Corinne Bourne

Corinne out in Redding, CA reports in on how the Star is making it easier for her to teach online: People are going to love being taught a language online the way we have been practicing together in our Zoom group this past summer, with stories that they help to create. Last night the all-staff […]

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It’s So Strange

In schools, we don’t really offer languages (I know there are exceptions like Alisa’s team in Chicago), to young kids under the age of 12, but then when they are in secondary school they start. Think about that. This conflicts glaringly with the idea that kids learn their first language starting at birth. What is

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We Are Innovators

We take the data-collection piece of our work as a true and valid thing. It is not. We are serving a monster – the data collection business that makes millions of dollars off of us and our kids each year. It is sucking our souls, vampire-like, and we are letting it. COVID is here as

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Don’t Poke the Bear

If you are pushing the CI now, doing the Star, etc. I would say to wait a bit. If you are not your own department, and you have to align with someone else to prepare for common assessments, etc. make sure you do that. You want to have your kids exactly where your traditional grammar

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Fight on. Fight on.

I refuse to let the molders of my world, esp. right now, influence my mood. We will eventually break down – to dust – the old curriculum, and happiness and unforced communication will define our days doing our jobs. Yes, we have been slaves to the corporate suck-need, their view of education, their need to

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How Do I Get an A?

I’m enjoying reading some of what Robert has written here over the years. It’s a ton. Here is something he wrote in 2016 on assessment: Hi Ben, Relative to the discussion about assessment, I thought I would share the following e-mail exchange I had with a student today. Since the student asked, I decided to

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Mr. Rogers

A repost: Here are some quotes from the documentary on Mr. Rogers’ life that resonated in my own mind with the work we do. They point to the way in which we might design future curriculums, with more interest in what the child is really experiencing in our classrooms and less on the subject matter

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Our Health

The mental health of many people in our profession is unraveling before our very eyes. Many are retiring early, quitting, etc. There is no small amount of suffering involved. You know what is happening because you are in the middle of it. My prayer in this post is straight to our Creator who doesn’t want

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