Sunday, Fun day

Sundays usually come with some anxiety for me.  The past couple have been exceptionally bad.  I get anxious because I'm worried/doubtful that I've got the very best story/lesson possible for Monday's classes.  Once first and second period on Monday have passed, I'm usually much better.  And by the end of the day, I'm confident that I can make it the rest of the week.  Why is Sunday so stressful? 
This Sunday's remedy came when I finally crafted a story for my third years with the following structures: no digas (don't say/tell), no pongas (don't put), no te pierdas (don't get lost).  It's difficult to come up with a story with all three.  It was probably pretty silly of me to pick these three commands, but alas I have a story.  It involves Bill Gates eating love pills (from another story) and talking with a few of his friends and his mother about his overpowering love of Lady Gaga.  He gets better when Steve Jobs gives him a shot of hate.  There's a lot of dialogue because we're focusing on commands, so I'm banking on the fact that my students will help me out.  I hope they will.  January always makes for a tough crowd. Happy Sunday!

How to create interesting stories with time-limited classes????

Lately, I've realized that I continue to make the same mistake with my third year students - I teach too high for most of them.  Since my students only meet for an hour at a time for only three days a week, they don't have the same level of background/acquisition as other third year students.  This makes it difficult because they haven't acquired as much, but the curriculum we follow seems to disregard the lack of time/acquisition that my students have had. 
I'm struggling with creating interesting, grammar-focused, vocabulary limited stories for them.  But then again, maybe I'm not letting them play the game - I need to personalize more.

Sheltering vocabulary not grammar...

This seems to be a recurring theme for me: the struggle between covering it all and getting my students to acquire the language.  I realized that during my struggle to get myself back on track this semester, I assigned a vocabulary relevant story, but a grammatically irrelevant story (since we have a common assessment coming up).  We're currently reading the story ourselves.  So now I'm stuck in a situation where I have to navigate this mistake.  I need to get my students back to focusing on commands.  Does this mean I totally drop the story to the wayside or is there some other way to get them back on track.  The story follows a similar story line as one from Blaine Ray's LICT muchísimo book - Girl sells love pills, girl accidentally takes love pills, girl immediately falls in love with herself and never leaves the bathroom.  That's where I get into a bind - there aren't any other characters in my story, so it's pretty difficult to incorporate some sort of commands.  Any ideas out there?

TEACH high frequency, COVER the rest.

I love this quote from Blaine Ray - "TEACH high frequency, COVER the rest."  It is such a great piece of advice.  I've been stressing over all the vocabulary that I need to "teach" this semester as it seems like third year Spanish has waaaaay more grammar than is viable.  But as long as I stick to teaching the high frequency stuff, I can "cover" the rest through being random vocabulary in stories and on their vocabulary lists.  *sigh* It was just the piece of advice I was looking for today.  Sometimes I just need someone to remind me what TPRS is all about.

Bouncing back

Today during first period something amazing happened.  I tried teaching commands through the hokey pokey.  I was too scared to attempt this last year as it didn't fit my personality that I had built up between myself and my students.  I remembered that if I am enthusiastic and don't care about looking stupid, neither do the kids (as much).  So as we started the song I got the goofy "I'm so excited" look on my face, clapped and rubbed my hands together... and the fun started.  We sang and danced, had a great time, and most importantly, we learned a few commands quickly and painlessly. 

Throughout the day I did the song two more times.  My fifth period was the best, I suspect because I had taken a risk.  I had stepped outside the box.  My kids appreciated doing something goofy and different (because I'm not that creative and amazing yet with the CI/TPRS skills as I'd like to be). 

Sixth period finally felt like sixth period.  No, my sixth period ROCKS.  They are a great class. The reason it finally felt like sixth period is because things started to click today.  I think I started going slow enough, pausing, personalizing and translating enough.  During my sixth period today, I think my class exhaled because they finally had their teacher back, and I relaxed because I was finally back.  I haven't felt much like myself since the beginning of this semester, but boy... It is GOOD to be back. :)  I'm even kinda bummed that tomorrow is a test day!

You're just what I needed...

We had a wonderful 3 day weekend this past weekend.  It was just what I needed after making the realization that I was/am burnt out.  I've made some big shifts and so far life is much better.  Today felt like I was even closer to being back on track with my classes than I have yet this semester.  The main ingredient to success (especially in a high school classroom): enthusiasm.
Since I've started putting myself first, I have more enthusiasm and energy to use in the classroom. It's been a welcome shift.  I've moved away from using my lazer pointer to moving around the room.  I think this increases my students' learning two fold.  They watch me as I move, so I know who's paying attention; and I slow down, so they have time to process.  Things are coming together.  I just need to become more focused on teaching to the eyes.
On another note, I'm hoping that this class I'm taking currently will pay off.  I'm using the ADDIE instructional design template to design a "unit" (I guess?) around teaching my third years affirmative and negative commands through reading and storytelling.  I'm hoping it'll be useful.  If not, I've already made a few connections with my instructional coach at school which reaped a lot of benefits with interesting graphic organizers (which I can use in third year as reading checks/evaluations) and valuable discussions with her about the intended use of common assessments in our PLC work.
This week will go by quickly, but I feel like once I hit my stride with my first extended reading in each class, that's when I start to get comfortable again.  I wonder why?  Is it because I've gone through all the "steps" or is it because when we do the readings I feel like I have more of a crutch?  Either way, I feel like my strength is incorporating reading.  Which works out wonderfully since that's how we acquire language! :)  What is your strength?  How is this semester panning out for you? 

No one will take better care of you, than yourself.

Today is day two of my journey to understand perfectionism in order to not allow it to control my life.  Last night, I read a couple of articles, courtesy of my fiance, (here and here) on burnout.  I was pretty sure before reading that I was burnt out.  After reading the articles, I was absolutely sure and disappointed that some how I had gotten to that point.

A couple of messages rang loud and clear, but the most prominent was the fact that if you don't take care of yourself, no one will.  I'm still unsure if it the expectations I try to achieve are actually put on me by superiors or if they are imagined by myself.  Either way, I understand how important it is now to make myself a HUGE priority. 

Another message that rang clear was that people who are on their way to burnout minimalize their friend circle.  They often cut themselves off from the world.  That is exactly what I had done during the first semester.  It's easy to say "Not right now", but the fact is that we need friends and family as a support system.  We cannot do it on our own. 

After realizing these things last night, after my too long of a blog post :), I resolved to make this my mission for 2011.  I need to get my life balanced, and maintain that balance.  So I only did a 1/2 hour of work, then I knitted, drank some sleepytime tea and relaxed.  And guess what, today I was a MUCH BETTER teacher.

Re: The Great Enemy of Teachers...and Students

Perfectionism has been on my mind a lot this year, and really my whole life in general.  The topic has come up recently on TPRSlistserv and on Laurie Clarq's blog.  Seeing this topic discussed on these public spots has helped me gain valuable insight into others' experiences with and views on perfectionism.

I've known since at least high school that I was/am a perfectionist.  I remember writing my autobiography in 9th grade English class and talking about it in there.  My view, however, of perfectionism has really changed this past few years... slowly.  During high school I thought that my perfectionism was a real strength.  It helped me channel my fears, mishaps, and otherwise negative experiences into positive ones.  During my senior year, I remember having an anxiety attack during the spring because I had too much on my plate (president of NHS and soccer team member among other things).  After that, I vowed to not to do too much again. 

And I did a good job, during undergraduate.  I made sure to limit my responsibilities (but to any sane person I'm sure I still did too much) and take time for myself.  It was a good time.  Some how that slipped away the closer I got to graduation.  Possibly because of the pressure (or perceived pressure) of meeting my full potential as a person. During my internship, the idea of teacher burnout became very real.  I took the following year off from teaching because of it.  The burnout was real, but I didn't know how to slow myself down. 

With the beginning of my teaching career, I was a permanent substitute.  I worked very hard to balance my work and my life.  I worked hard with my first full time teaching position at a very well known high school in Colorado to impress my co-workers, administrators, students and parents (sadly probably in that order too).  Although my fiance tells me that he thought I did a better job during that first year than during the previous experiences, I worry that I might just be better at hiding it; or maybe I'm just getting worse at dealing with it.  The bottom line is that I don't want this self-inflicted crazy, whirl-wind, judgmental, chaotic, stressful and pressured way of life any more.

It's a big challenge to step back from my life and really evaluate it from a different perspective.  Many times I have epiphanies, which seem huge to me, but they're things that my fiance has noticed (and been telling me about) for months/years/etc.  It's going to be a long journey back from this insanity of unrealistic expectations, but I know that just like TPRS, the journey will be well worth it for myself, my relationships with others and for my career.  Here we go...

An epiphany about being overwhelmed...

The beginning of a new semester seems to bring a certain amount of overwhelming emotion: anxiety, excitement, fear, worry, tiredness, etc.  Now that our first week back is over, I'm feeling much more confident and relaxed. 

We started out just doing PQA, to get students interested and to review. After all, PQA is the best and easiest thing ever.  The students are interested because we're talking about them all the time, but just using different structures.  It's easy to review and introduce using PQA. 

I was really starting to feel overwhelmed though as I was looking at my vocab lists from last year.  Since this is my first year with TPRS, I started paring down my lists into the 2000 most frequent words in the language.  It's really difficult to do because of the fear of my colleagues thinking poorly of me for teaching fewer words.  It's overwhelming to look at a list of 500 words and think "I have to teach all of these". 

But while driving home, I realized that during last semester, and even at the end I felt wonderful for doing this thing.  I know my students knew the "vocab" better than they ever had, and that they had tasted true success in Spanish. I know that it works better for me to teach fewer things, way more in depth than a ton of things not at all.

Beginning of a New Semester... going slow and finding balance.

Today was the first day with my third years, and yesterday was the first day with my first years. I started it out a la Ben Slavic with "Circling with balls" but I circled with cards. I still spent small amounts of time explaining procedures/rules but it was way less than I had in the past.  I think that my students enjoyed it over all.  I remember that the TPRS community mentions that the first 3 days of class are crucial because students decide whether or not they can "do it" in this time frame.  I hope I capture my students again.  They say they understand between 80-100% which is great.  I just continue to try and go slow, and try and bring in the students' interests. 

On another note, I've been feeling exhausted, so it's been tough to start the semester out with a lot of enthusiasm.  I wish I could do more, but I'll try and get a good nights' sleep tonight.  That has been tough because I've been stressing a lot about the start of my grad class again next Thursday.  It'll all end up fine. I'm going to take Michelle Whaley's advice and be aware of the over-achiever gene kicking in.  I'm definitely still striving to find balance between myself, work, school, and life.  On a positive, Gus says that it gets better with every semester; and that's saying something since I started my masters last semester!