About twenty years ago when teaching high school French in South Carolina, being at that point roughly half way through my teaching career, I was struggling very deeply emotionally. I was not happy in my job. The only fun I was having was after school coaching cross country and basketball and track. The early optimistic
Some people still think that the degree to which they can get a good problem going and then coming up with a cute and neatly wrapped solution is an indication of their talent as a CI teacher. Nothing could be further from the truth. The quality of the problem and its solution in a story
Hey Carly and Alisa look what I figured out: I spent fifteen years thinking that I wasn’t good enough at TPRS, innocently going to national conferences and spinning stories with a big smile on my face like I was in complete control of the story and yet inside I was a mess. I used to
Another thing about the problem of creating a problem in a story is that it depends on what our starting point is. If we start from a student card in Card Talk, we have less information than if we are working from an individually created image, which states problem, fear and secret on the back
Let’s say when starting to build a one word image with your class that you accepted, from the objects called out, a grape. The first thing we have to do with any new vocabulary is “walk before we talk”, so we stroll to the board and write down in both languages as always: raisin –
I’d forgotten that I had made some “places” posters for my walls back 15 years ago when I was still doing TPRS. Back then I thought it was all about the posters. Now I use about three. Anyway, maybe someone would like to use them:
When children feel honored as a part of a community, they learn. How to speak to our students in a way that uplifts? It is so simple. First, we must of course speak so slowly to them that they understand effortlessly, effortlessness being one of the key words found in Chomsky and Krashen’s research. We
Cher Ben, We know what we know to be true. And we know that if we don’t do what we know to be true, then we betray our students and ourselves. Students are and have always been the reason we fight when we fight. I do not even do pop-up grammar anymore unless I can
If you are writing a story down in class on the document camera, write slowly and enjoy the conversation with your students. Ask them side questions. If your students have by now learned how to play what Blaine calls “the game”, they might lie to you, which is your cue to see how far you
This is from 2009: Block days (90 minutes) are perfect days to teach a song and then build a story or a reading from it. But you can do this in one class period as well. Project a song with its translation and work with it in a more or less traditional way for its meaning. An
Bryan Whitney offers perhaps the best bail out move I have ever seen, better than dictee maybe because that only lasts ten to fifteen minutes, posted below. I call it Write Their Little Butts Off. For those who don’t know what a Bail Out Move is, it’s just a way to end something that isn’t working during
It’s March, everybody. We can do it. Maybe take a lesson from this guy:
