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Unprecedented 3
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6 thoughts on “Unprecedented 3”
For the last 4 years I have just done PQA and a little PMS. The rest of the time was a waste, but I still had a lot to learn.
Have you considered the job-giving aspect as a way to try to give yourself more wiggle room? My classes have really responded to taking jobs and the level of cooperation has gone up to the point where I can actually do TPRS. Despite the tremendous resistance from students and colleagues, TPRS is working in my class.
Have you bought a good book of stories? See if you can get the kids to do a ‘trial period’ with some sort of reward (?) Anything to get yourself a chance to try out some TPRS is worth it, but without cooperation from the kids, like you say, it won’t work.
I was so naive when I started using TPRS this year and thought that all teachers use this methodology or not . . . No in between. Now I see that there are lots of people doing bits and pieces. I wonder if this is effective. One day last week, I got frustrated that my Chinese 1 students were still having trouble with the difference between “this is” and “that is” so I had them get up and do a speaking exercise. Afterward, I realized it didn’t help and I just needed more input with gestures and good acting.
Recently, I was asked to present to an annual Chinese teachers’ workshop. Word has gotten out that I am teaching with TPRS so they gave me an amazing 40 minutes to present. Ironically, I was asked to present on two other topics as well: How to Grow Your Enrollment in Chinese and Teaching Multi-Level Classes. At the core of all these presentations is TPRS. Want your program to grow? Use TPRS. Have multiple levels in one class? Use TPRS. Okay, I had some other advice, too. In the end, out of about 20 teachers, I think only 2 were truly interested in exploring TPRS further because, as one teacher put it, “It looks like too much work,” even though I told them that it was less work than how I used to teach. It seems most of the teachers feel it is just easier to teach from the book like the person quoted above.
…I see that there are lots of people doing bits and pieces. I wonder if this is effective….
It’s not effective. Any more than equipping a car with one car tire, one bicycle tire, one tire from a tractor, and one from the junkyard.
Or yoking an ox and a mule to a plow. They move in radically different ways. While it may “work” in the short term, in the long run it will kill one of the animals. Yoking CI/TPRS and a textbook will kill one of them in the long run. In my case, it killed the textbook; unfortunately all too often it kills the CI/TPRs.
I think it neat Robert that you made the point aout the ox and the mule moving in different ways on a plow and how that in the long term will kill one of the animals. I made a similar analogy about putting four different kinds of tires on a car. Only one kind of tire will allow the car to function properly, the car tire, not the bike tire or the tractor tire of the junkyard tire. It is a good point we make. Those who dabble in TPRS are mere dabblers and will gain little. Honestly, my 3 and 4 class wrote such junk yesterday on the sentence frames I felt embarrassed for them and their teacher, who is a friend. But I mean junk. I mean confusion about how sentences are structured in French down to the bone marrow. They had done grammar worksheets, some of them, for three years prior to this class, and their writing is penetratingly empty of anything of value. My level 2 kids, who haven’t written much at all, outwrite them by miles. No, TPRS doesn’t mix with other stuff.
Tamula those are some really high numbers. Congrats. 2 out of 20 is a lot. Susan Gross told me that she thinks that only 1 out of 100 people she addressed in workshops even tried it, and out of 100 who tried it, only 1 ended up doing it successfully. This is no game for the fainthearted and the lazy. On a beach there are many bathers, but not too many swimmers in the deeper waters.