Something thing that really bugs me is how some of us are trying to do too much. We’re loading up our plates at the salad bar and trying everything. Why should we do that? It just leads to confusion.
I am not overeating. I do PQA on Monday, stories on Tuesday which carry over to Wednesday if needed, and, if not, then we do the reading of the story on Wednesday, and on Thursday I embed the reading or just finish it, and then on Friday we do the SSR class that is the culmination of the first ten minutes of SSR reading that we did at the beginning of each class during the week.
What has been the result of this strictly organized routine? There have been several:
a. I am not scattered for the first time in my career. The waters are no longer choppy all day. I never thought this possible – I thought school was supposed to be fucked up all day with crazy interactions with colleagues and kids all day that made me feel like I was on some kind of drug whose name began with some form of the word “meth -“.
b. the kids know what to expect. The routine is so important to them when, for most of them, their lives are pretty much in chaos. Their teachers across the board are running textbook/computer based programs at them so hard (Chris has something big to say about this, if he lets me publish it) that they are being overwhelmed in a Star Wars style of mental bot attack.
c. I don’t do stuff that doesn’t work. What I mean by that is that there have been so many little added twists and ideas in TPRS/CI over the years (I am responsible for many of them and so are others in this group) that, although they look cool, just confuse. If we try too many new options we forget the base structure of CI, which in my opinion must always be half of the time devoted to auditory CI in the form of PQA and/or stories and the other half to reading.
d. I am now refusing to answer pointless questions from teachers, again in private emails, about what they call TPRS “materials” and how to use them. What would I know about any of that? I don’t use materials in the sense these teachers are asking – they want so much to turn this into a textbook kind of thing and that is not possible*.
*I have always said that there are no materials. There is you and your communication with the kids and maybe a Matava or Tripp script and of course the novels to support you in that work. Yes, of course, teachers must use “materials” for training wheels, but we must take them off at a certain point! If you do that, you will bring true simplicity and majestic discipline – I shit you not – into your classroom and the materials (LICT, Cuentame) will finally stop leading you around by the nose and you will learn and launch real CI into your teaching and won’t that be a hoot.