BLM – 1

Now that the problem has surfaced from beneath the waves, we are left to ask what we’re going to do, right? Now that we are aware, now that we can see the scarred underbelly of our profession, will we just start treating all of our students in the same way? I don’t think that’s possible.

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The Problem of Circling

You may want to read this if you still use Circling as a TPRS/CI tool. It engages the mind in thinking about the pattern and CI is about disengaging the mind and making acquisition a completely unconscious process. Circling was invented by someone in Blaine Ray’s circle (not exactly sure who it was, maybe Blaine

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Getting Sleep at Home

The agonizing over opening schools, those conversations, is usually explained as based on a fear that kids will get behind. I don’t know about other subjects, but there is never being “behind” in languages. Everyone is exactly where they are. At the end of ten months of torture in traditional classes, the kids are en

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Emotional Safety

We need to address HOW we are making our kids feel when they are in our classes. To extend Marshall McCluhan’s message beyond electronic media, is it not possible that we ourselves, our bodies and the expressions on our faces, also the medium for our CI messages in our classes? Bear in mind that the

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Pitching So They Can Hit It

A repost from 2011: We want to be like pitching machines, which, being robotic, do not overly concern themselves with the ideas part/where the story goes. It’s like a director deciding to develop the dialogue for a film around the personality of an actor (the class) and not on a script connected to targets (the “curriculum”). There

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