A few months ago Bob Patrick brought up the subject of four percenters here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/04/23/4ers/ Here is a follow up to that article by Bob: It occurred to me today that I have found an answer to a question I asked several weeks ago:  who are the fourpercenters?  How do we describe them/know them? They […]

I often repeat the same exact question three or four times in a row using different emotions.  One would think that this would bore the kids, but the kids can be fooled into decoding the same sentence multiple times by asking them questions in different ways using different emotions. C’est vrai?/Is that true? said in

Here is another poem written by the Persian master Hafiz. It is taken from The Gift, translated from the Persian by Dan Ladinsky. DROPPING KEYS The small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners. When we treat students with

Four NYU grad students came to instruct our faculty in cultural sensitivity in a day long training last week. Fortunately, none of the faculty had much to do since it was the end of the year. Just kidding. But one of the grad students, Tanya Leslie, was excellent, and she was the one I got to

These two articles make me think that gesturing in TPRS may be underrated. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071104191551.htm http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004434.html

I’ve always wondered what language represents. I was told in college that words are symbols, like the word chair is a symbol for a chair, or the word liberty is a symbol for what we think of as freedom. Something like that. When I hear the word chair I think of the thing. I image

Just thought I’d publish, as a post, this silly comment from earlier this week in response to jen. Again, I am reminded about the value of privacy here. Some – many – reading this might think me coo-coo, but here I can write whatever I want: I sometimes wonder if we aren’t all crazy, as in

Yesterday was the last day for students after 35 years of teaching. Really 34.5 because I was half time this year, and how nice that is. I earned it after those 34 quite difficult full time years. It’s nice to be able to get up, have a cup of coffee, go for a bike ride,

We all know that the key idea in CI is to present only new words in the forms of the structures – that every single word in a story, in an ideal world, has already been acquired and so the comprehensible input generated in class can be 100% focused on the real lesson – the three

From Bob Patrick: Ben, I just got off the phone with John Piazza–our weekly coast to coast phone call.  One of the issues we talked about is that in our concern for rigor (includes all the rich conversation on your blog of late) we end up being pushed toward something that we have already identified

Grant send this. It pretty much kicks ass: Ben, There are MANY nuggets to take from this video. It’s a must share. The way Bill talks about commanding the audience’s attention, checking in with the audience. giving a vocabulary lesson and the SERENDIPITY of the girl standing and acting out the story are just PERFECT

When kids are not focused on the words but on the message, which is our main goal (because then we know that real acquisition is taking place), we can tell that this is happening by simply looking at their faces. It is like being in a movie theatre and being able to look back at the audience from