Tina is back in her classroom in Portland today after a pretty intense but very rewarding experience in Atlanta with 146 teachers of the North Atlanta Cluster of the Atlanta Public Schools. We had been invited there by their WL Coordinator, Dr. Margaret McKenzie, for a two day training. The energy there is, has always been, amazing.
As Tina and I were getting ready to board our flights home at dinner time last night in the Atlanta airport, I told her that I felt like I had too much too say, that I couldn’t get it all said. (When you do trainings, many lightbulbs go off, and I am sure that the other teachers in our PLC who train people in comprehensible input methods would agree with that statement.)
Anyway, Tina the Wise – she is wise – said, “Ben you need to start making videos so you don’t have to take so much time writing. This was good advice because many here on the PLC know that I pretty much write my ass off all day and have been doing so for ten years.
Anyway so that is what I am going to do. I want to keep writing and publishing lots of articles here, of course, so that we can continue to enjoy at least one place on the internet where we can go narrow and deep with the CI discussion to help each other process questions and problems that arise in our classroom on a daily basis and thereby keep our mental health going to the best extent possible in what is now clearly a burnout profession.
But look for some video links popping up here now, hopefully every day, of musings that are just easier to get on video than my having to sit and compose my thoughts into an article every day. We can call them “Ben’s Morning Musings” or something. I am going to record the first one right now and upload it to my YouTube channel and share the link here later today.
It’s on how issues of race intertwine with world language education in the Atlanta Public Schools.