Grant sent this in January:
Ben,
This is my 5th or 6th year of using TCI, only the 3rd using TCI exclusively (or what I feel is exclusively). Each year I’ve gotten better. Each year I become more and more skilled at staying in the target language and staying comprehensible and interesting.
But, each year around this time I have begun to notice I’m not reaching everyone. The wheat begins to separate from the chaff, so to speak. It becomes clear who is getting it and who is beginning to give up.
But I want to reach everyone. I know that’s maybe less than pragmatic, but I really believe that if I’m going to tout this thing, I have to make the best damn stab possible at reaching everyone in my classroom. Last year, however, by February, I could tell who had given up and I didn’t have the skills to save them. This year, something’s different. So, who are these kids?
Well, there are the Pigs who can’t fly. I’m not in a position to be able to demand they be exited. Then, there are the kids who just process the language much slower than others. A lot has been written about the Pigs who can’t fly. There’s no doubt they’re there and with some I’ve made it a point to exile them to the far corners of the room. Every few weeks I make an attempt to bring them back in to the fold. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
It’s the others I want to share about. The slower processors. The ones who are quiet in class and sometimes appear to be comprehending but who, for whatever reason, have not figured out how to be successful in class yet. I have a young Hmong girl in my class who has an IEP. Her IQ score is low and she performs even lower, generally. But, she’s a sweet girl, of course.
Most of the first 1/2 of the year, she would stare blankly or fake involvement. She could almost never answer any of the simplest questions, even when pointing directly to the translation. In October, after she began feeling more comfortable with me, she began to ask questions. Very interesting questions.
She asked if there were dialects in Spanish, because in Hmong there are dialects that define subgroups. She asked if Spanish people from different countries understand each other. On more than one occasion she was the focus of snickers because of her random, seemingly unrelated questions. But, she was approaching this class from a point that was meaningful to her – trying to make sense of this new language from a personal point of departure.
The funny (and frustrating) thing was that these questions ALWAYS came in the middle of CI. As other kids focused on understanding the message I was delivering, she threw in an apparently random question from left field that nobody else in the class really seemed to be interested in. Her performance, due to her not listening and not stopping me when she didn’t understand, was very low and her comprehension was a self-assessed 5 on the 10 scale.
I don’t know what happened, but today, while kids were getting books for SSR, she came to me and asked an astonishing question. She said, “Profe, are Spanish speaking cultures sexist?” I asked her what had she noticed that made her think this. She went on to say, paraphrasing, “Well, Hmong culture can be kind of sexist and I’ve noticed that when there are girls mixed with boys you use the boys’ sound.”
Now, she didn’t say exactly this, but I relate it here in language that appropriately grasps her own grasp of grammatical terms and concepts – she didn’t know how to say it, but she was telling me that she had noticed gender matching switch when a boy is included in the group. I’ve never explicitly told the group this and she would have no reason to have explicitly learned it. This girl had picked up on a relatively discrete grammar phenomenon through CI. And, what’s more, was able to give it words. She clearly “understands the concept” as some page turners like to say.
I stopped the class and made a BIG ASS deal out of her observation. The rest of the class, a reading class, she raised her hand to translate no fewer than 4 times! That’s 4 times more than the entire school year up until now. The switch has been pulled with this girl and from here on out I’ll have her eating from my hand when just yesterday she seemed destined to not continue with the language.
I write this because I really think that this is evidence that the CI wings open and take flight at different times for different kids. That’s critical for us to keep in mind. We CAN’T give up on kids who appear not to care or not to get it. I had pretty much given up on this girl – I didn’t understand the inner workings of her brain. I interpreted her questions as evidence that she was just on another planet.
Now it’s clear to me that she had to come to the language through her own door. In years past I would have given up on this girl and others like her. But we have to keep on loving them and trust that they will come around. Trust that they are just feeling the boards in the fence searching, touching, feeling, knocking – trying to find the loose board that lets them come in and join the fun. Will we welcome them in when they finally find their reason to buy in? I know how the page turners would answer that. I choose to let them in. To welcome them, even in January, to the beauty of languages.
Best,
Grant