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.
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