign language educator would always be in color, and that my very real prayers when I was asking for help in South Carolina before coming to Colorado had thankfully been finally met, and that, if the vision of TPRS that I had was not the same as that of the new people, who wanted to create their own versions because of the need to blend it into the other stuff in their professional lives, who was I to judge that, and I began to fall back on one thing professionally, and that was an energy I had never known in teaching, an energy that made me want to run across the school parking lot to start my classes in the morning I kid you not, those kids whom I had finally learned to reach, and who would, at the beginning of class, “start in” on stories with an energy to learn that I had never seen and am not likely to see again, nor are they, because they are headed to a local high school, where my National French Contest champions of whom I am so proud will go to quit their relationship with French, and never get to the AP level, because, well, you know why, and who knows what will happen with the Blaine Plaine and the Susie Shuttle and the other plaines in the TPRS fleet? I guess it depends on the few hundred people on board right now. Can they defend the method against the two thousand book launchers?