This from Chris today:
I went to our state’s FL conference over the weekend and first of all, Susan Gross is fantastic!
Second, I ran into one of the Spanish teachers at our high school and she asked me “You use that TPRS, don’t you?”. She tried sounding nice when asking this question, and it may sound weird but I felt the BITE in that question. One of the other HS teachers does TPRS on Fridays (yeah, I know) and she has a student teacher right now. He told me about how he heard that first teacher (the one with the bite) talking about TPRS one time saying “yeah, the students can speak the language but they can’t spell anything right”. These traditional turners are going to cling to their old ways until they either retire or are booted out. And they will attack and sabotage the TPRSers to get their way. Maybe it’s because I’m somewhat of a radical thinker, but I can’t help but think that something is brewing. Good news: my principal said he’d help me meet with our curriculum director to discuss changing our curriculum in light of the research out there and the upcoming changes to AP. He LOVES what he sees when observing me doing TPRS.
And did you see the edweek.org article about TPRS? Some mainstream publicity!
http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2012/04/02/tln_borich.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-FB
Chris
[ed. note: I also want to get that standards discussion going. It’s pretty thick and I need to simplify it. I’m referring to the stuff from Robert and Ben Lev in CA and Chris in Ohio]