I got a few questions from a group member. All are invited to respond. It’s a big ass question:
Hi Ben,
I just read the whole rebar/pqa blog posts. Under Rebar 3 you state that some weeks you don´t even know what the day’s structures are going to be or what the story will be about. My question is:
If you don´t plan your structures how can you be sure your stories will work?
I am trying to let my teaching be more natural with the whole TPRS process. It feels like the more planning I do the less natural/spontaneous the learning process becomes. Although it is late in the year, I am working on PQA because I don´t feel like a did a very good job of it in the beginning of the year. This is taking a step back from storytelling to personalize but it is necessary. Anyways, I hope to get the PQA and storytelling to mesh naturally instead of forcing the structures with a planned script. Any suggestions?
My response: Working with comprehensible input methods requires structure and yet, it is in the natural emergence of the language in which the mojo, the happiness, and the spontaneity lie.
That is one reason why the 4%er teachers are so ineffective. They lack spontaneity and view language as its structure and not what it really is, a spontaneous, joyous thing to be shared to make life and sharing with other people happier that day.
So how do we balance the need to structure our instruction and yet be spontaneous? My goal is to do it through trust. If we don’t trust that fun and spontaneous things will occur in life, and let go the reins of control a bit, then how can our classes be spontaneous. Deep breath on that one, right? Trust as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/09/28/smothered-by-blankets/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/08/12/dr-krashen/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2008/08/21/teaching-in-a-natural-way/
Forget the frustrating terms PQA and story – if you are new to the approach, you need workshops for that, honestly, unless you have a mentor there in your school. So just take a verb and hang out with it. Ask the kids for a verb. One suggests “throws”. Now they have ownership of it. You didn’t say, “Class, today we are going to be working with the verb “throws” and they all think to themselves “I want to throw up now”. A lot of what we do is handing over real ownership to our kids. We don’t do that. It is abominable.
After you ask them for a verb, engage the kids further by asking who throws and, once you know that, ask what they throw, making sure that every sentence you say has throws in it. Ask where they throw it.
You are making the right decision to do that. But, as the years go by and I look at this more and more, I see the power of stories. Last week I took a quick snapshot of Krashen’s face in one of those thin slicing moments (Malcolm Gladwell/Blink). What did I see? I saw passion and deep social awareness. I saw something that had to do with people embracing the deep goodness that life offers but that we mostly stifle. I saw deep frustration (Krashen admitted to our gorup that he is pissed off but he added that he doesn’t let it affect his days). I saw love of beauty. But the main thing I saw in that snapshot of Krashen’s face was a passion for people to be happy. That is what I think Krashen is trying to do – show us ways to be happy with our students, and simply to relax. Maybe he would think that I am reading too much into this, but it doesn’t matter. It is what I saw.
Regardless, is not language a major determinant of happiness? I think that it is. Right now as I write this, feeling a rant coming on, I am listening to a Portuguese ambiant radio station on iTunes – Radio Gaia – The Voice of the Planet (Sao Paulo) and every ten minutes or so there is a woman’s voice that comes on and says something. I don’t know what she says, but I feel the joy in her voice. What is more important, the message or the joy in the message?
Krashen has pointed to our mistake in pointing to the structure of the language and not focusing on its message. I would like to suggest that we may be making a mistake, as teachers who use comprehensible input, in that, yes, we focus on the message and not the structure of the language (grammar), but perhaps we might try to focus on the joy within the message instead. I offer as a case in point Handel’s Messiah and the Faure Requiem and the music of Gurrumul Yunupingu – Djarimirri , among others. This is what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bawDFY8G-o4
If a grammar teacher has joy in her lesson and a TPRS teacher has no joy in her lesson, then the grammar teacher might just be more effective, in spite of all our rhetoric. That is how powerful language is. All that is too much to go into here.
But we work with powerful stuff. I consider the people who are willing to fork up the cost of a few lattes each month, or have their school do it, to keep this unique discussion going here to be a different kind of teacher, wholly different from others. Starting to ramble but what the hell. Yeah, we are doing unique work. Look at the energy that Brigitte brings here. And Jody. Wow. And Brian and Harrell, our super intellectuals who – it is my guess – are trying to tone all down because they know that true smarts lies in being happy and smiling more and talking less.
Just thinking out loud here. But seriously, why would such accomplished scholars be teaching kids if that wern’t the case? Brian and Harrell could be teaching at the university level – Harrell could be teaching in about ten different disciplines. But they aren’t. They are here with us. Doing the engineering work – the very tough engineering work – of aligning their hearts with their students via language. The real work.
Hazrat Inayat Kahn (The Sufi Message) says that the work of life is in “right adjustment to other people”. That is the work we are trying to do here. It has little to do with teaching and much to do with trust and being happy. So, I for one, really want to keep the privacy thing going. It becomes more important to me every day and later today I will kick about 35 people out of our PLC ((I prefer that term to blog – it used to be blog but now everything that appears here is about teacher training). Sorry about that in advance. Gotta keep the group small so that we don’t display our gold too far out in the street.
Dang, not that was a rant! That is what my stories used to look like before I started sticking to the scripts Anne wrote. (Nice little segue back to the topic, Ben!) I simply would like to ask the community to tell me why we focus on structures so much. I just don’t get that. I trust that I will be giving the right structures, that they will show up somehow. Either they will be provided by the kids or my story script (I only use the best – Tripp and Matava), or they will emerge during the the Circling with Balls activity, or somewhere.
If you read the above link on the Net Hypothesis, Krashen makes it pretty clear that the din created in the head during a lively session of comprehensible input is not the result of the teacher nervously planning/hoping that the right structure for it to learn the language comes along in the discussion.
In fact, when language students go to sleep after hearing some nice, fine input that day (read input that contains joy, that is enjoyable), it is their own brain, not the well organized teacher, that does the crucial process of parsing out what it wants to keep in the deeper mind and what it will reject. The targeted structures from the day before may even be rejected in favor of some term(s) that the teacher would consider frivolous and irresponsible, like the simple “What’s that?” which came up in our story Thursday with Krashen and that he commented on. That is my own thinking on how the Language Aquisition Device/Process works, anyway.
I will post this answer, which is woefully insufficient to fully address the incredibly complex question you asked.
Honestly it is too big a question. But it allowed me to get a nice rant in so thank you for that. We never rant enough. We need to learn to let our freak flags fly more, to open the door of our cages from the inside (our cages aren’t locked) more often, as in this from 2008 here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2008/07/13/my-blog/
One more thought. You say that you are:
…taking a step back from storytelling to personalize but it is necessary…. [and that you] hope to get the PQA and storytelling to mesh naturally instead of forcing the structures with a planned script….
The fact that you could even ask the question shows a deep understanding of the whole deal already. My short comment on that is that I love the way you are willing to just go back and hang out with the kids in the target language. Yes, personalization is the key to the fun. A secret – you only need one kid to start a conversation. So don’t feel like you are in charge of getting to know them all at once – it can’t be done because they are teenagers. Few have social skills, at least real ones. Start with one kid, and one verb and that one kid who knows how to play the game will move the dead energy out of the room fast. The idea of meshing PQA into a story is actually an art form and need not occur all the time. Don’t worry about that so much. I like what you are doing. Simplify and trust. See if you can trust to go into class, try it once, with no plan at all. Just ask for a verb, as who does it, where, with what, when etc. The biggest problem with PQA in my view is people are unwilling to sit on the structure, thinking that they need to go on to the next thing, the next planned structure, the story, and all of that. Why do that if the kids don’t really know the structure/verb that you started class out with. Relax. Declutter. Go in with a whiteboard and a marker and a smile and deep faith in yourself as a person who can learn to just hang out with kids in another language. You’re doing the right thing. Please keep us informed. Sorry about the rant. It is my way of understanding, and of keeping my mind on what, to me, counts in my teaching. Looking for, finding in language, the joy that so eluded me when I thought that teaching was about conveying information, before I understood that teaching is not something separate from life, and that life is not something separate from joy.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2009/02/09/the-flying-ship-of-tprs/
https://benslavic.com/blog/2007/11/22/sick-can/