I got this from a colleague: …students using English lose daily participation points…. I don’t agree with students losing participation points. It sets the teacher up as a bean counter. The perception of the child is that they can be wrong and that the teacher cares more about the point counting than the kid. I […]
I am suggesting some additions – in blue below – to jGR. Words in red are out, words in blue are in. Suggestions, discussion are welcome. INTERPERSONAL SKILLS RUBRIC (used in daily assessment: 30% of grade) 5 ALL SKILLS IN 4, PLUS NON-FORCED EMERGING OUTPUT – this is a rare kid who throws out some good unforced
Two big water tanks overlook the land. The land is full of seeds. It rains little here, so how to get the water from the tanks to the seeds, so that they can grow and mature? I would say to fill up the first tank with as much auditory comprehensible input as it can hold. Then fill up
Karen in Alaska is now in a situation like Jeff’s. Here’s the information: Hi Ben, It is my turn to send you a parent letter. A parent just sent me this letter. I have been meaning to call the parent or email them because their kids just sit in my class with shitty attitudes and
Some kids have rough home lives. They learn to be on guard against emotional or physical attack. When we start our class, we should try to remember that, because we won’t reach those few particular kids with our instruction if they are wary of us, not from anything we did, but from their own upbringing. So
Here is a bio from another Canadian. She mentions the Pure Land. That made me very hippy, I mean happy: Hi Ben, I think I sent you a quick email about a year ago promising a bio when the chaos was over and then summer happened and I played hard and had fun and drank
Here is Corrado’s bio and thank you: This is my first year as a teacher. I am at an “urban” high school on the north shore of Boston, teaching five classes of Latin 1 to mostly freshmen. I am the only Latin teacher in the school, although there is another HS in the district which
We welcome Melissa to the group. Here is her bio: My name is Melissa Kriebel. I teach Exploratory and level 1 Spanish to 7th and 8th graders in Western Massachusetts. Teaching Spanish is a second career for me. I majored in Spanish in college with a minor in Marketing and upon graduation went to work
This tech idea, an excellent one, is from our new PLC member Scott Grapin: Hi Ben, My name is Scott Grapin, and I am a TPRS/CI high school Spanish teacher in NJ. In fact, I share a classroom with Liam O’Neill (Chinese), who I know you met in Las Vegas this past summer. He encouraged
Judy sent me this in an email about Jeff’s questions (see jGR and Parents 1) and I am posting her entire response here because it doesn’t format well as a comment. It’s just a continuation of that discussion. We can’t talk about this enough. Judy’s responses to the parent’s comments are in bold and in italics: First
Jeff is getting hammered right now by two parents. He’s asking for our help. I consider this something of a serious situation, bc if it were us, we’d really need the group’s help to see the best way out. My own opinion is that Jeff needs some direct positive administrator support, that these parents are
We will need some variety as we get into the next few months and on into the rest of the year. Of course, we already have and use: dictée CWB OWI WCTA free writes etc. However, we should not forget that some of the things in that list, which are normally associated with beginning the year PQA
