Ben Slavic

I’ll be gone this weekend.

We were talking about how TPRS lesson plans and target structures squeeze the life out of stories, creating in new teaches think that TPRS is hard to do and formulaic and they need to learn the formula. This is an investment in boredom. I say that learning how to teach in this way couldn’t be

Angie shared a video with us. She reports: My colleague filmed my Block 2 class today.  It’s long, but has many parts.  PQA, reading and discussion, partner reading, and Movie Talk.  It’s definitely a weird feeling to see myself on film, and I struggle with this group because there are a couple of mean kids

I can’t find anywhere in Krashen, although I don’t have much time any more to look thoroughly, where he talks about communication as awareness. There is one passage that is kind of connected. This is from a paper (I’ll give the source later) that Krashen wrote about something Roger Brown said: This is Krashen: “After

Alisa saw this and sent it to me. It’s not just the air here: http://www.npr.org/2016/05/11/477415686/can-indias-sacred-but-dead-yamuna-river-be-saved

Here is another picture report from the field, like John’s, of me sitting in my classroom:

With my own boys if there was ever any sense in me that they don’t need school that day, for whatever reason, I supported that. But the school always made me somewhat guilty. I accepted that message, that I was doing something a little wrong. The thinking needs to change on that. I am not guilty

That first post about the grove of trees is an attempt to get deeper into the nature of communication, which is the overarching standard in our profession, and yet one that I am sure is not agreed upon, not in the least, by members of our profession. Here is a link to the first Language of

This report from the field is in the form of a picture. John Piazza reports from Berkeley High School (CA): Hi Ben, I wanted to share this pic with you, because I think that you will understand when you see it. This was taken a week ago by a former student who asked to interview me

Along with reading (less interesting to the kids but vital), Star of the Week (much more interesting to the kids) may hold the key to the upper level CI class activity conundrum. It may hold the answer to putting the upper level rubik cube curriculum right.

We need to ASK THEM what they want to talk about before we start talking. This is as per Star of the Week. Why not ask THEM what questions they want to be asked? It’s not that hard to do and the results are fantastic. Just given them time to tell us what they want

So we were talking about how lesson plans lead to less interesting classes in TPRS. Canned TPRS lesson plans are based on insecurity about what is going to happen in the class. In that way, it kind of resembles life when it is too planned out – a bit stifling and devoid of any real interest.