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Tina on Targets – 1
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5 thoughts on “Tina on Targets – 1”
Tina,
Do you stil do 2-3 TPR gestures at the beginning of each class to build up a vocabulary? I did it this year so my kids know words like jumps, runs, walks, drives, eats, drinks, hits, etc. I feel like it’s helpful to stay in bounds in NT stories. Any thoughts on that?
I have not been doing that these days. I do not see anything wrong with it though! TPR is fun. I have been doing a lot of this, which I learnt from Ben this summer and it seemed so much easier so I changed over to this after arguing with him all summer about the merits of full-on TPR, ha ha, Ben you won: A word comes up, usually a verb, that we do not know. I just assign a quick gesture that can be done in their seats, like sign language (but totally makey-uppey not real sign language) and say, “Veut means wants. Show me veut, wants, veut.” Then I usually cycle through some other words that we have TPRd in the past and end with a couple reps of the new word and move on. It feels light and natural and it is also like a short brain break. Sometimes I throw in something slightly funny like look at Billy’s head or something but most of the time we cycle through fast and back to the activity at hand. I like to do that when a visitor pops in and the kids do too, they are proud of how many words they are getting to know.
Yes to integrated brain breaks. I play Simon says with the kids after we go 10 or 15 minutes full CI.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything Tina says!
In my understanding, the targeting was supposed to create a road map for teachers – the rails to keep it rolling in bounds & comprehensible. And it satisfied that whole teachery ‘agenda on the chalkboard,’ for the evaluators. Like Tina said, it helped the whole operation look school-ish, when, as we know, we are really more like caretakers (as in ‘caretaker speech;’ ‘Motherese’).
Now, I feel like I can easily ‘do’ an OWI and weave it into a story while staying in bounds, but I’m not sure I could right in the beginning of my T/CI journey. My trajectory allowed me to internalize the skills and not worry about what to talk about next. I feel like this bolstered my confidence, though I could be wrong; had I been trained to go non-targeted with strategies like OWI from the get-go, perhaps it would have been easy-breezy….
I do believe that simplicity is key. We work hard. Constant social & verbal interactions with kids and adults all day non-stop can be trying and draining. Add on the layer of administrative accountability, parents, extra-curricular involvement, union meetings, safety training, report cards…it easily spins outta control!
Now, though, I feel like my real challenge is to keep it simple. There is such beauty and simplicity in the art of storytelling/story-asking. People looking into each other’s faces, making meaning, clarifying their understanding, laughing together, sharing class jokes and funny images, looking at different artistic depictions…remembering and recording the story.
This is how I want to be spending my time! Less stuff, more meaning. Less tech, more face-to-face; less teacher entertaining students; more mutuality.
Better for everyone in the room, to be sure.
Alisa said:
…had I been trained to go non-targeted with strategies like OWI from the get-go, perhaps it would have been easy-breezy….
There was a teacher in Agen last summer who was trying so very hard to make a one word image complicated, school-like. After five minutes, she turned to stare a dagger through me. I moved to the back of the room. But she hung in there. In the next very emotional half hour of deep and vulnerable work in front of the group, we saw a kind of miracle happen. All of the fear melted away from her as she created the now infamous little brown chicken who was standing in front of a casino in Las Vegas. We all ended up in convulsive laughter and it wasn’t entirely the fault of the alcohol. We had reached down into a shared human space of vulnerability, simplicity and innocence and I saw in that half hour how simple this work can really be, and how our very teacher personalities can really get in the way of this work. God bless us all and may He protect us from our own need to be so damn smart all the time, and just let us hang out with our kids and quit being all that. The kids want us to relax, and we seem to be unable to do it. God will help us. I know it. He is tired of us suffering so much.