This is blog entry number four from my fearless former eighth grade student who has been sharing her views of studying French as a ninth grader in her high school. (Search “A Blow To His Confidence” for the preceding three blogs.) In this blog, the author bravely interviews her teacher: O.K. not to continue talking […]
Magic Johnson has said that, as he grew up, there were a lot of people who “shot down my dreams”. How many dreams of young kids of color to succeed at foreign languages have been dashed by worksheet coma teachers? Such teachers would be quick to attribute their racially imbalanced AP classes to the sloth of the individual
I got this email from Jennifer a few days ago. It is pretty interesting: “Ben, I wanted to thank you again for all your time and energy over the last year and a half, on your blog, and in Denver this summer. “As you know (and warned me about this summer) this year has
When we have the time to write up stories as readings (Step 3), we embellish the original story line with personalized details about kids in the class. They want to know what they did and they read the text very closely when they see their names or their friends’ names in the text. We add
This is a follow up email to the one yesterday. In it, we see an excellent restatement of the author’s original point: “Thanks for the compliment. I cannot wait until those new standards are passed. [ed. note: They are passed, but will teachers align their instruction with them?] There will be resistance, I know, but
This email is from the same student who posted here a few days ago about her teacher deciding that it is now time for the class to speak. Before reading this new entry, the reader may want to read the January 12 blog entry entitled “A Blow To His Confidence” – https://benslavic.com/blog/?p=5726). Here is the text of the new
I got this today. It’s long, but it shines light where light is needed: Dear Ben, I have a long rant, but I just spent three hours last night, and am scheduled for seven more tomorrow, of a workshop that seems to ignore everything we know about CI, and yet even quotes Krashen. I like the
On the thread of classroom discipline, Toni asked some questions which I have rescued from the comments and put here in Q and A form to preserve them as a searchable blog: Q. I haven’t used any PAT activities yet, but if I were to adopt that procedure, what do I do if the kids are
This email from a colleague addresses the simple idea that if we teach numbers by themselves, the kids will learn only the numbers. But, if we teach the actual language, our kids will learn both numbers and the rest of the language as well. Here it is: A second-year kid came in and complained that we
If a cow is in the fields and you want it to give milk, you don’t talk to it about the various kinds of grass to eat, analyzing with it the soil that the grass grows in, and you also don’t try to make it create milk before eating any grass. You just let it eat
Backwards design – a term that originally came from discussion with Anne Matava some years ago – is basically “frontloading vocabulary”. It’s the same thing. We pick structures from a reading we want to do with our kids and we do enough PQA around them earlier in the week in the form of stories so
I got this from a former student: Hi Mr. Slavic, Quick question for you. What was that statistic about the number of hours of listening that a person needs before they can do any real output? Was it 1000 hours? I’m pretty sure that that’s what it was but I just wanted to be sure.
