Now that the problem has surfaced from beneath the waves, we are left to ask what we’re going to do, right? Now that we are aware, now that we can see the scarred underbelly of our profession, will we just start treating all of our students in the same way? I don’t think that’s possible.
Some teachers were talking about George Floyd: “What can I do about it? I’m just a Spanish teacher!” One teacher responded: “True – you’re just a Spanish teacher, but has this event not made you at least more aware that there is has been visible social inequity in our schools, and possibly in your own
I just heard on the news that only 1 of 6 teachers are willing to go back into the classroom if it is done online. And yet, the news that it won’t be safe to return into physical buildings for at least 3 or 4 months – certainly not in 3 or 4 weeks –
You may want to read this if you still use Circling as a TPRS/CI tool. It engages the mind in thinking about the pattern and CI is about disengaging the mind and making acquisition a completely unconscious process. Circling was invented by someone in Blaine Ray’s circle (not exactly sure who it was, maybe Blaine
The agonizing over opening schools, those conversations, is usually explained as based on a fear that kids will get behind. I don’t know about other subjects, but there is never being “behind” in languages. Everyone is exactly where they are. At the end of ten months of torture in traditional classes, the kids are en
We need to address HOW we are making our kids feel when they are in our classes. To extend Marshall McCluhan’s message beyond electronic media, is it not possible that we ourselves, our bodies and the expressions on our faces, also the medium for our CI messages in our classes? Bear in mind that the
This is a repost from 2018: There has been a lot of recent discussion in the World Language teaching community about performance assessments that ask students to interact with authentic resources and integrate all three ACTFL modes of communication – interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational. This movement towards asking student to interact with the language in
This morning I was doing my usual a.m. routine of sitting at the kitchen table answering emails, the usual. My eye caught the mess on the sink and countertops of my kitchen and my brain said, “Clean the fucking kitchen!”. But my other eye caught on my computer’s desktop the image Danielle drew in our
A repost from 2011: We want to be like pitching machines, which, being robotic, do not overly concern themselves with the ideas part/where the story goes. It’s like a director deciding to develop the dialogue for a film around the personality of an actor (the class) and not on a script connected to targets (the “curriculum”). There
Focus on the beauty of the language, and not on what your students can or cannot do with it. Beauty always draws people in. So does fun. It also draws people in. Beauty and fun – don’t teach another class without them.
I feel as if the “New CI” out there is very much about making money for the new breed of purveyors of CI, who explore and pollute the purity of the research in what has become a new CI marketplace that uses social media and the internet to sell very mediocre stuff that has strayed
This was written and posted here in 2016: Are Sauk, Latin, Myskoke, Chickasaw languages asleep or is there something more going on? It’s easy to say they’re dead or on the point of extinction (in five years 70 of the remaining 139 Native American languages will “disappear”). But are they really going to be dead?
