In a comment to the post entitled “Then God bless you” John Piazza wrote this. I wanted to repeat it here: Why does it seem that last year was the worst year for so many teachers, and not just CI teachers? I have heard this from traditional teachers as well, teachers who would never have admitted any […]
I am going to start stories a little earlier this year. I don’t know why. I’ll keep on focusing on the kids and doing the personalization and norming of the classroom and all that, of course, until the classroom is entirely personalized and the rules are clear, but with September visions start dancing in my
Of course, one of the C words in the standards is Culture. Big deal. How can we teach the culture witout the language? Do it in English? That is lost time to CI. We don’t teach social studies, although some language teachers get away with that by talking about Diego and Maria in Argentina having breakfast
A few weeks ago Christine wrote this. It bears repeating: I really like standards-based grading for the following reasons: (1) it allows students/parents/me/etc. to see what skill the kids gets and doesn’t get–and not just “I’m good at this” or “I suck at this.” (2) Because you have a clearer understanding of a student’s strengths/weaknesses,
A few weeks ago we got into a discussion about the standards debate and Jim quoted Krashen. I republish that text here because of its importance: The National Standards Discussion: A Weapon of Mass Distraction Stephen Krashen We are again invited to give our opinions about the content of national standards (http://www.parcconline.org/parcc-content-frameworks). We are not
If you try to use your ipad to read the blog when you’re on the go, it may not work. When you open the website, it usually doesn’t even provide the “member log in” option, which is the little button on the top right corner. This is because the header (the stuff above the navigation
I’m going down to South Carolina for the weekend. I don’t want to bring a computer. So please free to explore any of the 2,194 blog posts and 6,879 comments here. Use the categories or the search function. The search function is more accurate if you know what topic you want to explore. See you next
It occurred to me that if an administrator or, especially, parent of a child who believes, through the parent, that we should be conjugating verbs, then we could do this: We teach using CI for about three weeks and then announce that the next week, about the fourth week or whenever, we will be doing
We are so looked at! All those administrators, instructional coaches, etc. who have nothing better to do than look at us, weigh us, judge us, make us accountable, make us nervous, give us too many tasks, far too many to allow us to do what we went into the profession for, to do the best job we
I thought of something else for when the Circling with Balls loses energy. Go from the facts you are talking about to the topic of love! That will wake them up. Here is a very simple example: Class, Jenna likes to watch TV! (ahhh!) Does Jenna like to watch TV? (yes) (finish circling this naturally) Then
I’m not a big TPR guy but I got an email from a colleague today that is definitely worth sharing if you are in fact doing any TPR to start the year. This description of TPR is excellent and I highly recommend it: We go through my TPR list. I started the first day with
