Panel 9 of the Illustrations of Best Practices from Atlanta Public Schools – and please remember that this series of articles first appeared in this space in 2009. This is a reprise and it is highly possible that the Georgia tenets in slide show form are no longer in place or approved by the state language powers that be, since many of them are so out of line with what we now know about how people learn languages:
Seek to integrate concepts from the general elementary school curriculum in lesson delivery and in every unit.
Hmmm. Under this statement there is a picture of a bunch of faces of very young kids with different hair color and their names with the subtitle “graphing hair color to reinforce math skills”. In L2 I would assume. Hmmm.
Find me the teacher who can do that kind of connecting to other classes and I will show you a teacher who will burn out in under three years. This is ridiculous and unattainable. Was this document written by real teachers? College people who live in theory?
The document was probably written by a few superstar teachers who don’t even do this stuff themselves but, by writing this, got a lot of approval from their superiors, because, really, this power point presentation is very cute. It’s just not real.
That’s what I like about TPRS stories. We really do talk in L2 about real things in our classes, things that have meaning and interest to our students, not things like graphing hair color in L2. Come on! Teach them how to speak the language first and then do stuff like this!
I wonder if there is any research on the almost completely fraudulant thing that foreign language education has become nationally in terms of real and measurable outcomes. 95% of my 8th graders are going to French level 2 at the high school, but only 11%, according to administratively kept hard statistics at the high school I feed, will make it to French level 3 there.
That means that of the 29 students who, now as eighth graders, feel good about their ability to learn French, only 3 of them will be in French 3 as sophomores. In a school of over 1700 students, none will be in AP French, and in Spanish, in a school with five Spanish teachers, only six will be in AP Spanish. The kids for some reason will be incapable of meeting the rigours of the high school curriculum. Hmmm.
This 89% attrition rate by level 3 is higher than the national average, which (this number is not substantiated) is around 75% attrition by level 3 nationally but nobody knows or cares.
The teachers who are behind this lie look like real teachers, so the principal and the three assistant principals haven’t a clue of what is really going on in their house. Why? Probably because the teachers write documents* that fool people by including in them sentences like
Seek to integrate concepts from the general elementary school curriculum in lesson delivery and in every unit.
2 and 7.
*I have never been able to figure out why intelligent administrators have never mounted some kind of inquiry or reacted in any way to the precipitous drop out numbers at the high school level nationally over the past half century. And at the lower levels, especially elementary, why is it that nobody every looked into the obvious fact that nobody was getting any results with little kids – for half a century – until lately which positives have all been from teachers who base their instruction in Dr. Krashen’s research. It’s a mystery to me how these high school numbers (estimated) were deemed acceptable by the system:
By level 2 75% remain – most because they need the credit for college.
By level 3 25% remain.
By level 4 under 10% remain.