I want to turn this recent comment here into a blog so that it will become searchable. (Stephen please note that a search on “classroom discipline” on this site will bring many blog entries from past months and years that may be worth reading on this topic as well.) Stephen wrote: … it’s hard not […]
I wrote to Stephen this morning about the discipline thing, just as a little pep talk for the day and as a follow up to that comment about from yesterday: Stephen the entire thing is, when a kid is being an ass, to just stop teaching, go into English, and patiently tell them that you
Elissa asked me to post this great question: Hello community of TPRSers- The 7th and 8th grades in my school will be traveling to Costa Rica in May. (Yes, I get to go with them!) And I am feeling stuck trying to figure out how to best prepare them. I’m new to TPRS and have
The tidal waves of change away from grammar and book based instruction are no longer coming, they are here. We in TPRS can take a deep breath. Each state is in a slightly different place on this, of course, but CA and CO are certainly on board with ACTFL – it is a legal thing
Typically, teachers who go to the trouble of making TPRS work for them experience, as a result of that effort, larger class sizes. There is no need to even mention, in this regard, the precipitous drops experienced in traditional classes – it is a fact. In a large suburban Denver high school, 89% of students quit their foreign
Hi Ben! My brother sent this to me. It’s a series of “experiments” by Volkswagen (gotta love the Germans!) showing that fun changes behavior. (That’s the fun theory.) I’m sending the link to the piano episode. They also did this with a trash bin and a recycling bin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw Enjoy! Robert
You know, I was walking around my building Friday and in the hallways I heard some pretty sophisticated versions of the English language. And yet, some of those English language experts were, if you asked their teachers, not any good at languages. Hmmm. The kids I heard spoke English with with total command of not only
PQA is great, but, originally, as I understand it, Blaine used it as a way of etching in, drilling in, the three structures prior to the story so that the story could be more easily understood. I wrote in a recent blog on how that particular process differs from what we have come to know
Here’s the thing: we have this computer in our minds, far greater, infinitely greater, than the most sophisticated computers ever built, and we go around thinking that we as teachers can impact the language output process of our students in a conscious way – that we can “teach them how to speak”. That doesn’t make
Robert tried to comment on the thread “Playing Tennis” but it disappeared somewhere so I am just putting it here as a regular blog entry: At the risk of over-intellectualizing the discussion, here are a couple of random thoughts. As much as we may reject the theorizing and academic discussion of which methodology is “right”,
I got this from Carol in New Jersey. She is asking for feedback from everyone. Could you put this out there? Circling and PQA-ing with the purchased materials is falling flat for me. Does someone who is using materials by Blaine or Carol have some advice? Example: circling and PQA-ing il coupe/he cuts and les
I was conversing in French with a student after school today. As a French 4 student soon going to France on a trip, she was concerned because she said that she had, up until this year, rarely heard the language in any of her classes up. A natural language talent (upper 1%), she seemed to
