David’s comment on the toughness of his largely Asian ESL kids in supporting families working for the corporation called FedEx gives us cause to reflect on what we are really doing in education. What is our profession really all about? In my opinion, what we do exhibits a form of patriotism that is of a different […]

I mentioned that I want to videotape my workshop with DPS teachers on Monday to help get a clearer version of the story I have already posted some clips of here. I will be able to do that because the audience fo this session will have had no French at all and I will have to

A blog member sent this. He makes a point that pretty much outlines the way I feel about how the video project: Hi Ben, I feel this idea of standardizing the way to comment on videos, or establishing common criteria, etc. reminds me too much of what I am trying to escape!…the data crunching monster that

I have an excellent idea. On Monday I am going to present to our Denver Public Schools teachers on this method. I will demostrate the three steps from beginning to end. The excellent idea is to do the same story, Afraid of the Package, and film it to upload here. But the key thing is that

Estimados colegas, I have written about this before, but I feel like I really need to get a better handle on this issue. I have some ideas here, but I need some more. In order to accurately assess our students, it seems to me that we need to address the idea of language plasticity—the phenomenon

I got this from a colleague who needs our help. It’s a great question about being exhausted that ties into the simplicity thread (actually a category) that has shown up here recently: I am the French teacher at a small high school.  I teach 8th grade [through] French 3/4….We use Blaine Ray’s Look I’m Really

Here are the four clips from today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO2xDVQQAUA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRXZTHUWKBI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEsoro-ga-E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHP3WtnLZv0 If you are keeping up with this, today we finished the first location of the story we are doing. We got the artist going today, which was very cool in all my classes. Those kids can draw! As I reviewed the tape, there was a lot I wanted

Sharing and presenting this method is very weird and it is very difficult to reach people, honestly. There seems to be an energy against it, if you know what I mean, and the work of reaching people is much more difficult than I would have ever thought. The reasons for the privacy of the blog

I got this from Brian, currently in his first month of using comprehensible input methods. Great stuff: Hi Ben, You asked me to expand a bit on this idea for the blog, so here goes: Zen and the Art of Language Teaching I had mentioned that over the summer, while on a wonderful trip down

I wanted to go to location 2 today, as per the videos posted yesterday, but the pressure is on to feed the gradebook. So I gave two quizzes today, one on the word wall words (bogus) and the other on the content of the story so far (valid), which quiz was written by the quiz writer

This may work. Based on what Chris said, I just went to My Videos and Playlists in YouTube and clicked on “Info and Settings” and then on “Video Information”, then “Broadcasting and Sharing Options”. It looks like this, with boxes to the left of the terms below which aren’t showing up here but are visible

I have noticed that, as we talk more about the use of video, as we all summon our courage to share with probably only 30 people who read this blog regularly of about 80 who are currently subsribers, we discuss theory and research less and less. Have you noticed? Whenever we talk about the nitty gritty