Pat Hiller Stainke wrote this on FB. I wrote some of my own responses under them. Pat’s comments are in italics and mine are in regular print:
…I’m an idea person, so it’s not hard to change gears or to come up with new stuff – but I feel a sense of urgency about handling things exactly right, right at this juncture….
I really get this comment, maybe because I am an idea person too. I used to spend so much time changing a lesson at the last moment, to respond to what I felt was “in the air”. I also agree that there are critical junctures with certain classes that, if we fail to respond to them in the right way at the right time, we will lose them. It’s an incredibly complex and emotional thing and few people, including our students and colleagues, even know that we are going through such times internally, because the rule in schools seems to be that you can’t show any weaknesses.
…one of my primary concerns is a class of French II which is pretty dysfunctional….
I think level II classes are the most dysfunctional of all the levels, especially when they are sophomores.
…the teacher they had for French kind of ‘gave up’ last year….
No blame. Only love. I gave up on some deep level each year for 24 years before meeting Susan Gross in 2001.
…the students just want to survive French II….
Such is the result of teaching using the old methods. But the dye has been cast. The mistake you would make, the mistake I have made, would be to try to save the day.
…their foundations are unbelievably weak, so I really have my work cut out for me…
In my view, this is a serious mistake. The dye has been cast. The damage has been done. Christmas break is fast approaching. To try to “make up” for time lost by another teacher would be foolish. I only say this from my own experience and I would love for someone to show me how I am wrong. I once inherited an AP French class that had endured three different teachers in their first three years. They knew next to nothing, because it was all scrambled. I tried to TPRS them back to health and it didn’t work. Only 3 of the 22 students wanted to play and the negative mental mass of the other 19 crushed us. I feel that in situations like this we can only accept our students where they are and lovingly bring them back in a limited way to some love of the language, and not so much to an intellectual level of “where they should be”, but rather just to love the language in some way. I now wish that with that AP class I had drastically lowered expectations and had just gone back and cleaned up their grammar because that was all I could really do in that setting. Instead, I drove myself nuts trying to get them ready for all aspects of the AP exam. I really should have picked them up in my arms and treated them for what they were – wounded. I should have only had the goal of trying to get them to love the language even a little bit by doing lots of grammar and reading – it is all that they knew – to give them confidence and then hope for the best. I could have done some French poetry because kids that age, seniors, love poetry. Just simple poetry like the collection I have on this site. By speaking to them in French at the start of the year, that automatically put thick iron grills up in their faces because they couldn’t understand a thing I said to them and they tried to cover that by shutting down and reversing the energy and blaming me, saying that the instruction was weird. Now, that was an AP class and this is a level 2 class, but I think it is the same. Those kids dislike the language because they feel so stupid and if you try to offer them stories they will resist and blame you. Those are lost classes, to speak plainly. You can’t put lipstick on that misfed pig at this point. I would try to clean up their grammar, going very slowly so that they could at least feel some success in that area, and do some reading and maybe once a week teach some poetry. I might sneak a few starting the year activities in at the end of class, going from five to ten minutes and maybe more at the end of class. But don’t expect anything. Treat them for what they are – beginners.
…they are resistant – to everything!…
They have every reason to be. And the biggest mistake you can make in response to their resistance is to resist that resistance. In our profession we have been brainwashed to think that we should sacrifice our mental health and well-being in order to make up for bad teaching in the past by another teacher. Serious damage has been done to many teachers because of that expectation, so don’t act like you can fix it. We are not superhuman, we have our other classes.
…they want me to ‘go back to the book’. I think this means they want unit-based chapters and vocabulary lists….
Yes. This drove me crazy at the time, but now I would do it. With that AP class, as I said, I should have gone back to the book and retaught the grammar. I would have enjoyed that a lot! French grammar is a thing of exquisite beauty. It’s just too bad it doesn’t align with the expectations of the national parent organization of my profession. Those kids in that AP class were highly intelligent kids but the entire grammar system had been so scrambled in their brains that they knew even less than they did on the first day of French 1. And yet, since they were able to memorize the grammar rules for the tests, their previous failed teachers had sent them the message, through the medium of testing, that they are very good at French. Nothing that you can say or do that will convince them otherwise.
… many of them really don’t like each other….
Love and forgive. The setting that they were put in pitted them against each other, not just in French class but in all their classes. That is what traditional teaching in languages does to kids and I am against it. There are few teachers who see the damage that they are doing. They think that survival of the fittest is the way schools work. The few get to succeed and get all the good stuff and the many must suffer. That’s crazy but a lot of people believe it, and some are teachers. Can you change that poisonous mindset in this class? You would be like a person staring at a car that has been totaled in an accident and trying to wish it, using only their mind, back into the condition it was in before the accident. The sad thing is that if you had been their teacher in French I you would see them all working together with no animosity between them, if you had started with stories.
… which makes paired and group activities difficult….
Best not to do pair or group work in a comprehensible input class. It takes time away from CI. Only do it if you are being observed to get the box checked or if you need a break, or are working with the OWATS activity. But I don’t see you doing any CI with this group. They are too damaged. This is no longer about teaching these kids, it’s about YOU getting through the year and forgiving yourself for not turning around the huge tanker in the middle of the ocean with your own little tugboat.
….I’m currently reading PQA in a Wink! Personalizing the classroom and valuing the students for who they are above all else comes easily to me, but now I have new tools to do this. I just have to believe that it’s not too late for me to ‘start over’, in a sense, with this one class….
Pat, I appreciate your buying my materials, and Susan Gross told me that the book you are currently reading, PQA in a Wink! is my best book, but in my own mind and heart I am certain that no amount of doing the activities in PQA in a Wink! can save this class.
…have any of you had the experience of turning things around with a resistant and dysfunctional class?…
I am so sorry I have not. I am sure others here will comment on this. I think it may have been done by stronger teachers than me. I was never able to. It was a big ugly standoff – they wanted grammar and I wanted CI and it usually lasted until the end of the year. Any small amount of change I was able to bring with classes I had inherited from other teaches was not worth the mental and emotional stress on me. I am sorry to say this but for me it is true. That is why I would like the group to get involved on this last question.