Ben Slavic

Ben, I would normally write to my Latin peeps when in dire need of blowing off steam, but this is a purely Spanish problem so it seemed inappropriate.  Feel free to post if you want, but I didn’t want to hijack anyone else’s thread. Today I had a meeting with my sympathetic department head and […]

Michele has a request of the group: Hi Ben, I’m ready to start a master’s degree and really would like to pursue something in TPRS, but as far as I know there are no programs as such – even undergraduate.  Or are there?  So instead of just “settling” for doing one in curriculum or technology

Anne Matava and Laura Avila teach together in Maine and are veteran TCI teachers: Hi all, Here in Maine they have made standards-based education law.  The school I teach in has held out as long as possible, but there is no avoiding it, so now we are having to scramble to be ready for next

We have a young scholar in St. Louis whose awareness of the research and spot on grasp of the difficult issues confronting us seems to go well beyond his years. Here’s Nathan Beck’s bio: Hey Ben, Here’s my bio that’s taken me forever to write. Sorry about that! Hello, all! My name is Nathan Beck

Ben, In the general atmosphere of negativity that always comes up this time of year, I’ve caught from my first and second year students the general perception that “Latin is easy.” Several students have said this to me personally and I’ve heard it whispered in various contexts as well. Of course this is always contrasted

A report from Hotlanta: In these days when a lot of us are stressed and stressing (and I have been), I have had a couple of encouraging experiences that I want to report. As you may recall, I have several workshops for teachers scheduled, and this past weekend, I did the first one with 30

When people think of language classes, consciously or unconsciously, they think of the textbook, the conjugations, the rules of agreement about parts of speech that the kids grasp but vaguely. They remember that some kids weren’t interested in all that, and they draw the conclusion that kids don’t want to learn. This is simply not

Greg is getting ready to hit his kids, and I mean like in splat, with their first jGR grades. They are earned each day this week as we speak. On Friday the kids will see a dispassionate, factual assessment of their observable non-verbal behaviors in Greg’s classroom. It will be a big moment for them

This picks up on the Jeff thread. It is from John talking to James. I am in hearty accordance with him about the reading suggestion, and not just because I believe in the raw unbridled power of reading to bring unexpected huge language gains, but also bc just about everyone is crawling to spring break

I have mentioned Tric a Quiz here and I know it’s confusing. I can’t even find where it’s written about – in some comment somewhere. Basically it’s when we start a quiz and question 1 is “Yes or no, the boy is unhappy”. Say the answer is yes. Normally on the regular old Quick Quiz the

The influence of Miriam Met and Helena Curtain and people like that can still be seen in this point from John: Hi Ben, On page 10 of this month’s issue, there is an article “Five Common Mistakes Language Learners Make.” This is a condensed version of an article by a EFL instructor Ann Merritt in

We encourage kids to speak when they want. We don’t force them to do so. That means that in a story, during the story or at the end, we can ask a kid to recycle the information up to a certain point in the story (recycling) or retell the entire story at the end. If