This is a repost from 2008. Are the ideas expressed below still true? What is actually going on in our own districts re: CI instruction? It is not a pretty picture. The four percenters who became teachers because they were four percenters rule. Most districts are filled with beaten down, conflicted foreign language educators. Had […]

Here is the letter to my assistant principal that I wrote to express my position about the situation that prompted the previous 9 blog posts about how Pigs Can’t Fly. The principal got involved. The result was that this kid and another were removed from my class at Thanksgiving. Since then, my class has healed,

A teacher on the Invisibles FB page has written something about the value of non-targeting that I’d like to share here. Sean Griffin writes: I am enjoying being relatively stress free these first few weeks of school, thanks to just going with creating tableaux using…whatever. First, I photocopied the pages 192-194 in The Invisibles to

I am always pushing the case against using CI to teach lists of words, a la TPRS. However, right about now kids can get really rude and we may not have enough bad grades on them to keep them humble. Need some bad grades to keep them humble? Do something. Give more quizzes. Grade them

What else can we say about those really rare rude kids who challenge us at the deepest gut level and even cause us to lose sleep at night? 1. The student seems to be not at all interested in learning the language I am teaching in my classroom. 2. The student seems very interested in

I apologize for comparing pigs to some of the kids we have to deal with. Anyway, what do we do about these kids? Well, the first thing is to recognize them and figure out if they really pose a threat to our classrooms at the deepest level. The ones who are oppositionally defiant passive aggressive

What other behaviors does this oppositional student exhibit with other students during class? Those whom he can reach and bring into his orbit – if the teacher lets him – are only a few of the kids affected by kids like this. But all the kids in the class are affected. The students who want

In language classrooms based on comprensible input, the problem of non-participatory and/or oppositionally defiant students is much worse. In traditional classrooms, students can signal their inability to participate in many ways like by staring at a desk and get away with it. But in CI/TPRS classrooms they can’t do that because the teacher is required by the national proficiency guidelines

People who continue (a la TPRS) to use CI to teach word lists and other old-style curriculums perhaps aren’t thinking deeply enough about it. One person objected that they don’t have enough class time if they do as I suggest of using 15 or 20 minutes per class to teach the traditional curriculum. I counter

We’re busy but feedback is needed. I had advised a teacher to go to the book with two bad classes. Now this has happened: Hi Ben, Since I’ve stopped doing CI in a couple of my classes now due to behavior, I’ve run into further CM problems with one especially. Now the students are bored

The kids whom we are talking about in this discussion of kid pigs/jackals are very rare, and usually, as I suspect is true in other classrooms right now, it is one kid who, if allowed, brings one or two others along with him into a kind of “cell” in the classroom. If we haven’t perked up

Many of us mistakenly think that we can handle those most rare kids if we “just love them” enough. We are wrong. What I said in PQA in a Wink! about Mildred and Kyle and developing alternate personalities with them doesn’t apply to these kids. We put our careers and our sanity on the line when we rush