A repost from 2018: I’m on a new kick – the appreciation of beauty. By us. When we’re teaching. So that our students can experience something beautiful each day instead of what they experience now, with the testing in all their classes and all. Why not? Why not make schools into places where beauty (of […]
Nine years ago I met Kate Taluga at a conference on saving native endangered languages in Oklahoma. She also attended a National TPRS conference around that time and presented on building community with students – I believe that conference was in Las Vegas. I remember enjoying speaking with Susan Gross and Kate after Kate presented
What do you do if you get more than 18 students or more in your Invisibles online classes in the fall? Don’t you need to see their faces in order for the Invisibles to work online, since grading them is based on seeing their faces? I was asked this question on a webinar with Teacher’s
Up until now, after twenty years of doing CI or some other form of it like TPRS, I have always thought that the two ways of teaching were mostly mutually exclusive. But now, I see no reason why we can’t mix the two, especially in level 1 language classes. That’s where all the oppositional sparks
We were talking about the limitations brought by the new practitioners of TPRS/CI who have over the past twenty years led the TPRS/CI movement into a new marketplace which I call the “CI Marketplace”, where the purity of the research and the elegant simplicity of the Communication standard have been left in tattered shreds of
In the last post we suggested that there have been waves of language teachers since about 1970. The first were the traditionalists. ‘Nuff said. The second were the Blaine Ray disciples who came in with real force in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, they sold out and Krashen and Blaine let them. So now, their potential
I said in a recent Teacher’s Discovery webinar – just yesterday actually – that we need to finally grow up in our profession. We need to become big girls and boys now that COVID has opened up a new and exciting highway for us to align more and more with the research. We need to
Viktoria has read the book with particular close attention to Cat. A. She has also attended the last few weeks of Zoom instruction on Cat. A. I am thrilled to report that we just finished a Zoom class in which Victoria demo’d Cat. A and she nailed it. She really did. What does that mean?
If you but learn how to teach in line with the standards and research, you won’t have to complain about being bullied by children in your classroom. Kids become bullies when they feel powerless. Give them power (i.e. knowledge of what you are saying) and – BECAUSE THEY UNDERSTAND – they will stop bullying you.
Alisa sent this: I just don’t agree. We in the specific field of language education have the upper hand, but nobody seems to know it. I think that with (1) the 65%/35% grading system used in the Invisibles and (2) small personalized classes, it can work fine. All we have to do is make sure
This post is from years ago, but worth a re-post: Some years ago, in a much-lauded speech to the Republican National Convention, then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made “we believe in teachers” one of his central themes. This prompts the questions: What does it mean to believe in teachers? And, do we really believe in
I’ve been reflecting more and more about how it’s not about how smart you are, or how fast you process languages, but about the community piece. That’s why, even when instructing online, we can’t let that piece fall aside. We need to increase it. Indeed, everything is based on recognizing our students as people. And
