Grant Boulanger has written the folowing passage about the change we are in. It is free of venom and refreshingly clear. If even half of us printed and shared some variation of this text at at our next department meetings, submitting it to our administrators as well, we would reach a lot of people who […]

Robert requests ideas from the group: Hi Ben, As you know from my recent comments, I have been elected Department Chair at my high school. At the urging of our French teacher, I am going to move ahead at the school site level with trying to introduce TCI/TPRS into the curriculum across the board. With

When a so-called expert (we are all experts and fools at the same time) shows up in a school district from 2000 miles away and gives a one or two day presentation, the actual return on investment by all involved is minimal at best. Most people are just too skeptical and it can be diffucult on

There are probably only a handful, if that, of  teachers out there – but there are some – who for some reason do not want us to be doing this work, and we don’t want them in our private conversation here. So if you haven’t sent in a bio, please do so. We must know

We have been talking about the need for simple low level novels for TCI classes in Latin. We actually need more of them in many languages. In this article, published so that I can make it available in the category list and not have it scroll out, David Maust asks Robert Harrell for advice on the

James reminds us of something we often forget, that the kids have to sit in restraining devices and fake, feign or pay attention to us yammering away each and every day from around 7:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.. I often tell them that if their parents had to do that, there would be no school, or it

I went over to James Hosler’s site and found another site by him but in Latin, and then another one for his students. He even spoke some Latin on a short clip. I understood two words – mea culpa. I have to think this is what they sounded like a few thousand years ago. It

I invite students in one class to visit other of my classes, if their schedule allows, if there is nothing being done in some class, etc. They sometimes take me up on it. Today a student sat in on my 9th pd. class and just observed. When he left, he said, “Good class, Mr. Slavic!”

Just to clarify about the class competitions. The kids enjoy competing, but we know that creating competition between classes – in which a group of kids is made to feel that they lost at something – is far from what we want to create here. For us, CC is a sneaky way to get increased high

I am in a language lab right now on my planning period. The class in here, a heritage speakers class, is all out of control when they are supposed to be using the computers to do a writing  assignment in Spanish. It is  chaos in here, but the (very young first year teacher) is on

Darren’s bio: I am totally for CI. I have been teaching Spansish for 13 years. I started using TPRS in about 2002 or 2003. I love it. I was in a high school setting for several years. It was tough being the only TPRS teacher, you know all the teachers doing the grammar thing. When I

I really like the way, in this method, how the kids can write phonetically and then when we work on writing directly, after the story and after the reading, it all cleans up really nicely. Unless they have heard it first with lots and lots of reps with full meaning to them, they can’t write, nor should they