TPRS year 2 - Reflection

I thought I would offer a bit of a reflection on this past year at school.  So I just finished my second year of TPRS with Spanish in High School (and a middle school class).  I really did notice more students speaking Spanish in these past two years in the hallways than before.  This was my first year at a new school and the teachers would often tell me that they would hear the non-Native speaking kids speaking more Spanish in their classes than previous years.

That's encouraging.  The more circling I do, the more it will just slip out in a contextualized way, right? That is, naturally.

Some things this year that were harder though were that the school environment was a bit different from my previous school.  There seemed to in general be more apathy to learning.  And I was the new guy too.  So that might not have helped.  By my fifth year in my previous school, my students generally knew who I was and what I was about.  Hopefully this second year will be easier in the new school.

I thought I would break down some of the lessons I have learned this year into sections.

1. Native / Heritage Speakers
    I was nervous about having kids in my classes who spoke Spanish as a first language at home.  I was nervous mainly because I thought that these kids might call me out on my not knowing their language or they would get bored and cause problems in class.  I found very few cases of either thing.  I combatted the first one by always asking how they would say something at home (if I was unsure or simply wanting to see if they would help me) and I would remind them, "Hey guys. I'm not as blessed with the language as you guys.  If you notice I make a mistake, please let me know! I don't want to teach something incorrectly."  I think this helped the kids see that I considered them as allies.
   The second concern wasn't really an issue because through storytelling, the Native / Heritage speaking students were sometimes even more entertained than the non-natives.  They enjoyed being silly in the language.
   I did have some opt to read every day and write summaries.  My school was considering doing a Native / Heritage Speaker Spanish class in the future.  It could be neat.  I fear it might require lots of planning though.


2. Student success and less than success
   I had a few students this year who didn't do well with the storytelling.  I asked around about one and he was a senior who didn't want to take my class to begin with.  He also never looked at the board.  He did come in after school once or twice to work with me.  To be fair, in the class that he was in, I had to teach with [outdated] technology.  So I was stuck near the front of the classroom at a computer with a touch panel monitor to switch to different places.  And in order for the other kids to see me pointing in the other school, I had to stand next to the laptop and couldn't stand in front of the TV and point.  As a result, he had a hard time in class but said outside of class that it was a lot easier.

  I also had a student or two sleep during class.  I REALLY need to get into the habit of calling home and checking up on the students.

  Also my policy on cheating next year will be that students will have to come in after school and do the same or a similar assignment to make up their zero.  I seemed to have problems with a few not doing the readings (or even trying) when I had subs.  They would even write the same short answers as someone else (word for word with the same spelling mistakes).


3. Homework
I didn't do it all year and I didn't regret that decision.  My students once in awhile thanked me.  I also heard comments from students that I was a "tough" teacher because I really did my best to make them learn in class, but they knew I did it for their benefit and they liked that.  They also appreciated how we didn't have homework because some classes really load it on.  I watched Alfie Kohn's talk about the second shift.  It's the idea that we give kids a "second job" by giving them all the homework that they must do when it's time to explore other avenues and simply be kids.

My idea for this last year was actually to give kids 3-4 assignments per 3 week period and give them options (enrichment type activities).  Some were cultural while others were retelling the story, making flashcards of the structures, etc.  I never ended up using them though and don't feel to bad about it.  My kids still learned quite a bit!  I'm not sure if they really would have learned more if I would have assigned homework.  It would just have been something that they would have rushed through and done superficially (for the most part).


4. Decorations
I feel like my room was too unorganized in the decorations.  I would like to add a word wall of some sort with verb conjugations and some high frequency vocabulary that I can go and point to when necessary.  I would like to group some of the items together like my pictures of places.  Then I could have the term, "los lugares" (places) above them.

I would also like to do something involving a wall of awesome where I just have things to praise the students and classes for.  Or another idea might be kind of like what my lab in physics class did.  We had the name of the groups who did the best in the lab activities get up on the wall and other classes could even see who the winning group was.  I thought that was a really neat way to get us to buy into physics class a lot more.   So maybe we could have something like that and I could think of a system for groups to get points and they could decorate a little placard that I could hang up on the wall.  Then we would periodically change groups.


5. Storytelling
My first year was a little easier in storytelling.  This year I started out much more confident, but burned out much sooner.  It might have had something to do with my having to miss about two weeks in January / February due to my daughter being born and also getting a bad case of strep for a week.  I'm sure it didn't help since when I was finally back, my students had missed out on the structure for a few weeks.

I did notice about halfway through the year, my kids were getting bored with the monotony of the Blaine Ray stories in Look I can Talk!  This is meant as no disrespect to Mr. Ray and his storytelling abilities.  But many of the stories seem to be the same story, only with a few new words and/or a different character.  My kids were craving novelty.  It might have been my fault for trying to work into a story that fit the structures like the Blaine stories.  For whatever reason, I found myself experimenting and looking for structures that I could make up my own stories with and found success.

I'll do a later post on this, but next year I have decided to not use the Blaine stories as much as make up my own and conspire with a fellow TPRS Spanish teacher that lives nearby.

All in all, the second year for TPRS was tougher, but there were a lot of lessons I hope to learn from to continue to make a myself better educator.

year 2 - TPRS - parent/teacher conferences

So in the last school I taught at and the current one, they tend to have a short day (until 12:45) and then they have parent/teacher conferences from then until 7:00 pm.

It makes for a long day.  In my previous school, we were able to stay in our rooms during the parent/teacher conferences and I think I might have 8 or so parents come (a few of which worked in the building).  At this new school, all the high school teachers had tables set up in the gym for a one-stop parent/teacher shop.  It was a little different, but forced us (especially me) to be more social.

At the beginning of the year, I had a mother meet with me and introduce me to her son.  She expressed to me her reservations about him because he had taken Spanish I the previous year and had completely failed it and had to repeat the class.  She was worried that this year would be just as bad or worse for him.

I've noticed this year he's been doing quite well and tends to have an ok time in the class.  He also aces his quizzes over the stories and structures.  His parents came lastnight and his mother was so thankful for how she even heard him speaking Spanish one day nonchalantly in conversation.  He responded in typical high-schooler fashion, "It's no big deal.  The teacher says it everyday."  Nevertheless, his mother was able to see the change in his attitude toward class and he has completely turned around in it.

There were a few other students whose parents told me how much their kids talked about class at home or listened to songs from class at home and shared that with their parents.  These are my treasures.  These are the things that are what remind me that the day-to-day frustrations and difficulties are worth it because I have students interacting with the language and loving the experience in the classroom.

Día 125 - junior high Spanish

One day a few weeks ago, my storyline developed into a boy had a big zit bigger than an elephant and he was sad.  Jessica Simpson loved him and kissed his zit.  I didn't have any idea the story would go there.  When we got the actors, it of course added interest but the story started out fairly interesting to that class.

My Junior High Students filled out a questionnaire at the beginning of this semester and I wanted to get some more ideas of things to talk about in class with them using the language.  I also have seen that the more we can personalize the stories around them, the more interesting it is and silly it gets.  Of course, we must remain in the realm of not making fun of the students.

In one of Ben Slavic's books, he talks about using a student's pet as a character in the story.  Only, he starts the story with: "___ has a guinea pig." And then he talks about how they have a mean guinea pig, etc.  It develops into a character and even though that person's guinea pig isn't any of those things, it makes the story more interesting to the class.

Sometimes we want to make fun of something in Spanish but it can't be the students.  So how can we make fun to learn description words without hurting students' feelings?  That's where pets can come in.  My students learned the word "fat" pretty quickly because I always talk about my fat cat, Felipe.  Sometimes I might even teach the word "Smelly" with him.  Or "stupid" can also work because I'm not talking about a person.

So I tried this out with a student.  I wanted to practice the structure "Had." So I read their questionnaires and looked for pets that we haven't learned the names of yet.  Then I started the story out with "____ had a hamster" instead of "there was a hamster."  It worked out well.  I went along with Ben Slavic's idea of describing the hamster as mean and seeing where that is going.  Then I practiced the structure "s/he wanted to have" and it turned out the mean hamster wanted to have a car.  So he went to a competition in McDonald's where he ate 104 Bic Macs.  The purple Teletubbie only ate 103.9 Big Macs.  I got some repetitions of "s/he won" in there, which was my third structure and then they finished the story with the Purple Teletubbie eating the hamster.

A student told me that she wanted to be a part of the story.  She's quiet but her eye-contact is great and I can tell she is picking up the language through quizzes and occasional comics and other things.  So I decided to incorporate her into the story.  There was only one problem, the structure I wanted to practice was "s/he lost."  Well, no big deal.  I looked at her sheet and saw she had a frog.  So we talked about her ugly weak frog with 1000 eyes who wanted to have 9 sexy girl flies.  He went to a competition in Jersey shore and jumped low.  A beautiful penguin jumped higher and won.  The frog lost.  He was sad.

The interesting thing was the class loves these things as well as the inside jokes later that are created just for us.  When I reminded them that the students' hamster was dead, we pretended to be sad for her.  I love it.

Moral:
So if I get stuck in a storytelling rut, fictionalizing pets is a good way to make a story more fun.

Día 24 - Creating a story for Junior High

Yesterday I decided to experiment with the Junior High class because they were not responding well to my stories.

So I created the following as a plotline.

Now keep in mind that when you're creating a story for a class, you start with three target structures and a problem.

The idea is to either solve the problem in the story or work on solving the problem even if you don't resolve it.

The reasoning behind this is that without a problem or some sort of conflict, you have no gas for your story.  It's great to add details and funny little extra things to the story, but if the story does not have a plot, there will be no context for which the students to remember the terms.

My problem was that:
A boy wants a girlfriend but he has bad breath.

My target structures were:
Estaba triste (He/She was sad)
Quería tener (He/she wanted to have)

Le dijo (He/she said to him/to her)

I started off class with PQA asking the class how they were feeling.  I thought that I could have my stories in the future highlight an emotional condition of some sort to tie them in together.  It offers a good context for my brain at this juncture.

Then we went into comparing and contrasting how people were feeling in class.  Until finally I asked for a volunteer.  We established a new identity for the student because I didn't want to have any actual student to have 'bad breath' unless I clear it with the before class.  So my actor wanted a girlfriend and he had bad breath.  Throughout the story we added extra words.  If the students wanted them written on the board, I wrote them, otherwise we moved on.

We had two different locations in the story due to time constraints.  After class a student told me that it was a very interesting story.  This helped.  I also had one of my sillier boys in class act as a girl that had no nose who he ended up with at the end.

All in all a good story.  Now today I would like to do a reading activity with similar but different details or a dictation as mentioned by Ben Slavic in his book TPRS in a Year!.