We will link this article to the Super Mini Stories category and keep adding them in here for ease of reference next year: 1. Eating Kittens (Diane Neubauer): (students need: would like to/wants to eat, numbers, good) She is (Lady Gaga). Lady Gaga is not good! She wants to eat. She wants to eat (kittens). […]

An April 29 ruling from the country’s top authority on labor issues says that employers cannot require employees to be constantly positive at work.  …requiring that employees act positive, regardless of working conditions, isn’t allowed. If employers want positivity in the workplace, fine. But they have to create the kind of environment that leads their employees

Just read this from Claire. Then think about it next time you do a story. Then act.  Little girls feeling like they’re just a distraction in school is not okay. Until we do what Robert does and call out little boys who treat girls that way, invading our space when we’re trying to communicate-nothing’s gonna

Russ summed up the thread quite well right here in a comment today: The students create the content; the teacher provides the language. Just don’t think you can assess the kids on the structures. Because you don’t know if that’s even what they acquired. I think the real change needs to be in assessment and

We have done everything we can but our students cannot meet us half way, cannot do their 50%; they are just broken. It is not our fault. We are doing with stories all that is humanly possible in those orc infested nests called school buildings. It is my opinion that the daily hell states that we

So it’s not the fault of TPRS but the darkness that surrounds us. It’s Mordor and nothing less. Orcs are teaching our children. Sauron’s eye still roams our lands, for we have not yet destroyed the ring. There is no Frodo, just us as we walk across the parking lot with the Uncertainty, a feeling

No teacher can fix a teen who for their entire lives have a history of years of no adults engaging them in communication without an agenda. Most have never really been acknowledged in kindness and so they don’t know how to be kind themselves. They live in big fear every day. How are our kids

I was thinking about why it is so hard for WL teachers and, from what I perceive, easier for ESL teachers. Many foreign language teachers stay with the textbook because they (unbelievably) don’t know about Krashen. They don’t know any better. Most of those who even get deep enough into Krashen reject TPRS. Why? The reason

This is a repost from 2009: In mid 2009 Dr. Krashen wrote this draft as part of a series of emails on the topic of non-targeted input and on a new term he had just defined called transparency, which is very much related to the Net Hypothesis. I responded that I felt that what he had written below

Here is a link to a revamped version of the Classroom Rules. I had to take the No English rule out. It never got followed. I also changed the wording of Rule #4 as per John Piazza’s suggestion from last fall. Classroom Rules New May 2016

One thing that Claire has done for me in this thread is validate my Language of the Trees articles, many of which have not yet been posted here, temporarily halted while the authentic assessment train went by (and still continues like on those long Illinois Central trains). I am very interested in the idea presented

Claire has done so much for us lately. We’ve needed the information and she has provided it. I am certain that most of those following the authentic assessment thread here recently have grown a lot in the past three weeks. I really like the expressions in bold letters below. They turn the tables around on