Do students remember the things they’re taught? Studies show that we forget at least 40% of everything we learn in grade school. Many have questioned whether the ways we teach are effective in the first place. Mr. Joyce says if they’re told to remember something, it probably won’t stick with them. That is the foundation of this French teacher’s way of teaching his students.
Shayne Patrick Joyce, who would’ve been Sean if his cousin didn’t take it first, has been the French teacher at Kennard-Dale High School for 23 years. He loves long walks up the mountains and teaching basic French to children. But sorry people, he’s taken. Husband and father to five kids, Joyce wasn’t always the passionate French teacher you may know.
He says he started off his life “babied” by both sides of the family, which caused him to be a mediocre student overall. That all changed for our young Monsieur when he went to college with a new slate – a new chance at life. That is where his career in French began, even though this wasn’t necessarily something he was passionate about at first. He was good at French, which is why he pursued it.
A friend of his asked if he wanted to go to France to learn to teach the language. He agreed, and off he went – far away to learn many things and come back as the hero that French students deserve. Like a French Batman… maybe that’s why he loves doing the voice so much.
He came back to America and got a job at an inner city school in Virginia, where 40% of students failed to meet graduation requirements. Joyce declared the environment could be summed up in one experience he had:
“So for this school, 8th grade graduation was a big deal. Right before school starts, walking in, I see a little girl. This student, she’s as sweet and innocent as can be, and her father is right next to her, downing a whole six pack of beer right in front of her before her big day. Like, she knows, at her age, an 8th grader, what she is witnessing is wrong and is just looking in, disappointment.”
After working there for 2 years, Mrs. Joyce got pregnant. Not wanting to raise a child in that district, they moved to Dallastown and eventually Kennard-Dale High School became his new place of work. That was 23 years ago.
With these years of experience just at KD, he’s done a lot of refining to his teaching. That refinement comes from personal experience and research. He started with giving students worksheets and homework, but it didn’t work well. Homework was just an unsupervised task to these students, never helping them in the long run. They’d either get it wrong and not know how to better themselves or just cheat and use Google Translate.
Joyce’s philosophy on homework is simple. “If you’re doing the work in class, why would you do it at home unsupervised?”
The way students learn French in the classroom is what has evolved the most over time, and that evolution majorly has to do with personal research on the brain and how the brain processes information. When asked where it came from, Joyce responded:
“Research tells us that if the brain knows it needs to know something, it won’t keep that information. It will just put it into a little spot in the brain that needs to remember something for a little bit and then forget about it later. If you have many papers and teach directly from a textbook, it’ll make the brain think you have to learn this, so it won’t keep that for longer than after a test. If you trick the brain into doing, for example, telling a story or making things fun in the classroom, the brain will not think you have to remember this and you just will.”
This is what Joyce has implemented in his class: students tell stories, students make things, students have fun. This idea of students remembering things better has shown to be truthful in his classroom; they are remembering more and are less afraid to get things wrong. French speaking, reading, and writing levels have improved as time has gone on by taking the stress of a test out of the picture and just teaching French in inventive ways.
Take a student of Monsieur’s for three years, Ray Shores, who started freshman year in French 1, and now is in French 3. When asked about their improvement, they stated, “Yeah I’ve learned a significant amount of French in his class, every day is funny and enjoyable while at the same time we’re taught the language.”
Joyce, himself, acknowledged that learning is not the same for everyone; some pick up things quicker than others. Some are at a certain point and haven’t quite reached where it clicks yet, some are less afraid to get things wrong so they can correct them. However, from everything he’s done, he believes this way of teaching has truly helped the most people.
It’s clear that this is a different way of teaching. Joyce said he wouldn’t know how to incorporate it into other classes, especially if those classes need some sort of state mandated test, but he’s sure it’s been done. There are many ways to teach without directly teaching the textbook, and Joyce has discovered one of them.
