Ben Slavic

Where It’s Going

I would like to share something I wrote this back in 2007, when I was still trying to make TPRS work for me: “When we divorce ourselves from any idea of establishing meaning, defining words, teaching from a word list, keeping up with a high frequency list, connecting our instruction to a chapter book that

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MAGA

When I was in high school, I attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana. Classmates included a kid whose family owned 51% of Coca Cola, Ward Lay of Frito Lay, Jim Lear of Lear Jets, whose dad used to fly him to NYC for lunch on Sundays from the school’s airport, which was next to our

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Kindergarten Day

Kindergarten Day allows us to see our students in a different way – not so much as students but as real children. We read from picture books like “I Am A Bunny” or “Trains” or from counting books with pictures of things like four apples, and five flowers, etc. We read from these books for

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Shame on ACTFL

Our national parent organization has done a good job of identifying the Communication Standard as what should be the main focus of our work. However, over the past thirty years as the research became more and more clear each year, they never found themselves able to cast off the textbook model, which has almost nothing

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Mimi Met

A repost: Miriam Met, a trainer like Helena Curtain in the old days, a PhD in language whatever from Philadelphia and a very big deal in language teacher training over many years, came to Denver in 2006 to do a day long training for almost two hundred foreign language teachers in Jefferson County. She was

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Narcissism

In the new POST-COVID model of education, teachers must learn how to identify people with narcissistic traits and deal with them so that we have a lot more AUTHORITY and command a lot more RESPECT than we have in the past as teachers. I highly recommend a book by Dr. Christine Northrup called Dodging Energy Vampires.

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