It occurred to me that some of the newer people in our group may not know what our curriculum looks like. In a word, we teach verbs. We don’t teach a mosh pit of intellectual/academic material that can’t be understood. We come into class and our goal is to get as many repetitions on a […]

Our students forget content but they remember language. It’s a big joke that people are hired to teach kids things that they will definitely forget after the test, things that will have zero use to them whatsoever. Why? Because the information is going to the wrong place. It’s like putting all the furniture into the attic

  This story from Jim Tripp has an elegant simplicity in the structure. The one I am going to do with the Skyped in kid from Japan may be too complex. I am glad Jim sent us this. It points up something of great importance – that many of us, certainly me, tend to forget.

Some more details/clarifications from Linda Li on the current discussion about question words: I have two sets of Question words (Pinyin, and characters. Both posted in my classroom. Depending where they sit in the classroom and where I am, they can access to both of them. Although, I intentionally direct intermediate and advanced students to

A student studied long and hard for a (memorized material) Spanish test. The test came and the student was upset that the test was too easy – he studied far more than he needed to, he said, and felt bad about the wasted time. His mom said, “Oh, no time is ever wasted when you

Next week one of my students has to go to Japan for the week. I’m going to Skype him into our classes because he doesn’t want to miss class. We’ll beam him in from Japan on his iPad. Here are the target structures I will use: lost something of great importance looked for found Script

Ruth and I had a side conversation in the comment fields earlier tonight about question words in relation to the overall discussion about Linda Li’s recent Two Truths and a Lie classes here in our school, where her kids were knocking it out of the park with speech output (because of the super high – what I

There is a poignant scene toward the end of the film Night at the Museum when Amelia Earhart whispers into Ben Stiller’s character’s ear, “Have fun!” before flying off in her red airplane. It reminds me of a topic we return to here all the time – the idea that when we focus on the

Every one in a while a sentence rings true. This from Polly, in just a few words, lays to complete waste everything that has ever been said about assessment: …I really feel like those kids that want to learn the language are going to no matter if they have assessments or not….

Nathaniel responds below to some verbage from somewhere. We don’t need to know where, just some sad educational factory place where people write stuff that they don’t really understand but do it because it sounds good. File this line here in the Intellectual Bullying file: …we are designed to teach the whole language of reading

I updated, made some changes to, this very effective way of getting high numbers of repetitions on the numbers. You will need to have the numbers and colors poster from Teachers Discovery here in order to do this: 1. Get an envelope. If you have a turban, wear it. If you want, have the kids find some

This, from John Bracey, is telling. It is almost the equivalent of a criminal indictment on grammar teachers. It really burns me up: I remember having a conversation with some upper level high school students about how they made it this far in Latin. Here are some roughly remembered quotes: “Before a test, I would