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!

"You must be the change you wish to see..." in the world language classroom.

So this past week was our first week back at school.  Monday the kids come back.  My rooms (I say rooms because our schedule is like a college's so we all share different rooms throughout the school) are in presentable condition.  I have lesson plans for the first week back, and I'm feeling more relaxed than last year at this time.

The most exciting news of the year is that I was given the go-ahead to use the TPRS method this year!  I approached my department head after our first department meeting and asked.  She was excited that I wanted to try something different.  Wahoo!  After that, I asked about purchasing the novels that we will read each Friday only to find that we definitely don't have enough money in our budget to buy the books.  Problem was solved however because the students are warned that they may have to pay a small fee for a "reader" to be used in the class.  This is only a slight hiccup on the road to what I hope is the best year yet!

I've planned this week to start out with minimal talking at the students and maximum language contact time.  I hope this change in delivery pays off in the end of the week.  Monday all the classes have different assemblies to go to during different periods, so I'll spend most of the time getting to know the students instead of going over the rules.  The following days will be spent circling with the student information sheets and the first ask a story sessions.  Friday is a special day in which students will get their Spanish names and will create their own flag to represent themselves (after researching what different colors represent on flags, etc). 

This should be a great first week.  I'm just trying to calm my nerves because I'm used to having everything planned to a T.  Which seems kind of impossible with the circling with student information sheets, but we'll give it a go!