The Neuroscience Behind Stress and Learning
Carol sent this: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/neuroscience-behind-stress-and-learning-judy-willis
The Social Situatedness of Language Learning
I got this cool email from Mark Knowles at UC Boulder: Hi Ben, I heard another absurd language teaching story yesterday that you may want to post on your blog. I happened to hear it at a discussion about “Absorb, Do, and Connect” and “Absorb activities”(http://www.horton.com/portfolioabsorb.htm), but the context is somewhat irrelevant for our purposes.
Classroom Management
Classroom Management is 100% a function of student engagement. Without the latter, you can’t have the former. So make it your goal to engage your students and quit worrying about all those little Fred Jones types of tricks to manage the kids. Nothing against Fred Jones, but wouldn’t it be easier to just make your
Time to Get Over It
What this work with comprehensible input really entails is lots of mediocre stories, some really pathetic ones, and on occasion a few really good ones. I really want to debunk the notion in this work that we all have to be wonderful and creative and funny and impressive in this work. I must keep saying
What is this Work About?
What is this work really about? It’s about laughing with kids. If you spend your time in class laughing with kids, and it’s in the target language, you will probably end up by the end of the year having taught a nuclear explosion amount of language compared to what is possible in what you were
Pleasure Hypothesis
If you haven’t read this yet, read it: http://sdkrashen.com/content/articles/1994_the_pleasure_hypothesis.pdf
It’s Getting Old
I really think that I need to get over it and exit the profession because it just nags at me so. I see injustices everywhere and they appear monstrous to me and I just don’t know what to do about it. I see kids that are not in the “club” (you know what I mean
Burn Out
I saw this this morning on a TikTok video: “Don’t burn yourself out trying to change the culture of an organization where you are not in a position of power.” Hmmm. I guess I heard that one about 40 years too late….
Not at the Expense of Children
CI presenters don’t need to fly around the world anymore to present to schools and districts who want to adopt CI. That way of training people is an outdated model. Now, it can all be done online. Besides, who uses air travel anymore, with the planet about to burn up? An interesting result of this
The Game
Blaine Ray calls teaching this way “Playing the Game”. It’s when they try to guess what you are thinking. You put your hand on your chin after asking a question to get student input into building the story, and you look up to the ceiling and wait for cute answers. If you choose to blame
Word Chunk Team Game (WCTG)
I haven’t shared the WCTG in a long time with teachers since it is a Book 2 thing and most teachers are still trying to absorb the gems in Book 1. But I have to say that, after doing a coaching session on it today, I had forgotten how truly magnificent it is for teachers
The Old Days
The old days of “challenging” language students is over. Our field is challenging enough for them and for us. Those days were part of something in language education that didn’t work, and so good riddance. The research tells us that if it isn’t effortless for them, then it doesn’t align with the research about how