Team Windows - teacher break

I needed a break today. I shouldn't have, because I wasn't at school yesterday, but for whatever reason, teaching the day after you've been out is just enervating, so instead my kids provided comprehensible input to themselves. 

More CI Games

I know this is something I've mentioned before, but games seem so important. Kids love to play them, they're low-stress for us, and they break up our lessons nicely. We're always tempted to play games with the kids, but so often, games don't lend themselves well to a CI approach because they're either just fact recall, or they don't really lend themselves to actually understanding a concept. Running around is not always a good measure of understanding. :D

Jeopardy
I've been adapting Jeopardy recently to work better with a CI approach rather than a 'fact recall' game, and I have yet to have a class for whom it doesn't work.

This is a fairly high-output game for the kids, but it is limited by the types of questions they can ask, and it's also mitigated by the fact that students are working in groups. It also gives them some freedom in the sense that there may be various questions which can be answered by what you said.

A quick and dirty guide to telling a story

Story-telling was one of the hardest things for me to start to get good at. I spent my first two years shoving twenty-four words into a story, saying them once, and then wondering why they weren't sticking and weren't helping. People kept telling me 'slow,' but it wasn't really processing, and it's only been over the last couple years that I've gotten anywhere even closer to being good at doing it. The guide I'm putting here is mostly a collection of lessons I've learned in the journey so far.

1. Come in with a plot. This week, the plot is 'someone has something they don't want and so tries to give it to people.' It doesn't have a lot of details in it. Maybe your story has a lot more details in it (at the beginning, mine always did, too. I knew where I wanted them to go, or what the object was going to be, or so forth. no shame in that), maybe it has even fewer, but either way, I always go into a story with an outline of a plot so I can drive the story in that direction. If it doesn't end up there, fine, but at least I wasn't flopping around helplessly.

Learning Locutions

The more locutions the kids hear over and over and have access to, the more locutions and idioms and so forth they start to add to their regular vocabulary. To this end, I've put up an idiom wall. Each week, each level chooses an idiom which becomes the Idiom of the Week. The kids, when they use it correctly and in context, get a treat. This means I go through candy very quickly, but it also means that kids are falling all over themselves to use idioms correctly - which means they get committed to memory very quickly. This week, Latin II is practicing excidit mihi and Latin III has nisi fallor. If you use a denarius (or somesuch) rewards system, that would work nicely for this, as would a number of other systems.

Dear Abby

One of my classes and I have been spending time on you should, also known as jussive subjunctives. They've been proposing things for each other to do for the last several days, so today we brought it to a head in talking about our own problems.

I gave each student two small squares of paper.

If you have a paper guillotine, one of the best things I keep in my classroom is squares of paper guillotined from stuff in the recycled paper bin. We use them for warm-ups, quick quizzes, and any manner of things that don't require a full sheet.

On the first sheet, they wrote about a problem they have - my boyfriend doesn't love me, my history grade is bad, I hate physics, my brother won't give me the car.

Read and Draw

This is a summarization technique that I use with some regularity to great effect.

I am fortunate to own ten giant white boards (which can be gotten at CostCo or on Amazon), but this could just as easily be done with butcher paper, on the surface of a desk with whiteboard markers, or on 8.5x11 printer paper. This is a two-day activity.

Day one: I set up the desks in pairs facing each other. Each student was armed with a copy of a familiar passage, and each PAIR had a giant whiteboard and marker. This began almost as a popcorn reading. The first partner read a line to the second partner, who drew a picture and did NOT erase it. The second partner then read the second line and the other one drew it. The goal was, at the end, to have the entire passage illustrated.

Using Synonyms to Understand a Text

I don't know under what skill we might file this (speaking? circumlocution? summarizing? understanding a reading? all or none of the above?), but this was something I did with my students today and thought I'd share.

My threes are reading the beginning of Genesis, and it's fairly legible, but there are some phrases that throw them off. They're also having some difficulty summarizing in their own words because it's written succinctly, and because let's face it, talking can be a difficult skill to acquire. What we did today worked well for us, and I think it's something I will try again.

I'm posting it here because I've found that it's of enormous benefit to me when I spend time finding ways to say the same thing variously. When we do it with a class, you also get the benefit of your students hearing things from each other that they hadn't come up with themselves. It's not heavy production, but it does ask them to pull and then pool their language skills to consider other methods of expressing themselves and expressing certain ideas.

Imperfect and Perfect Tenses

For the last several years, I've been using a translation technique to teach the imperfect and perfect tenses. Because they have implications that exist but are rarely actively noticed in English, I have found that calling attention to them in English first tends to result in them sticking more closely in the kids' understanding. Furthermore, by the end of it, the story is entirely in the target language, so the students have a thorough understanding of the story because they've heard it in English several times, but they are eventually only processing it in Latin.

Summarization activity

I was at an immersion program this summer, and I was playing an ongoing game with a good friend of mine from Australia. One of us would tell a story with several details to the other. The other would then have time to think about the story and, when ready, would retell the story in one sentence. We were practicing periodic sentences and subordinating clauses. It was entertaining and also surprisingly helpful.

So today with my Latin III/IV students, I handed out pictures of monsters to them. There were nine kinds of monsters (gorgons, sea monsters, unicorns, dragons, etc), and the first thing they did was silently, for five minutes, write in their journal about the monster they had. Then I asked some of them which monster they had, and as a class we talked a little bit about each monster. When I hit on one (and it varied by class) that the students knew about and could describe and found interesting, we established a list of facts about the creature. Some of these were made up (apparently there are six harpies, of which three are dangerous and three are nice), and others were legitimately facts about the monsters (Medusa is a gorgon, and she is snakey-haired). Then we circled the information. Circling is a TPRS technique intended to get in repetitions (although it is absolutely not the only way to get in repetitions) and, to a certain degree, check comprehension. For example:

Locutiones Latinae

I have found in my journey in Latin speaking that the most difficult thing for me (other than, good heavens, convoluted clauses within clauses) has by far been speaking Latin. We tend, especially as tirones, to start speaking English but using Latin words. It's a really easy thing to do, and it's a harder thing to do to start acquiring real Latin. I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but hours and hours and hours of input is the only real way to do that - for us or for our students. Sometimes, though, a list of nice idioms can help, so I'm putting forth a small list here of idioms I've found to be useful, ways we can start saying things more Latinly, if you will - either with our students or simply ourselves.

Tables and Chairs

I am in the process of acquiring card tables. Last year I decided to get rid of my desks and was very happy with the decision. My feeling at the time was that desks encourage kids to feel restrained, as though they have to be right all the time and as though they must stifle their creativity. We train our students that the goal is to be correct, rather than to make progress, and to do it right rather than trying out a lot of different ways. Students have learned to ask teachers the question 'how do you want me to do this?' rather than asking themselves 'how many ways can I do this?'. Desks, for me, were a symbol of that manifesto, so my goal in getting rid of the desks was to create a community learning feeling where students did not feel restrained behind a wood desk, but rather were immediately in contact with the rest of the classroom community. Furthermore, I wanted room in the middle of the classroom where students could practice plays, run relays, and do large group activities that hadn't been possible when there were desks.

Parent communication

I like to communicate with the parents of my students not just when I'm concerned or am informing them of an event of some variety (test, convention, competition, etc), but also when a kid has done something particularly well. Sometimes the parents of these students hear from teachers all the time that their kid is fabulous, and some of them never hear these things from teachers. I had a student this year who was severely autistic and fails all his classes, and one day, he did a great job in class, so I called his mother to let her know. I told her what the student had done, and she said, "You must have the wrong student." It was heartbreaking, particularly when I assured her that I did not have the wrong student. I've been doing this via email, but this year, I acquired postcards very cheaply (250 of them from VistaPrint for 17 dollars).

Posters for your walls

Anyone who has known me for a decent amount of time will be able to tell you pretty quickly that I can't draw. Really at all. All my stick people have giant eyes and look the same, my third period spent twenty minutes coaching me to draw a box so we could have a gift drawn on the board, and I generally have to 'hire' students to be artists, rather than just doing it to give them a job. My handwriting is a disaster, and my kids come in at the beginning of the year, see my decorations and say, "Aww, that's so cute! Here, let me re-do everything for you." It's thoughtful.

Enter postermywall.com. I am not being hired or paid to do this, and in fact, I don't think they know I'm writing this, so take it in that spirit.

Games: Snatch It

I do not have a catchy name for this. If you have one, tell me.

You can really use this for whatever you want, but I like to use it for comprehension - true/false, questioning about stories, etc.

Sit students in pairs across from one another. Give each student a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker (this isn't strictly necessary if you don't have them, but I find it keeps them honest). Between them, have them put an object that's easy to grab and won't hurt them if they grab it quickly. I, for example, have eleven thousand stuffed animals in my classroom, so these work nicely. I do not recommend things like paper.

They Don't Notice, plus how we treat grammar

One of the big questions that always comes up for people new to the idea of CI (and, if we're being honest, probably to the people who do it a lot, too) is with regard to sheltering. I have yet to see a textbook (actually, the only book in Latin that I have seen that does this is one that was pointed out by Bob Patrick - it's Tres Ursi, a Latin version of the three bears) that effectively keeps vocab down but goes hog wild with the grammar.

We have this concept that students will not understand what we're saying if we use grammar they don't know. There is only a certain degree to which that's true. But they absolutely won't understand if we use a lot of vocabulary they don't know. People don't have the ability to truly absorb thirty-five vocabulary words in a day or two. They just don't. And when we start throwing around stories and lectures and texts and such that are chock full of words they don't know, we lose them. The textbook I use introduces words like swamp once and then never uses them again, forcing kids either to go hunting in the dictionary or, at the minimum, to interrupt their reading to look at the glossary at the bottom of the page. Swamp is a fabulous word! But it's not repeated enough, it's not relevant to what they're doing, and so all it really serves to do is disrupt them.

What Is CI?

It occurs to me that I forgot to gloss this, and that's silly.

CI is Comprehensible Input. It is the theory of presenting understandable, comprehensible, compelling ideas in the target language to our students. This is accomplished a lot of ways - story-telling, play-acting, drawing pictures, sometimes just flat-out glossing words or spot-translating. We can do this by offering communication tools to our students (I don't understand; stop; break that down; tell me that word; slow down) so that they are in control of their learning (plus minusve :D). Evan Gardner points out that to a certain degree, we have to be trained monkeys for them - if they say do that three times and we ever don't do it three times, we discourage them from communicating with us what they need.

Games: Show-and-Tell

There's been a lot of discussion on Ben Slavic's PLC (it costs about $5.00 a month, and the community that comes from it really is worth it) about games not really promoting CI, and that's pretty true. A lot of games do not promote good comprehensible input, discussion, reasonable output or communication. A lot of it is just spitting out of words or grammar without any context. So I've spent the last couple of years putting together games that do encourage CI, encourage conversation, useful input.

There are people who argue that there's little point in asking the kids to produce at all in front of a class because any input for the rest of the class that's not correct is damaging. I don't think that's necessarily true - I think forcing kids to output can just be dangerous because they aren't always ready and so it stresses them out and upsets them.
So when I go to play games that require my students to output, I have to make sure that

Popcorn Reading

This is something that's been running around our county a lot, and I'd love to give credit where it's due, but I can't remember where it came from. Since it landed in my inbox the first time, I've done some tweaking with it, and here's what I've come up with:

my classroom has chairs instead of desks, so I put half of them in a circle, and then the other half in a second circle inside the first, so that the chairs are facing each other.

You should have a circle that looks like this, and then a secondary circle inside it. Each kid should have a partner facing him, basically.

Embedded Stories

There have so often been stories I wanted my students to read that were simply above their heads. The most recent example is Catullus' carmen V. It's a lovely poem, and the concepts are really pretty simple, and I spent a day or two teaching them some of the the vocabulary they were about to run into, but it's poetry, so the phrasing is hard and, sometimes, keeping the flow of it is hard.

One of the answers to that is embedded readings. Michele Whaley and Laurie Clarcq are the creators and goddesses of this technique. Essentially, it means creating several versions of a text to scaffold it so that students work up to understanding the original. It allows you to work up to new vocabulary with explanations, synonyms and scene-setting so you end up with very little glossing and very little reverting to L1. The first version should be simple enough that they should understand it easily with no questions.

FVR - free voluntary reading and TarHeel Reader

It's hard to do free voluntary reading in a classroom because it can't really be voluntary. You're telling them to read. And it can only be free within boundaries, because they can only read things at their level, and that can be pretty limiting. But I've spent some time building up a pretty decent library, because - as studies have found - when kids read what they want to, they get more out of it than reading what they're told to read. So how do we get our kids to read - since it builds vocab, it builds spelling, it builds idiom and expression - on their own?

We spend ten minutes at the beginning (or end, in the case of my honors IIs, because they said they preferred to do class, get into Latin, and then wind down by reading) of every class period reading. I give them a log they fill out each day that notes what they read (the name of the story, pages of a book, whatever) and a brief summary of it. It keeps them from reading things they don't understand. Some of them read the same four pages every day for a week, and I'm actually fine with that. They think they're getting away with no work, but really what it means is that they're getting repetition, which doesn't do them any harm.

On Untextbooking

I've been doing an experiment for the last couple years, and so far, I'm finding that it's working - not only for me, but also for my students. I've been in the process of untextbooking. That is, I've been phasing the book out of my classroom. My Latin I students don't touch it really at all, and it comes in a little bit (just the first year book, and just because it has good stories in it) second year, but I only pull out the stories I think the kids are going to connect with and find funny.

Three years ago was my first year at my current high school. Our county uses the Cambridge Latin Course, which - at least for a while - has wonderful stories. I had taught out of it for the year I was at my previous school, and so I jumped right into it at GHS, too. But here's the problem - and it's the one I'd found the previous year: while we were interested in the stories we were telling together, and while several of the stories in the CLC are great, many of them feel like a slog, most of them were above the kids' heads (some of the humor is sly, and the kids' sense of the language isn't that developed yet), and it was more about pushing through the reading than it was about enjoying it. I'm not an expert on reading, although I love to do it, but it seemed to me like that just wasn't a good way to teach reading.

Sitting in a CI Classroom

As teachers, we don't often have the opportunity to sit in CI classrooms as students where the language being taught is one we don't understand. Even when we do have the opportunity, we frequently are watching the teacher's techniques or the students' reactions, rather than learning the language for ourselves. We are 'four percenters' - the people who want to drive the car and know how it works, so we function okay in a 'normal' language classroom.

But today I have the opportunity to sit in a CI classroom, and I'm learning French. It's been about six years since I've heard any French, so this is nice. I'm getting to say things in French again, and I'm getting to immerse myself. I'm surprised by, when the teacher's doing a good job, how easy it is to understand what's going on, but I'm having difficulty separating that from the fact that I already have a little French. Nevertheless, she's good at repeating herself, asking us to repeat ourselves, and demonstrating things. We're also demonstrating things, which I would find kitschy if I weren't finding that it also sticks in your memory a lot better. I've been incorporating this into my classroom for the last couple years with mixed results. Turns out that even with gestures, if you don't reinforce them, they don't become a thing. If you do, the following happens:

A Deucalione (or: from the beginning!)

There's a book called Latin for Americans, and I used it once. I didn't find that it lent itself well to teaching a comprehensible language, but rather a lot of vocab and grammatical principles. Generally speaking, most kids don't learn straight grammatical principles very well. Most students - I like to use the car analogy: I can drive my car, but I don't necessarily want to know how it works. Most students are like that with language. They want to drive the language, but they don't want or need a lesson on the engine. It will alienate them, and they don't progress. I've made that mistake enough times. I want to teach Latin to everyone, because they're all capable, they want to, and more than that, they have the right to learn it. So I've called this Latin for Everyone, because my goal here really is to learn to be able to teach every one of my students. Including the one who, right now, refuses to take his headphones off and insists on sleeping no matter what I do. I will learn to teach that kid.

I'm sitting at a Comprehensible Input workshop presented by my county. I'm listening for beautiful nuggets of wisdom that are either new or that I need repeated, and there are always many when we learn from our communities.

Really, I guess, I'm starting this for myself because sometimes I do things that really, really work, and then three weeks later I want to try them again but have forgotten how to do them, and that's frustrating. Sometimes I also want to catalog things that don't work, and I want to remember that, too. This year I taught a class possibly more memorable than any other I've ever had because it made me cry more than once. They didn't want to listen. They didn't want to participate. They didn't want didn't want didn't want and so I devolved into grammar instruction in a method as CI as I could make it, because they wouldn't believe that listening would teach them anything. So for the first time ever, they aced grammar sections (which meant almost nothing to them, I'm pretty sure, except the ten who listened) but couldn't manage the stories that some of my Latin I students could read, because they refused to pay attention to it.

If nothing else, I guess, it illustrates the point: we can't learn language just through grammar. We don't learn language by memorizing grammatical principles. Ablative absolutes stopped being a useful shortcut and became 'let's get rid of because' and sounded scarily like math to me. Scarily. And most kids aren't good at math. All kids are good at talking (which, actually, was that class's problem anyway).

My mother always said to me, "Arianne, people, especially difficult people, come into your life to teach you something, and until you learn it, they aren't going to go away." My fifth period is going to be one of those groups, I think, that stays in my life until I understand how to teach them because they deserved to be taught this year, and I didn't succeed, acceptably, in teaching them.

So, about me?

I've officially been teaching for four years. I went through college in a traditional grammar-translation program (and I loved it), but then I hit a turn in my road that's pretty unusual in the Latin community (at least for now). I was lucky enough to learn to teach in a comprehensible input program, from a very good comprehensible input teacher in a classroom full of (God love them) kids who were very forgiving. I got lucky because a lot of CI teachers have to make their way here through a method that not only taught them, but that they've become used to using in their classroom, but, fascinatingly or not, I think the mistakes I've been making are almost the same. I imagine that reveals something about teachers. I've done these:

1. Expected way too much from my students
2. Not repeated myself enough
3. Not gone slowly enough
4. Presented something and then never gone over it again, but thought they knew it
5. Didn't ask enough questions
6. Didn't ask them what they thought of my lesson
7. Not setting up rules carefully enough for my CI classroom to function without distractions, or with little distraction.

I'm creating this for myself so I remember these things, but also because - as Keith Toda said on his blog - there aren't a lot of voices in CI Latin, and even though I respect all of the people who are writing on this topic, well, the more voices = the better. I guess it should also be said (because I've been reading Spanish blogs, too) that CI is for everyone, too. That what we say about Latin is applicable across the board - anyone can do this. Anyone should do this.

So without further ado, these are some lessons I know about right now that I hope I will be able to apply:

1. This kid, let's called her Jamie B, sat down for our first timed write, she sat for five minutes, and I swear, she wrote nothing. Nothing. I sat next to her desk trying to get her to write something. Nothing. She wrote nothing. I couldn't figure it out. We'd just spend two weeks going over this freaking story, and she couldn't write anything. She finished honors Latin II last week, and she wrote fifty words. Now. Zev B wrote 241, so comparatively, I'm unimpressed. But Zev B was writing three zillion words from the beginning, and Jamie B wrote nothing, and she was ECSTATIC at this progress. Me, too, and I told her so. Jamie also had an 82 in this class because she has a tendency to refuse to ask questions, and she likes to sit next to her friends and chat, or use her cell phone, or do her physics homework. She wants an A. She wants an A desperately every semester - she's that kid - and I want her to have an A, but she had an 82 after the final, and there wasn't a lot I could do.

So Jamie, annoyed either at herself or at me, said to me, "But I learned to lie" (one of her problems is that she always tries to tell me the truth, and she doesn't always know the words she needs to do that, so I've been trying to encourage her to lie when she needs to in order to use the things she knows how to use - we're required to give district speaking assessments), and she plopped herself down and talked to me for five minutes straight about Hannah Montana, Zac Efron, and a kid in her class who annoys her. I have never heard Jamie talk that much at all in two years. I was going to just sort of put up with it for a second (because she'd been lobbying for an A and that annoyed me, even though I legitimately like Jamie), and then I realized this was going to be a thing, so I grabbed the computer and feverishly started typing everything she said. I have a record of it, it's about a half page long, and that thing is going to be part of my graduation present to her because I am so stinking proud of her. I showed it to her, and her eyes got wide, and she floated out of the room without even asking about the A.

Kids aren't going to do things 'til they're good and ready to do the thing, and then it'll happen. And I can't get mad or frustrated (at them or at me) for not doing it until they're ready. You can prompt and push and question, and they can accept that, but they won't do it 'til they're ready. Jamie used ut (so that - it introduces a subjunctive) several times. She missed the subjunctive, but she's getting the concept in their. John F gets the subjunctive when he uses it. Who cares? Jamie will get there when she's ready to do it - she's moving that way, and that's the point. If she doesn't move, she won't get there. Let's care about the movement.

2. Tricia W mentioned to me that she finally feels this semester like the things we did last semester are entering her permanent memory, her ability to do things immediately rather than by pushing herself. This is a phenomenon I've noticed a little bit - that they won't really use stuff from the current semester unless it's immediately relevant to them. I need to stop worrying about whether or not they can use what we did last week and start thinking about the progress they're making. I need to be prepared for the fact that I probably won't really start hearing past tense until next year; ablative absolutes aren't going to sneak in until they've heard me use them a lot. They are going to get there if they keep hearing it from me, if it keeps being repeated. I need to remember to keep using the things I want to hear from them, and they'll use them, too. For those things to make their way not just into learned memory but also functional memory takes more time than I want it to, and for it to occur to them to speak more deeply takes some time, too. They remember that they can say this and that, but they won't always think about the places they can take that. They need that from me. I can't expect them to do it on their own.

Anyway. Those are the lessons I'm working from right now. Getting ready for a summer of learning how to teach better, and trying to find new lessons in the space away from teaching, and in the real world. You should come with me.