I write stuff on scraps of paper and they collect on my desk next to my computer and then I throw them away. Before I toss them this time, here they are written out:
…when traditional teachers are faced with real facts based on real research, many of them go into intellectual convulsions and then hunker down with the textbook rather than change what they are doing. They are supported by admins who aren’t in the least intellectually interested in what is going on in our field as long as the classrooms are quiet and the kids remain submissive…
…good language teaching must be lived, not planned…
…language teachers need and deserve to have access to a way of teaching languages that works….
Laura Avila, one of the truly great Spanish teachers I have met, has said this about the Star: “The StarChart is on one of the walls in my classroom. I point to it daily, multiple times throughout the course of the day when we begin class with, ‘Class, where are we on the Star curriculum?’ “
A teacher in my Saturday classes wrote to me, “I like the Star because I can be myself.”