I'm usually nervous for the first day of school. This year I was extra nervous. Five of my colleagues and I had just been to Canada for a three-day workshop on a teaching strategy (et cetera)known as AIM (Accelerative Integrated Method). I had gone with a fair degree of skepticism. AIM uses a truncated collection of vocabulary that presents and combines all parts of speech in stories, plays, songs and dance. I haven't actually seen the dance part yet. The creator of AIM apparently analyzed French, which is the original language of AIM, and now Spanish for the highest frequency words and phrases, subsequently matching every word to an "iconic" gesture which the teacher performs while the class speaks in unison. I believe that speaking in unison and the criterion for language selection are the accelerative part. The Integrated element may be the limitation of using only the highest frequency words and of couching them in a familiar context, such as a play or a story.
I don't mind sharing that I arrived in Canada almost choking on skepticism. High school students learning fluent Spanish by gesturing every single word? ¡Qué risa! They would think it too infantile. Alas, I'm a kinaesthetic sucker. As soon as I started doing the gestures myself and saw how, in contrast to TPRS (which is another method we've adapted here) there is a very lucid plan for teaching grammar, I was bound to try it. It seems to be going very well. The students really like it. The common thread of discussion amongst us teachers is that it is exhausting at the moment. However, it is my considered opinion that it is much less exhausting than talking to students who don't talk back.
A second feature of my curriculum this year (and one which also caused me to chew a little foil) is the fact that I'm trying to run a nearly paperless classroom. I hate paper. I hate how much of it is meaningless. I hate how it piles up. I hate fill in the blank worksheets, I hate figuring out where to put them, and most of all I hate how students ask "Are we getting points for this?" Last year was a big year for me in terms of finding out why they want points for everything. I'm done with it. I don't remember how or why it happened, but the end of the 2011-2012 school year saw me rifling through the internet every spare moment looking up Standards-Based Grading. I couldn't find much for Language Teaching so I've mostly scoured Jason Buell's (of Always Formative)narratives and adapted some of the tools that he's explained. Enyhoo, getting back to the paperless classroom, I've created a website for each class. I got alot of the design know-how from this tech-whiz Chemistry teacher known as Ms. Bethea. I also borrowed shamelessly from the ultra-spare arrangement of Shawn Cornally's physics site. Many, many thanks to them for getting me to think about documenting my practice in this way.
