French 2 - Day 1

So, I'm a little apprehensive beginning a new year with my advanced students. Truth be told, I'm not a hard core disciplinarian and that spells disaster for TPRS. I think students are still learning more than with the book approach, but how much more can they do if I do a better job of having a controlled environment, so a few changes I am planning on implementing this year.

Seating charts from the first week. This is hard. They are a tedious thing for me to make and I don't like doing them at all. Kids hate them, but they do usually work . . . for a while. Then, they need to be done again, which is my biggest gripe.

More important, I'm going to have a brief but serious discussion in L1 with my students on the first day of class about expectations. I'm going to have a scribe write down some ideas of what expectations the students have of me and what expectations I have of them and some potential consequences. Ben Slavic is a strong advocate of Reaching for the phone and it sounds like a great tool, but I hate calling parents. Probably the best reason I should . . .

Finally, I'm going to devote some time each day to read what others are doing. Ben's blog has a lot of good stuff and he's made classroom management a focus this year which is just what I need. Too bad I couldn't make it to NTPRS this year. Last year it was great, but sounds like this year, classroom mgmt was a focal point and I would have done well to have experienced it.

Well, off I go . . . I'll have to blog about how things went after "the talk" tomorrow.