Also here is a “funny-if-it-weren’t-so-true” report from John: Hi Ben, I recently had the privilege of hanging out with Diane Grieman at a gathering of local CI teachers, and she had an interesting story about textbooks. She spoke of a colleague who, when asked how she managed to teach from mostly TPRS based materials, in […]
This from John: Ben, We create stories together as a class and everything goes great; everyone does their jobs and I’ve got pictures to work with and a rough, written version of the story by my story writer. I take that rough written version and polish it up for our Step 3 Reading, right? I
A friend told me about his recent bike tour in the south of France. Here is what he said: “We just rolled along the countryside and caught the sights and sounds along the way with a lot of good food, wine and so on. Hanging out over there seems to have a lot more dimensions
Carly Pike has a question that I don’t believe has been addressed here before: Dear Ben, I am a brand new teacher, attempting to survive my first year. Things are going as well as any first year could expect to go, however I’ve hit a roadblock. I have just started to teach a combined French
In yesterday’s loss to Seattle, Denver, and all the other teams in the National Football League, and a whole lot of other Americans who work with groups of people, actually won. Why? Because we saw modeled, by the Seattle team, interactions between the team and especially it’s coach Pete Carroll that describe a new model,
There is a thread on Movie Talk over on the forum some of which I moved over here. There are some very valuable MT links in this discussion: Chris S. – Yesterday basically on a whim I movietalked this: youtube.com/watch?v=nfYPktsd9bs It’s 3:23 long, it’s called “Chicken or the Egg,” has sound and music (but no
Personalization is a two way street. The kids must sense in the PQA that we really care, as a person, about them, in the midst of all of the questionning. Susan Gross has pointed this out to us so many times. However, it is sometimes very hard for us to genuinely approach our kids with open heart
How many people are still enforcing jGR/ICSR now at the end of January? Just curious. I am thinking less people than in the fall. Why? Perhaps for two reasons: 1. Everything is working. The Classroom Rules poster and the jGR chart require only limited use during class to straighten out wayward youths. The classroom discipline
Just to summarize a thread that pops up here every once in a while, we have been working on coming up with ideas for upper level classes. We have two that are being tested by various group members in their third and fourth year (true CI kids since level 1) classes. The first idea is
Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 100 years old today. My dad was a violinist and fought in Germany in WW2. When he returned home he had to switch to the viola, because he couldn’t hear the high notes any more. He met my mom in Wiesbaden when they brought her to
I feel like there is some confusion about the effectiveness of stories. There has been a lot of talk, especially over the past two years, about how, as long as we just do comprehensible input in any form, we are doing our jobs. And that is true. In fact, it is a point I have
Nothing could be more important to the novice teacher than a feeling of being on safe ground at the beginning of a storytelling class. Nothing could be more satisfying to the novice teacher than the knowledge that the story is going to develop naturally with little fuss, that it won’t have to be forced, that
