Nothing like a good night’s sleep. This stuff is so complex! It involves not just work on a conscious level but also on an unconscious level so that the method can be fully integrated into our deeper minds. If we are to truly learn this method, we have to be willing to work hard. I was struck by how much I didn’t know, felt awkward with, while being observed by those seven people yesterday, with the videotape rolling, etc. It really helps to have someone like Diana there afterwards to tell me straight up what she saw, what was good and what was bad. Anyway, the good night’s sleep helped me process the following things:
1. Stories really do have a lot of power in terms of grabbing and keeping kids’ interest, as long as the script is good. Anne called the Thorndike story a “workhorse” in an email to me yesterday. But, even this workhorse of a story script served my purpose of demonstrating the method yesterday. The point is that, very often, when PQA lacks mojo, stories can turn the tide and bring the interest.
2. TPR is necessary. I was way off on that for the past six or seven years, when I just got away from it, as I became enamored of the Circling with Sports Balls activity to start the year. We absolutely must have a list of verbs that we TPR exhaustively to start the year and we shouldn’t even start stories until that is done. So, if we do both TPR and Circling with Balls, then our kids will be properly prepared because they know the verbs that keep coming up in the stories and they also know that the teacher likes them and cares about them so it all works together. We need both the verbs and the personalization pieces in place before we start stories (not to mention a good hammering of the rules and phone calls home in those first few weeks).
3. It’s not just that the absenteeism rate is so high in the culture of the school I now teach in, especially in late afternoon classes, but also that those verbs, the way I have it set up now, were buried in my new Word Wall* and so wouldn’t be presented for weeks or months anyway. So, hanging out there with your district coordinator and your new principal who has never seen you teach and a district coach and four teachers – that’s seven people – and realizing in the moment of the class that your kids weren’t ready to do stories was kind of unnerving.
4. A little time out – someone in an email told me that all of this is “so confusing”. My response is that we have to get used to that as we continue to work together. There is no “method” because this work is in a constant state of development and change and is continuously morphing into new forms. It is a way, an outlook, an approach, a path, and not a method. There are no experts and no defined program. The three steps are indispensible and must absolutely be used for stories to work, but we ust learn to use them with a lot of flex and bending.
5. The main thing I learned yesterday, in observing and reflecting on the story (which is no longer Thorndike – I now call it Yoshi) – and this is the big learning from yesterday – is what Diana told me after the story: “Ben, you just went way out of bounds the whole time.” Whoops! Going out of bounds is as bad as going too fast! The kids can’t understand anything in either situation, one because of the speed and two because of all the new sounds. This reflects Laurie’s brilliant comment here today about the Green Screen. As Laurie has said:
…the most “natural” way is to pick a high-frequency phrase ….just one…and build your story around that….
6. A word about actors. Be careful about choice of actors. The kid who volunteered to act yesterday entered my class very late as a student three weeks ago, plays sports, and has had maybe ten classes this year, and in those, he is not the most focused kid in the universe. It didn’t help. Actors have the double responsibility of standing in front of peers in a mature way and paying full attention to the language, which are not easy things to do. If the videotape of yesterday’s class is useable, you can see in it my own style of getting actors up, which is to simply say in English, in that moment when I realize that the story is now rolling and I need an actor: “We need a (boy, dad, girlfriend)…”, etc. and then point to the stool in the front of the room next to me and wait until some kid gets up to play the part we need. Sometimes the wait is awkward but I don’t care, I just wait it out.
So my two big learnings from the story yesterday are:
a. to make sure that the kids have plenty of TPR’d verbs at the ready in their deeper minds before I start stories.
b. to prevent myself from adding too many new words into the story every few minutes. My teacher mind – the one from before – just wants to impart that information and show off but it is all wrong and it’s embarrassing in this videotape. (But I guess I can’t ask the group to put up bad video unless I am willing to do it myself.)
The entire key point in this videotape for me is that we stick to the story scripts and the targeted structures and absolutely avoid introducing anything new to stories that the students don’t already know, as per that recent post “Only The Structures Can Be New”.
* The problem with my new Word Wall of 140 verbs, which is a good representative wall of high frequency vocabulary, is that it doesn’t adequately present enough of the important verbs early enough on, as per Bryce’s recent point that TPRS is largely a verb based method. The verbs should be in the first few columns of words to be learned in the first weeks of school. As it is now, it is a big mix, and some of the most crucial verbs for stories in that current word wall are weeks, or even months, from being TPR’d because they are in the form of that big list. So this is a formal request from the group for a good TPR Word Wall to go with my general Word Wall. We need a good one and I can put what we decide on up on the posters page of this site when we get it. Please be clear, by the way, that the the wrong Word Wall is on my site right now. It is out of date. I will put the one I now use – or the one that we come up with together – on the posters page of this site and we can straighten all this word wall stuff out to be ready for next year.