More Thoughts After ACTFL

It's amazing - I went to ACTFL this year feeling worn down and like TPRS and Comprehensible Input just can't fit into my mandated curriculum anymore.  After all, the absolutely wonderful novels are not on the approved reading list.  Free and Voluntary Reading is discouraged, and I am supposed to keep my students on grade level reading and writing Common Core standards, even if that means leaving the target language and reading and writing in English.  My storytelling has gotten lackluster, my questions are predictable, my students won't participate... and I wondered "why do I keep fighting the bureaucratic machine"

Now, here I am, a few days post-conference.  The difference is amazing.  I went to some great sessions.  (The trick is don't feel guilty, if a session doesn't seem to fit your needs, leave and find a different one that does!  Another trick is, if there is a time slot with no interesting sessions, hang out in the exhibit hall.  I think I set up camp at the TPRS publishing booth!) 

Randomish thoughts:

I went to a session on writing and the Common Core.  I figured I needed to see what other people are doing.  Well, they advocated staying in the Target Language and *supporting* the standards but by getting our students to be proficient in reading, writing, and thinking in our target language.  How refreshing!  Now if I can just communicate this effectively to the "higher ups"

I already mentioned the embedded reading and cultural reading sessions.  I keep thinking how much more accessible reading will be with the layers of reading.  Start small and build up.

The last session I went to, on Sunday afternoon (yes I got kicked out for last call) was about making homework meaningful.  

I have fallen into the trap of, I guess flipping my classroom in a way.  The high school teachers here all use traditional language learning models.  My students leave my classroom and have to take daily vocabulary and grammar quizzes.  No longer is it about acquisition or communication.  And I have struggled to find a way to balance my beliefs and research with the expectations of my district.  The final exam is also very much based on grammar rules and vocabulary memorization rather than acquisition in the language.  Some of the questions come directly from the student workbooks.  And so, since I do not use the textbook or workbook in class, I assign workbook pages as homework in order to familiarize my students with the layout and expectations of the book's author (and therefore the exam), as well as their future teachers.

Which brings me back to the session.  The presenter used backward planning starting with those "can do" statements in the program (My textbook says things like "students will be able to order food at a cafe") then planning backwards to figure out what instruction with actually be able to get the students to that point.  Her homework reflects that same philosophy.  Rather than assigning the grammar activities because they are there, and are expected, she has students prepare for the oral classwork the following day.  She asks students to "be ready to____" and such activities as "discuss three things you own" in this case, students will be using the verb tener (to have), but the homework focuses on the skill of using it in context rather than isolated lists of verb forms, and students are pressured into doing the homework because they have to stand up in class and speak.

I woke up at five o'clock this morning thinking about homework, my curriculum, and how I can get my pedagogical philosophies to match what I am teaching again..  (I am such a nerd!)  How can I get my students more involved in what they are learning, more vested in it, etc.  Also, if they are truly able to acquire this language, in theory they should be able to do as well on the test.  @martinabex.com @embeddedreading.com

TPRS in a non TPRS department

TPRS in a non-TPRS department


There are 9 teachers in my department. I am the only teacher who is trying to use TPRS. I have taken a softer, gentler approach this year. Meaning, I have not advertised my use of TPRS, nor have I chastised the other teachers for using the methods they do. Instead, I have sought to find places and times where what I believe can be shared in an open way. For instance, I shared a participation rubric that Ben Slavic posted on his blog. I have shared strategies for reading skills.

I discovered that in my case, it is not that my department is anti-TPRS, it’s that the bureaucracy of the district I teach in requires a high degree of lock-step teaching. We are expected, district wide, to be on the same chapter as every other teacher within a few days.

It is also a lack of familiarity. When I have made comments, such as referencing the top 100 words used in spoken Spanish, or that “even stupid kids growing up in Spain learn to speak Spanish” that my ideas are listened to. I even brought up the topic of homework not having an impact on learning. One of the teachers decided to try an experiment with her students – and she is the most traditional teacher in the group. Not everybody agrees with me, but that’s ok. I didn’t become a teacher to have everybody agree with me. It’s enough that we can all listen to each other with respect.



Now, I don’t share everything. In part because TPRS sounds so fuzzy and not well prepared if you don’t SEE it. I mean, telling other teachers that you aren’t too worried about grammar just rings all sorts of alarms. And it isn’t even true. But, it’s hard to put into concise words what we do. So, mainly I share in small bits and pieces.

Towards the end of the year I gave up and taught the old way. The kids had to have a certain amount of information in order to be able to pass the standardized exam, and I didn’t have enough time to cover it all in a traditional TPRS manner (we lost 11 instructional days this year to snow just for starters) and the amount of vocab and grammar just cannot be acquired in that time. So, I used all the time-worn strategies of language teachers everywhere. A lot more of my students failed the second semester than the first, and my exam grades were consistent with first semester grades.

Sooo... now that I am on break I am plannning to use Backwards Designing to map out my own personal TPRS curriculum that aligns with the district pacing guide by semesters next year. There is a rumor that we might be able to keep our students for the whole year, which would ease some of the stress too. I would have a whole year to get students to where they “belong.”

Cereal again?

I was just talking about how some of my former students still discuss events from our classes last year, and even years before. Then what happens? These very same students started a debate about a word we had used in one of our stories on my facebook page. 

The basic story is this:

Mike Tyson is famous. He is strong. Lots of people like him. But, he has a problem. He likes to eat people's ears. It is illegal to eat people's ears. The police come and arrest him. He goes to jail.

While he is in jail, he has an idea. He has to wait, because he can't do anything about his idea when he is in jail.

When he gets home, he makes Tyson Puffs - a cereal shaped like people's ears. Now he can eat ears and it isn't illegal. Now he doesn't go to jail. Now he is happy.

The debate was about the word "Puffs". One girl said it was Pufs, another thought it was Poofs, and one boy said it was Puffs. It turns out, they were all right. In the English translation, we had written "Puffs", as we asked the story, we pronounced it "poofs" and when we wrote it in Spanish, we wrote "Pufs" to keep the pronunciation.  But really, it has been more than a year and a half, and here they are debating, literally the semantics of our story about cereal, body parts, and jail. 

And, it's on my facebook page!  Which means one - these students have become autonomous learners of the language; two - they are making connections and using the language outside of school (ACTFL standards); three - we have succeeded in building relationships with each other; four - the students have truly acquired some of the language; and five - I now have to explain to my family and adult friends why my students think a story about eating ears is hilarious.  :)

Oh! The connections... this all came up because I told my son I was going to eat his ears.  :)

TPRS vs standardized teaching

I am in a quandary. I am convinced that TPRS is the best way to help students truly acquire the language. I am so convinced, that this is the primary focus of my upcoming thesis. And yet.

And yet, I am not teaching with TPRS at the moment. Why not?

It just feels like such a fight. I have to give quarterly benchmark exams in which students are expected to have mastered banalities of the language. I lose my students at the semester and will have to retrain them all to TPRS. I am tired of defending myself to my colleagues. I am tired of fighting students who want the "easier" way of filling in blanks from the textbook rather than sitting back and doing the "hard work" of listening to a story.

I am in the process of giving the first benchmark exams, and it seems that even had I not stopped the stories, my students would have succeeded phenomenally. So, it's back into the trenches I go.

Playing with language

A few weeks ago my four year old was practicing new and unique nicknames/gentle insults. I had explained to him that we sometimes make up names for people we like and it's ok. He decided to practice on me.

A few names in, he called me a "CarHead." Wow. I couldn't pass that one up. We stopped then and there and I "parked".

What does a CarHead look like? Do they walk or do they drive around on their heads? How do they see?

Pretty soon we came up with a visual image. A CarHead is a person but they have an upside down car for a head. When they get tired of walking, they stand on their heads and drive around. Can't you just see that imagery there?

A few days after that I was struggling with angst - lots of decisions to be made in a very short time frame. This same kid of the CarHead fame looked at me and said, "Mommy, you're a "Conundrum Head." I had to laugh, because no other word or combination of words could possibly draw a better picture of me in that moment, and it took a four year old (albeit with a precocious vocabulary) to be able to create that image so well.

Laughing Out Loud

I was in a Mandarin class all this week. What a hoot! We laughed so hard that our sides literally hurt. We laughed so hard that the teacher had to give us a ten minute break so we could gather our thoughts. We laughed so hard that I will NEVER forget the word for meat in Mandarin.

And then today, I was reminded that this is not the standard impression we have of foreign language classes. Learning a language is supposed to be HARD work. We are supposed to suffer to gain this priviledged information. We are not supposed to be laughing about sexy airline pilots, meat, and America Idol try outs. We are supposed to be stressed about tones and tenses (no tenses in Mandarin, btw) We are supposed to feel STUPID. And when the teacher has repeated the same word for three days, and I stop her to ask what that word means, the entire class is supposed to turn on me and remind me how stupid I am for forgetting.

Nobody told that to my teacher, Linda Li, this week. I did make that mistake, and she stopped talking, reminded me what the word was, and then slowed down her story until she was sure I was back on board. And when we accidentally said the teacher kissed the student instead of the teacher asked the student, she didn't tell us how we were awful students because we couldn't hear the tones after four days.

It's ok if you make a mistake

and write in Spanish.

????

Yes, I actually had to say that to my Spanish students. So many of them were erasing entire sentences because they had accidentally written in Spanish for a rare English assignment. I had them create a Venn diagram comparing three homes: theirs, and two from a book we just read. Because I wanted them to make the cultural connections I asked them to write in English. And, as they were writing many of them realized that they had accidentally written in Spanish instead.

I am so upset. Really. How dare they acquire what I am trying to teach them?

On a similar note, we were reading from the class novel and I was having students translate the paragraphs out loud. At least one student in each class "translated" a word right back into Spanish.

Again. I am so upset. Can't you tell? Livid.

LOL

Dictations - evidence of comprehension...

I spent part of my holiday yesterday grading dictations, and I found a curious pattern that showed my students were understanding what I said, even if they were not following instructions.

A brief background. I do dictations a la Ben Slavic. First, there is not English spoken during a dictation. I read through the dictation two times. Rather than reading one word at a time, I read in natural clusters of words - words tend to be said in groups rather than individually, so that's the way I read my dictation. I offer a third repetition if anybody needs it. Then I project the answers on the screen. Students underline any mistakes they made and make the corrections immediately below the original error. Unlike many of our activities which are focused on comprehension, the dictation is focused on the details. The sentences are based on stories we have told or read recently, but students are not asked any questions about the material.

In Spanish there are two words that usually translate into English as "for." These are "por" and "para." They are used with completely different meanings in Spanish, and this is often a difficult concept for English speakers to master. I have no idea if this changes through TPRS or not (the distinction between the two past tenses seems to become more intuitive through TPRS instruction.) In my dictation I used the word "para" I had a small group of students write the word "por" instead. Now, the two words don't sound the same, other than the initial sound.

My assumption is that the sentences made so much sense to these students that their brains felt comfortable filling in the next most logical word rather than listening intently and trying to sound it out.

I am of two minds with this. On the one hand, I wish the students had been listening more carefully - I only ask for this attention to detail for ten minutes of the week. And I wish that they had been more careful with their editing as well. On the other hand, I am thrilled that they were understanding the material so well.

Now I guess I just have to write some stories with lots of por and para repetitions.

:)