John responded to Jeff: Jeff, I know I sound like a broken record these days, but I really want to emphasize that you need to be putting yourself first here: your job security, your mental health and emotional stability, and your family. No class or method is worth sacrificing these things for, especially a Latin […]

Dear all, Yesterday, I was doing an activity with my Latin III class where we read a Latin I story using family members and I was circling things like “who is the father’s son?”  I turned my back and some kid threw something across the room.  I turned around and out of extreme frustration, I

A possible idea, not fully tested yet, is to have a clipboard going during class with a transparency (from the old overhead projectors) over the class seating chart. Each time a kid does something good (following the Classroom Rules) or bad (usually blurting or cell phones) we make a plus or minus in their square

I wonder how we get to know more about the world. Hmmm. Maybe through all the language teachers who work so hard in very rough situations in schools but are now beginning to see real results? But those teachers often think that their work has no purpose, not really, because the kids aren’t interested. Hmmm.

We can only send one tape to a visiting school (CC Rule #3). So, it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all, to increase incentive and buy-in from each class, to make all our classes compete against our other classes to earn the right to submit the tape representing our school. We make the competition among all other classes studying the same language within

I updated the rules. Pls. object to any, support or add any: • Only one day max on PQA to prepare them. • Film the first story you get and send it in. • No stopping the camera. • Don’t start filming until you have ALL the releases signed by kids’ parents. The copies can

Have studies been done to show the success of Curtain’s ideas, in particular the four points raised above? Where is the research supporting Curtain? Or, because she is Helena Curtain, does she not have to provide any research for her claims? Or does having a big brother with lots of money to protect you allow you to

The entire product Curtain offers must ultimately fall like a house of cards, when the teachers who stay with the textbook over the next few decades lose their jobs due to their failure to align with the ACTFL standards, and as their: small upper level enrollments can no longer be justified. school budgets tighten up.

Nobody seems to be calling Curtain out on what she is doing. But she is a false prophet in that she has taken Krashen’s and Ray’s ideas and packaged them in a way that misrepresents them. Her ideas are not geared toward maximum student gains, even if she says so and people believe her and

Krashen has shown that we learn languages unconsciously and Curtain should not be playing with that. Nobody should be playing with that. She is wrong to promote such a twisting of his words. It’s insulting to his work. It distorts*. The application of Krashen’s ideas in TPRS by Blaine Ray require that the entire process of instruction

In the Helena Curtain scenario, which is happening all over the country right now today in classrooms near you, the teacher doesn’t have to embrace the extremely radical and hugely effective idea that comprehensible input really does mean creating a din of uninterrupted L2 in the minds of the students. Comprehensible input and the textbook

What Curtain has done is very dangerous to language educators. She has watered down what cannot be watered down – Krashen. She has pulled what she knows of Krashen into the realm of the textbook, and so has Mimi Met, who has had ties to the Realidades company, which is really scary. Is Karen Rowan