From Bob Patrick: Interesting (though not at all surprising) tidbit here today.  I have a female student, Latin 2, who was “sent away” to a juvenile institution to deal with behavioral issues (at home –

Here is that information from Jim that he sent to jen about options available to those few kids in class who want something else. Jim, are we to understand that these are for levels 3 and above

Those following the Jeff Brickler thread here will be heartened to read this from some parents to Jeff: Dear Mr. Brickler, David is lucky  to be your student and has been enjoying your teaching and studying

In some classes, like the one Jeff is dealing with right now, you just have to give up the lofty goals of heavy input CI and punt the ball, just to make it to the

I want to keep the blog apolitical. Real life (the shootings) intruded, and we rightly needed to talk. I went numb, we all did, and something in me and in many of us will never

Thomas Merton said what is below. It first appeared here in 2007. I think it’s a good time to republish it here in the light of some of us here having made the significant decision

Jeff is really a kind of lightning rod in our village. He has now been hit again. The image is one of a boxer taking another roundhouse to the head. No mistake about it –

Erin asks the group: Ben, I have a question I’d like to ask the group.  I’ll be missing the last 5 weeks of school this spring (if not longer) to have my first baby.  What

Let’s take a break. I’m not interested in thinking about how to become a better teacher right now. I don’t think you are either. Let’s pick this ball up again in January – that would

Think of this post as a place to say or not say what we are thinking and feeling, if we have not gone numb, right now. We work in schools. Our lives are around children.

Today Diana Noonan came by and saw me using bWT. She didn’t like it. She said that the story we wrote together was more about production and critical thinking and so did not go along

Today one of my classes ended with my group of kids having created the following text as per bWT. We were working from a prompt of three couples dancing at a party: There were three girls and four

We should respect what goes on in the deeper mind as it does its work of creating language systems. We should listen to TPRS/CI experts like Judy Dubois when they speak like this: …it seems

Jody La Maréchale des Forces de l’Ouest said in an email: I think we should name ourselves “The Round World Group”. I can no longer see my work through the “flat world lens” no matter

How beautiful this is from Jody, our Maréchale of the Western Forces: I notice how easily we “change course” trying to manage our own personalities, histories, perceived weaknesses, anxiety/fears about our job security, etc., and

The listening input we provide for our students is not a set of activities but rather a process based on a template (we call it the first two steps of TPRS). In the same way, the

This writing idea is from a teacher in Robert’s school: Our French teacher is also an English teacher, and she showed us a way to nudge our students along in writing and give them the

It’s weird how we can work with this comprehensible input for years and not see things right under our noses. The idea of doing R and D as per recent comments here by Jody, where

This is just to announce a new category designed as a gathering of information point for Mark Knowles at UC Boulder. If you get any information on how your TPRS/CI kids fare in college, pls.

Robert reports on a recent RT workshop with Jason Fritze, the RT master, and we say a big thank you to both of them! I know that RT is on all of our to-do lists, and

A group member asks: …where can I find ammo on the blog that has to do with why forcing output does not lead to acquisition?… Any ideas?

I was talking with one our AP’s today who is bright and actually sat in on the classes I did with Krashen here last year. She gets it. She was ALL OVER the jGR and

Here is more of the conversation between the Structured Input person at the U of Maine (comments in black) and skip (comments in blue). The first article is here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/12/09/structured-input/ Kathleen, Thank you for your

Another series of emails, the third such collection, among the Latinists, but it applies to all of us. It is about Jeff’s organizing himself against attacks by ignorant people, but there is also a valuable

The essence of pop up grammar in R and D is to simply say, “X means ____ “. If a kid asks something about X and Gammar Man inside of us wants to go off

Robert gave a nice rundown of some terms that are thrown around a lot in language circles. Below he explains these terms to Chris, who right now is the kid enjoying challenging the emperors on

A U-Maine French professor wrote a text on input that caught skip’s attention, who shared it with me. My opinion is that this professor would fail badly in secondary schools, and that she likely reaches a lot less

Heh heh. I just keep coming up with these annoying acronyms. Here’s another one – sabrina’s Writing Idea, or sWI. It is an excellent idea and easily put in place just by extending a story class by

Chris needs answers from the group: Ben, I was thinking, I could use some definitions of some terms we throw around.  We obviously know what somebody means when they say CI or TPRS but, I

I had asked David to write out a description of his plan with examples just to make it more clear. The original discussion a week ago was here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/12/01/embedded-reading-activity/ dRP (David’s Reading Plan): Day 1:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sir-ken-robinson/do-schools-kill-creativity_b_2252942.html

Remember when you were little and sometimes you played ball, learning about throwing and catching? You even threw it to people. And they caught it sometimes! And YOU caught it sometimes! Lets’ break that down in

jen has a question for us. We owe her, for her awesome jGR, so answer her well: So today, out of the blue, the new French teacher (who has in level 3 the group that

Carol suggests that we talk about getting some ideas for writing. We don’t have many. It’s a good idea: ….when it comes to the baby steps of writing that eventually morph into the upper level

Jody does this thing where she interviews her kids. It’s a good one: I never “circle” in reading. (I have a lot of reasons for not doing it, but I don’t believe there are any

This suggestion from Ben Lev addresses a problem that I am sure most of us have without even being aware of it: Yesterday in the middle of a story I was getting great response from

A minor but super important thread to me in the past few weeks here has been the one on the rich wanting to hire their own Latin tutors and keeping instruction like it was in the 18th century.

David’s brilliant idea also made me want to share what Anne wrote in the appendix to her story script books – a step by step way of scripting our own stories. Anne has always felt

Melissa sends great news: Just thought I’d share my success. I had a breakthrough day today circling. I was circling likes and focused on food. It was awesome. We ended up in one class with

We welcome Erin to the discussion and thank you for the bio, Erin: Ben, I joined your group a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to introduce myself and let you know what a fantastic

Diane Neubauer wrote this here yesterday: I just attended a one-day conference with Helena Curtain as the speaker. She talked about the 90%+ guideline, why, and how to get through challenges to using the target

Highly recommended: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/watch-teacher-infiltrates-alec-education-meeting-confronts-members

I have made some changes to what I want jGR to be for me. If you don’t like the changes, just use the November version. This is the December version. The sentences I changed are

I hosted a DPS Learning Lab today and made a handout for the teachers to refer to during the observation. Here it is below in case anyone is interested. It’s basically the stuff I want

This is from skip, who welcomes feedback: In an attempt to further the “how do humans acquire second languages” discussion I would like to make the following statements: 1. Oral proficiency is produced by repetitive

A question from Melissa: Hi Ben, My principal just sent out an email asking for samples of our “study guides” for assessments when an individualized education plan or 504 plan requires it for the students.

A question from Jen for the group. It’s about the parent re-education thing: Ben, This email, unlike my others, will be short. I’m just so damn tired. I had to make a call to a

This is the position of ACTFL on learning classical languages (ACTFL Position Statement of 7/30/12): …communication for a classical language refers to an emphasis on reading ability….   Here is the link: http://www.actfl.org/news/position-statements/use-the-target-language-the-classroom John Piazza,

These articles by our own Robert Patrick and John Piazza fit in with the current thread started by David. I think that they are important for us to read, in case we get into discussion with any colleagues