Beth Sims

I hope Beth sends in a lot of reports from the field this year. The last one we got is here:
https://benslavic.com/blog/report-from-the-field-beth-sims/
Follow ups will be important because she isn’t the only person who is going in “new” with the Natural Approach to Stories and Natural Approach to the Year way of teaching for the 2018-2019 academic year.
I will number her reports from the field – the link above takes us to her first report, one glowing with hope and enthusiasm and then in May of next year if we have 50 similar reports I will be happy.
Everything is not going to be wonderful. But they will be real. We will address specific problems with specific responses. Of course, this applies to everyone here and I strongly suggest that when a question occurs to anyone as a beginner or teacher who has experience with the new “natural” approach, she write it down right then and there in class – or have a star student do so – so as not to forget. Important questions are always forgotten by the end of class unless we write them down when they occur to us. Just tell the kids that is what you are doing and they will get it. I wrote seven books that way. Then send the question to benslavic@yahoo.com and I will post it.
Beth is in a unique position to help others who are just starting out in their natural approach journey and those are the kinds of conversations that I want most in the comment fields this year, along with our continued focus on mental health, and on all the kinds of things (discussions about the research, etc.) that we have been intensely talking about for over ten years now here.
What Beth is doing is big time, and if she and others send in enough reports and questions, then we will be able to draw all sorts of conclusions about the validity of what Tina and I are promoting with our intense focus on non targeted comprehensible input. The answers are ready, all we need are the questions.
Last comment here: What we are doing is no game for the faint-hearted. The way we are teaching now is born of intense frustration and disillusionment and I might even say despair. For some of us (me, certainly) it could be seen as a last gasp attempt to make our careers real – for me it happened in the final semester of 38 years of mild insanity and deep sadness, proving again that God has a sense of humor.
We don’t have to be in professional despair anymore, which we all know bleeds over into our personal lives. We now have something that works. So use this space this year to make it work at the highest level for all of us who are trying to make it work, to bring us the peace that we desperately seek in a profession gone bonkers.