Recently someone posted on the More list asking about how and when to gesture to establish meaning, and their query was met with a strong assertion that establishing meaning through gestures is just not to be done. The person with the question said that he did not want to lead anyone astray so he rescinded […]
Scotty Jimenez teaches high school Spanish in Oxford, MS. He shared with Tina and I at our recent St. Louis workshop that he’s wrapping up his tenth year of teaching and apparently has done it all – six years of traditional teaching out of a big name publisher textbook and three and a half years
Alisa wrote a cool sentence today. In working with a group of traditional teachers, when they realized what is possible with CI instruction, she said: … [they] immediately felt that rush of wind through their hair from not pulling Hebrew out of a box, but rather cooking it up in class w/fresh, organic & locally
Here’s Carmen’s commute: Hi Ben, I took this picture this morning on my way to work. It was very cloudy here in Chicago. That’s the loop (downtown), my school is in the West Loop. Best, Carmen
In the same way that our planet is warming up, so also is it undeniable that the role of the heart in education is warming up: https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/energetic-communication/
Alisa got this message from a student, a second grade native Mandarin Speaker in her Spanish class who was in ELL during Spanish last year. It kind of says it all.
Tina throws a wrench into the thinking of those who think that they are teaching to the standards when they are really doing skill building activities: The communicative activity where they practice doing Task X in Language Y using Phrases A, B, and C is skill-building. Recently Dr. Krashen said on FB that the real
Here’s Steven’s commute along with that double rainbow he mentioned. To me it symbolizes hope for us:
A member of our community said this to me in an email today. Guess who it was? I got a free latte for Teacher Appreciation Week. The mom who delivered it is Chloe’s mom. She said Chloe loves Spanish and sits around at home talking in Spanish and writing in Spanish for fun. She said
When we target parts of the language, and repeat them with the goal of getting students to learn them, we inevitably leave some of our students behind. Some get left behind because they are not yet ready to learn that little piece of the linguistic system at that time, and we leave others languishing in
