If it were a business, language education would eventually fail for the brick house reason. Few customers would be left. Administrators who continue to pay upper level teachers with seven or two white kids in an upper level classroom room rip off taxpayers. No wonder we have financial problems in our schools – we are […]

The result of grammar study is that the language house thus built of batches of grammar bricks has no shape or form, and, most egregiously, is not related to sound, which is what language is. How sad that years of training are given to build a house that doesn’t function or even look like a house.

Now that my vision is clear about grammar acquisition, I can see that grammar, word order, rules of agreement, all that mechanical stuff, is organized in the basement of the house! It happens by itself unconsciously! The conscious mind – the upper floors of the house – can do nothing to organize a language into speech!

This is the first in a series of seven articles against grammar instruction. Grammar instruction hurts kids. Stop doing it if you still are. In the past, teachers would take a batch of bricks, called a chapter in a book, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids

These are the keys to everything: 1. Circling – it has to become automatic. There are some hokey videos by me on the topic of Circling on the Videos hard link at the top of this page. 2. We have to slow down so much that it is awkward. We just don’t do that, no matter

Jody has made a point about CWB that seems small but is big. I put it here to make it cross reference with those categories and thus have less chance of being forgotten. She said: …starting with a little TPR practice–doing stuff you know will come up in the CWB or OWI–can be very fun and

A repost from 2011: When we stir pancake batter, the lumps go away and the batter is smooth. That is what we want to do with our repetitive questions when we circle. Just keep making circles with the wisk in the bowl until the lumps are all gone. If we don’t make enough circles, we can

I posted this in early May and had to push it back until now because the queue was too jammed. It’s starting to get a little unjammed now. I had just visited a classroom where the teacher laid a bunch of incomprehensible input on the kids as they walked in. It shocked them and me.

I was doing a seventy minute story last week as a final exam. We did the story over a period of about fifty minutes and then the kids were to take the remainder of the period to write out the story. I flipped the board to show the artist’s drawing of the story for ease

Reuben Vyn will be teaching French 1 at iFLT. Watch this guy. He is our best in DPS. He never uses English in the classroom. His exit scores are off the chart. There is an IB program at GW, which has at times been ranked as the #1 IB program in the U.S., because, like

The amazing Robert Harrell is this month’s Teacher of the Month on the PLC. He is our resident scholar here. The complete fisherman, Robert casts his intellectual net far into the ocean for all of us on the PLC and consistently brings in big delicious fish and cooks them himself so that we are never