Our PLC member Taron Ware shares something cool that he created: Hi Ben, I posted this in the French Teachers in the USA Group as a response to the Google Form Evaluation I have been working on (I tagged you in it in the screenshot is below). Would you mind having a look at it? Here’s […]
This is a story that might be told in the future: There was a student on a class trip to France who had quite an experience there. She was a fourth year 17 year-old student in a well-to-do school in Chicago and, although great at memorizing the things required by her textbook-driven teacher in the
This post from TPRS in a Year! is related to the topic of milking and will be the final article in this series on the topic. Anyone doing NTCI can ignore the targeting mentioned in the (2009) article, but if targeting works for you, enjoy! – Skill #22: Staying in the Moment This is my
Laura just returned to her classroom after a family loss. Normally, that would be a tall order, to restore the classroom to prime form after a month of subs and right before a vacation. Here is her report: Hi Ben, I was out from school for over a month. When I got back, the clamor
Here are the Director’s Cues mentioned as a major tool in the milking processes described earlier in this series of posts. They are also listed in A Natural Approach to Stories (ANATS) and in A Natural Approach to the Year (ANATTY). Properly posted (high above the screen), they can be easily used at any point
Eugene and Bonnie Hamilton once spent a few days with me when I was still teaching in a middle school here in the Denver area. Eugene is a Latin teacher and musician (French Horn) and Bonnie is a high school German teacher. We were talking between classes and Eugene said that he thought of stories
Live in your classroom in full confidence that the next moment will manifest safely, creatively, just as the next note manifests in a piece of jazz, naturally. The next note is the next word or word group. Language is not predictable and controlled, but by its very nature free. This is called teaching from faith
A modified (to reflect the current topic of milking) repost from 2009: In one Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger repeats only the words “I’m all right” for the entire song. That’s the message. (Apparently even Mick needs reps on that one, right? I certainly do!) Anyway, that ultra simplistic patterning of meaning made me think that maybe we sometimes try to introduce too much language into our
I spent many years working hard trying to make sure that things got funny in stories. I would think outside of class of ways to bring in a certain celebrity, or some fact about a kid, so that, if it weren’t a home run story, it would at least be at least a single or
Making a story with the Invisibles is truly a team effort. So remind your students to be on the lookout for those little insight moments – those moments to milk – that, in a second, can improve the quality of the movie being made in the minds of your students via a catch phrase. There
We take delight in leaving our old stodgy paranoid piece of our teacher self behind. We relax no matter how hard it is for us. All we have to do is be aware of our intention to be relaxed and milk the right sentences and do the only thing that we really have to do
