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
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
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:
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.
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.
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