Pat’s Polemics

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tprs going into a whole district is something I've seen recently on a listserv for fl teachers. Then two Spanish teachers needed, tprs-ready preferred. Also, there is a listserv for teachers teaching Chinese to English-speakers wherein most of the teachers use tprs.

More and more, I think my prediction that tprs may become the dominat paradigm in fl teaching is coming true, much sooner than I thought.

What does this portend? Certainly, as a method it has matured greatly in a very short time. The originator, Blaine Ray, is still giving workshops. Some of the earliest proponents are still around (sorry if I make you sound old, guys), posting to listservs, attending conferences and giving workshops. Yet here we are, with schools and even whole districts requesting that tprs be the method used to teach fl.

Ignoring the loud sound of the gnashing of teeth,

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Has anyone done a study on the origins on the school culture of punishment? I have Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards but haven't read it. Maybe he'll talk about it in terms of what the behaviorist approach to discipline was reacting againt. Most teachers, though, seem to think that people learn b/c they are rewarded and will do better if they are punished....... everyone except them, that is. THEY learn for the sake of learning, for the love of knowledge; but the rest of us shlubs prefer to screw off, mouth off, shilly-shally and dilly-dally, anything but learn.

My first impulse is to look at the personalities of the teachers. How many of them (notice I've switched to 'them' as opposed to 'us') were goody-goody two-shoes type students, always eager to please the teacher, always ready with the perfect homework? I've noticed the look on the face of teachers when I mention that I was not a good student and really didn't care that much about doing assigned work. Because I loved to read, the work in everything except math and science came pretty easy to me. But their reaction is to my oppositional stance. I think it truly shocks them.

Which makes me think teaching may be an interitance from the medieval guilds or religious orders demanding conformity and obedience. How else explain the huge discrepancy in the time spent on how to teach and the time spent on how to punish? Could it be that they remember the kids who were insouciant in the face of their mighty struggles to satisfy the teachers and they still resent it?

No matter how silly these ramblings may seem, I don't think many people will find my observations that far from reality. Anyone who has sat through the endless department meetings where teaching methods and positive approaches to students are given short shrift while detailed arguments are advanced for how many points to deduct for this or that infraction of teacher expectations can wonder with me just what is going on.

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Here's a post written by Bob Patrick to a member of a Latin teacher listserv who complained about discussions on the list being taken over by the same five or six people and about being blasted with research that seemed in opposition to classroom experience.

I appreciate the response, and I think I appreciate your frustration. AS
I've said to someone off list about this thread (that never really made any
progress), if you will go back and look at my initial post to you, it was
not debate at all. It contained questions. I really was trying to
understand where you were coming from.

In a follow up post, you told me more

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This in response to a request on my views re tprs and on staying in the TL:

First of all, thanks for recognizing that I am not a shrill proselytizer for one method or another.

Just between you and me, I have a sneaking suspicion that tprs will become the dominant paradigm for teaching fl in the U.S. (and then be overthrown, of course). The reason is not so much that tprs has a monopoly on good teaching practices. I think of the AVID program out of San Diego which has an excellent fl strand in its training, of PACE as laid out in Shrum & Glisan and detailed by Cherice Montgomery, of VanPattens series out of McGraw-Hill on structured input and structured output, of more idiosyncratic and personalized methods like Rassias, and so on.

What tprs offers is what Americans need: A PROGRAM! It is something......

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If.......
the work is important to student learning, I should assign it.

If I assign it and they do it, I must read it.

If I read it, I should critique it.

If I critique it, I must grade it.

If I grade it, I must enter that grade in my book.

If I enter it, I must average it with other assignments.

If I average it, it must count toward the course grade.

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As you start the very first meeting with your new students (it'll be different for students following you from a previous year), plan out how you will present the language. I'm going to assume a fairly communicative approach and assume you will have your students reading stories. My textbook is a lot of connected stories, a narrative of the life of a young Roman boy who grows to manhood. In my Spanish classes, I used to use readings from Mexican elementary school textbooks and the geography of various countries.

So, assuming you do something like this, you know you will be IDENTIFYING and DESCRIBING. You will want to associate specific places, objects, and actions with the characters in the stories. (TPRS-ers might want to comment on any way in which tprs might differ in the presentation). Therefore, you can start that first meeting with identifying yourself, describing yourself, talking about what you do, and associating yourself with certain places, objects and actions. Examples would be:
My name is.........
I am a teacher.
I teach (TL).
I am a man, a grown-up.

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How do you start off with your students? This is crucial. One mistake my school used to make was loading up classes with 38 to 40 some kids on the assumption a lot of them would drop after the first grading period. That meant all students in those classes started off in an impossible situation, developed habits appropriate to that overcrowded environment, and found it difficult to readjust some months later with a smaller (32) class.

Obviously, the way you start off is going to depend on

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Corny, I know, or, as kids would say now, cheesy. And thus we start our lessons on how to teach a fl. We must be flexible, lesson #1.

In this series, I will not discuss the surroundings you may find yourself in. That is covered in many good books on teaching. OTOH, I will not go so far as James F. Lee in his book on task-based learning where he lists a set of conditions that must obtain for a student to acquire a fl. To mix an aphorism of Donald Rumsfeld, we go to war with the kids we've got. Without good classroom management, y'all ain't teachin' nuttin'.

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According to researchers featured on an npr piece, multipliers are leaders who bring out the best in people. Their opposite number are diminishers. The most interesting part of the theory of mangagement presented was that multipliers and diminishers possess very different views of other people. And this made me think of teachers and the way they view their students and colleagues.

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