Jen Schongalla had sent me a photo last week from ACTFL and I posted it here of her and Grant and Robert. There was another guy in the picture but I didn’t know him so didn’t publish that photo but it turned out to be our own Nathaniel Hardt! I just haven’t met him in […]

We have a number of bios from group members. Some go back as far as ten years. So you can search a person’s name and maybe they have sent one in that you can read. But we’ve gotten away from them in recent years, and the Teachers of the Month awards, too. We’ve been so

I was making tea this morning and the term: …quando cœli movéndi sunt et terra…. just popped into my mind. This was from the Libera Me  from the Faure Requiem. But I hadn’t heard it for thirty years back in South Carolina when I sang it over an eleven year period in my church. So I

There was a brief thread (one comment) here a few weeks ago on a post by Robert on the topic of Comprehensible Output: https://benslavic.com/blog/comprehensible-output-hypothesis/ I put the part I consider most important in that article in orange. Robert’s comments on Swain cannot be ignored. His read on Swain is so accurate. It reveals so much.

Tina sent this to me. Read it. Maybe share it. It reveals the dark bubble that traditional teachers live in, to the great detriment of so many students: Seven Sources of the Big Grey Cloud in Downtown Portland: My administrator warned me that I was in for a fight for CI because our community is

John just won the Classical Association of Massachusetts Excellence in Teaching Award (aka Massachusetts Latin Teacher of the Year) ?

Kristen asks a question and gives us a nice report from the field in the process! – Hello people that I deeply admire! My admin is thankfully loving the progress I have made this year. I owe most of you a HUGE amount of credit for this wonderful change in my teaching. I was wondering

More important than teaching well is keeping our jobs. In this report, a teacher in our group shares with us a topic that is almost never discussed, and yet is one that is in my view the single most important thing in teaching – keeping things from getting too real and personal in a classroom

Jen just sent this, a photo of her with Grant Boulanger and Robert Harrell in Boston this week: Some of us will be disappointed to note that Grant was not chosen as ACTFL TOY. A traditional teacher was. I don’t think that a single one of us who was involved in helping Grant make his

Here are the images in Mindee’s two stories from last week with her 2nd and 3rd graders. Looks like she is a fast learner! First story, 3rd Grade: 1. There is a pencil.  She is a girl.  Her name is Bobita and she is happy.  She is 7 years old. 2.    Bobita wants a pokeman cat for

Aiming for 100% transparency is just another fence between you and the students. I watched a teacher once who was aiming for much more transparency than I had been. As I watched her it felt annoying. She wrote everything on the board when I just wanted to know what came next. I realized we lose

Tina is getting observed by PPS Lincoln HS WL team later this month. She asked about possible lesson plans. I suggested this: So you want to create a short story and then move to the big four of the 22 strategies in the Reading Options, starting with Choral Translation/Discussion of Grammar and moving to Reading