In those afternoon sessions in San Diego, I want to do a thing where we’ll work on CWB and OWI and stuff like that in groups of four after seeing it modeled by me and one other teacher. So the order for our first session on Tuesday afternoon would be: 1. I model CWB. 2. […]
I’ve often wondered why those Circling sessions coached by Susie and others at national conferences over the past ten years didn’t work that well. Well, in my opinion they didn’t work well because people I talked to told me they felt shitty at it. I felt shitty at it. I observed that the sessions made
Liam reports in from New Jersey: Ben: I hope your year is winding up nicely and that you’re getting pumped for SD! I had wanted to be more in touch over the blog this year but, if you recall from a previous exchange, teaching 6 different classes with multiple levels in some of them and
It is only the whole brain that can perform the nearly infinite functions necessary to grasp how the language is built (the conscious analytical mind is totally incapable of doing so). Just speak to the kids and read with them Point to the majestic design of the building of the language, which is far more
The fact is that the grammar teachers’ claim that their students can acquire a language in this way is and has been completely false. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can come from studying a language in this way. We must look at the house to learn the language, not the bricks. We don’t have to become architects
Let’s teach buildings! Let’s teach Garnier’s Opera House in Paris. We can walk around the outside of that building for three hours and barely begin to get what is on those exterior walls. And then we can go inside for the Chagall ceiling and for wonderful stories. And then we can hang out studying the
If it were a business, language education would eventually fail for the brick house reason. Few customers would be left. Administrators who continue to pay upper level teachers with seven or two white kids in an upper level classroom room rip off taxpayers. No wonder we have financial problems in our schools – we are
The result of grammar study is that the language house thus built of batches of grammar bricks has no shape or form, and, most egregiously, is not related to sound, which is what language is. How sad that years of training are given to build a house that doesn’t function or even look like a house.
Now that my vision is clear about grammar acquisition, I can see that grammar, word order, rules of agreement, all that mechanical stuff, is organized in the basement of the house! It happens by itself unconsciously! The conscious mind – the upper floors of the house – can do nothing to organize a language into speech!
This is the first in a series of seven articles against grammar instruction. Grammar instruction hurts kids. Stop doing it if you still are. In the past, teachers would take a batch of bricks, called a chapter in a book, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids
These are the keys to everything: 1. Circling – it has to become automatic. There are some hokey videos by me on the topic of Circling on the Videos hard link at the top of this page. 2. We have to slow down so much that it is awkward. We just don’t do that, no matter
Jody has made a point about CWB that seems small but is big. I put it here to make it cross reference with those categories and thus have less chance of being forgotten. She said: …starting with a little TPR practice–doing stuff you know will come up in the CWB or OWI–can be very fun and
