The idea of milking certain sentences to let the story have more freedom and thus more interest is one that challenges us to step outside of our comfort zones. We pretty much have to let go of control if we want the story to be charged with interest. We can’t just let our own internal […]
When we let go of trying to teach the language in favor of letting those milking moments drive the story, we change. We become real teachers. It’s as if we don’t even care if they learn it, because in those moments of freedom, of rendering that one line quickly, in a high voice, with sadness,
Milking a phrase is of course scary, but only at first. Really, it is so much fun, and largely because you are released from having to know what it going to happen next. Now that is NTCI and when you first do it in class, you feel like something great just happened. Maybe in those
When we don’t target, we are much more aware of the kinds of cool sentences described in the last post because when we don’t target we align with the flow of language and not shackled language. Thus, everyone who works with NTCI eventually creates their own process. Non-targeting (Invisibles, OWI, etc.) frees our work. Like if a
One skill maybe to focus on after the break would be to milk statements more. Anyone who has done CI knows that roughly every tenth thing a class says, or maybe every twentieth, is different (i.e. funnier, more interesting, of a higher quality in sound or meaning, etc.), and gives us pause and makes us
A repost from 2009: Susan Gross has said about personalization: … the BIG PICTURE is the relationships among those in the classroom. That’s what real teaching is all about. If the relationship is healthy, the kids will learn better. If the relationship is shaky, the learning is shaky. Only the teacher has the power to
I just took Julia’s survey on NTCI and it only took about 15 minutes. I embrace this attempt by her to record opinions about NTCI. The thing is, I don’t know how many of us here actually are even doing NTCI as described in A Natural Approach to Stores (ANATS) and in A Natural Approach
I just got a student in my class. Came from conventional high school with an “A” transfer grade. I think that means that this student had looked up all the worksheet answers online and the teacher gave him an A. He doesn’t actually know any Spanish at all though. None of the question words, not
We want complete buy-in from our students when creating a one word image with them. This requires that we are 100% understood when building the image. Here is one way to accomplish that goal. The process is done in English: (1) First, point to the space with respect. Convey the idea to the students that
I can’t think of a better reason to go through the insanity of teaching languages than the one about uplifting ourselves and others. And what is the best way of teaching languages that uplifts us and our students the most? It’s through comprehensible input based storytelling, everybody agrees on that these days. We don’t hear
Are there any other reasons why we teach, something not so obvious? Personally, I believe that a not-so-obvious reason we teach is to uplift ourselves and others, so we can find work that at least has some potential to make life fun and interesting, which many jobs don’t have. Making life better is one subtle
We must often revisit our motives for going into teaching in the first place. It will keep us heading down the right road. We spend a lot of time doing this work in very difficult buildings with lots of opposition, so we should know why we do it. Do we do it for the following
