I like to scribble down thoughts that occur to me in class. I just call a time out, and write things down. Yesterday was one of the truly insightful days of my teaching life as I worked with a few Matava stories, and I learned so much by teaching the kids yesterday.
If you are having a rough go of it with TPRS/CI here in the tough January days – and who isn’t – you may want to just have a talk in which you tell the kids how few teachers there are doing this, that you don’t want to teach them grammar, and that you need their help. I do that. It is something I have never regretted. It is like they are my consultants in this work. We are working together to solve the problem of how to teach CI.
In class, I’ll get an idea. I’ll stop class, call a time out, scribble the new idea down, and try to get it here on the blog eventually. Some scribblings get lost or I can’t read them later, but some make it here, and I expand on them as I did below. Why do I write so much? I learn by writing. It is my way. This blog is more of a journal for me than anything else – it always has been.
There are two French 3 senior girls whom I ask questions about how they are learning right in the middle of class. They are so dialed in! They know what is working and what is not working and they tell me. During the time outs we sometimes take a few minutes while the class rests and we brainstorm about the idea that I am trying to scribble down. The biggest problem, of course, is my use of English. I suck at that.
Yesterday they helped me with what is happening in their minds about pop up grammar. I think that cultivating a spirit of asking a few kids how they are doing, using two or three minutes of class while the other kids have a brain break, every now and again, can be useful. Over the years doing this, I have learned that kids like to help (kids like to help!) and feel as if they are part of the change and part of the growth talked about in the PLC – they know all about the blog and this way of teaching and they are very happy and proud to be a part of it. It doesn’t hurt that I am a good propagandist.
So here are some of the not too organized thoughts I scribbled down during my classes yesterday, in no particular order. I have expanded on each scribbling. Some of what is below, my growth from yesterday, may mean something, some may not. Some of the ideas may apply only to me, or maybe some people in the group may resonate with some of them:
Trust the Flow
We MUST talk about them, but not because the method says so. We have to WANT to talk about them. We talk about them because we want to. We don’t teach to their foreheads, we teach to their eyes. We WANT to get to know them, to ask questions that have an outrageous feel to them like this repetition of a structure we worked on last Friday and stayed with during the entire class yesterday because it is so hard in French:
Ramiro wanted to know when Jose was going to get his hair cut. He found out that Jose was going to get his hair cut on Monday. Class, when will Jose get his haircut? That’s right, class, Thursday! Ramiro found out that Jose would get his hair cut on Thursday. etc.
Quite frankly, if I don’t have those guys sitting there in my class to talk to and to talk about, nobody in the room is going to acquire the sound of a challenging reflexive verb in three tenses. They won’t care. But since I gave twenty minutes of circling to “to get a haircut”, they got good reps, although nowhere near enough for acquisition.
Make it about them. If “to get a haircut” is not one of the targets, but comes up, go there, get the reps, then get back to the story, but only when the difficult haircut structure has been really heavily circled. The original structures will always be there for us to return to. Some of the best classes will have like 16 words in them for a half hour at a time. Then the kids can really feel good about their ability to focus. I may go in tomorrow and do another entire class on that one structure. It would only help. I don’t have enough time to teach the entire language anyway.
This is true narrow and deep teaching, without a thought for the stuff I am not teaching. Why does that make sense? Because in four years I have about 500 hours available to me and they need far more than 10,000 hours. So who’s exhibiting insane behavior when they try to teach the entire language to a group of teenage electronic hormone cases, many of whom don’t even care, in 500 hours?
We must always TRUST that the discussion will GO SOMEWHERE INTERESTING and we need to be ready to drop everything – the targeted structures for that day – at least temporarily if there is a party happening close by inside a new structure like the one that came up re: when Jose was going to get a haircut.
Value of Stories
The best way to success in this work is through stories. That is because in stories we have tracks (the three structures which I compare to rebar rods – see that category). By focusing only on the tracks, the CI practitioner includes one of the structures in every single utterance, thus giving structure for the CI train and the kids can thus understand. On the other hand, in general non-focused CI lots of structures can appear in the discussion in rapid succession. Therefore, there are less tracks in non-focused CI, unless the instructor makes it so by going slowly enough and by repeating the current structure being used over and over, but in most situations when the discussion lacks at least on formally targeted structure the CI train’s wheels go off into the sand.
Promethean Boards
Promethean Boards are used in many TPRS classrooms and that is fine. They are not my cup of tea, however. Why? Because they reflect the visual nature of learning. Humans are 93% visual, a fact born out by many studies. But one cannot learn a language by looking at things. I have known from my very first year of teaching that teaching a language is 100% about creating images in the minds of students (I just never knew how to do it until I found TPRS). One must hear the language and images must happen in the deeper mind of the learn for acquisition to happen. I thus prefer a simple white board so that I can be free to produce an “invisible” Promethean Board’s worth of SOUND in my classes. We all do it differently.
Some musicians play without heart. My brother is a professional cellist but only plays Brahms with heart. Bach technically is there, but somehow it doesn’t get lift off like Brahms. (Maybe it was the fact that it was Brahms that gave the heart quality, what do I know?) My dad was a violinist who wanted to play with heart but mind dominated, in my opinion. My mom, captured by the Nazis at the age of 14 with her village wiped out in Tagenrog in 1943 (written up in Wikipedia), sat at the piano for hours but couldn’t get the war out of her fingers. I dumped my expensive violin years ago and shifted all my energy into this work. But yesterday I played the violin in my classes, but my violin was the French language. I played with heart. I can’t explain nor would I expect anyone to understand it. But my kids did. They got it. They felt the love. We laughed, we played, I frickin’ stayed 99.5% in French, which I rarely do, and I learned again – this was in a French 1 class – that as long as I am feeling joy in my heart that I can teach using CI in a way that, if my heart is not engaged, I could be a big expert on CI and still not bring the potential of CI into my teaching. Profound thought right there. Describes my own path with this stuff. How do we explain that at a workshop? How do we tell teachers that, if we don’t bring joy into our teaching, the method doesn’t work? Hmmm. Really, who’s going to believe that? They want to know how. I answer, teach with joy and develop your technical skills. They say, can I just do it with only the skills? (Some teachers don’t want to be happy.) I say, no.
Pop Up Grammar
I suggest we lower the time of pop up grammar to 1.5 seconds. Why? When I’m allowed 4 seconds to make a grammar point, I always extend those 4 seconds longer, ending up using the pop up grammar lesson as an excuse to talk about myself in English. But when I mainly explain the grammar by writing on the board: “era” – “will” and “erait” -“would”, WITHOUT A LOT OF VERBAL EXPLANATION, LIKE 1.5 SECONDS OF IT, THAT TO ME MAKES A BETTER POP UP AND WHAT A POP UP NOW IS FOR ME AND MY KIDS TELL ME IT WORKS FOR THEM BETTER AS WELL BECAUSE THEY TOLD ME IN ALL HONESTY WHEN I EXPLAIN GRAMMAR IN L1 – AND THESE ARE SMART KIDS – THAT THEY IMMEDIATELY TUNE IT OUT AND HAVE DONE SO NOW WITH ME ON THAT FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS. I CAN’T AFFORD THOSE FOUR SECOND POP UPS BC THEY LAUNCH ME INTO FAR MORE THAN FOUR SECOND POP UPS.