Once I was teaching a class when there was some construction work going on in the building. The workers needed to be in a certain corner/cubby part of my room. More and more workers started coming and coming and going. A few admins appeared here and there. The students I teaching at that time was […]
Hello Ben, I have loved the creativity of having to try to learn how to make distance learning work, never having trained for it! In particular, I’ve tried to assign activities that they can do in virtual groups, taking advantage of their attachment to their phones. That has been quite popular as a way to
Hi Ben, I’ve browsed through some of the postings and comments on your blog after the closure of schools. One comment from you resonates in my mind and I paraphrase: that the future of the teaching of FL will be online. Maybe you are right, and that is the sad direction we are moving in,
Here is me wearing my mask in my backyard. I had mentioned it in a comment field – I used it in New Delhi five years ago. Highly recommended from a quality UK company: Respro.
In this comment-turned-post we see a few videos of how the Invisibles can be used in a Zoom setting. Carly Edelman started with the Invisibles right away upon my return from New Delhi in 2016, by reading general articles I was writing about them here on the PLC starting in that year. Those articles turned
Testing in CI classrooms is far more damaging than we think it is. It conflicts in the most serious manner with the real research about how people learn languages. We must work harder to take down this monster in our teaching. The best thing is to focus on the good things that our students can
I’ve known and worked with Diego Ojeda (Louisville, KY) for years and would like to formally welcome him into our group. Many of you know Diego as one of the premier presenters in the CI world and a true gentleman. He is busy with all sorts of projects, but tonight in a phone call I
In their efforts to show that they are in line with the research and the buzz word of the day, CI , there are many language departments now claiming – innaccurately – that they do CI, and it’s getting worse daily. They are straddling centuries. They have one foot in the last century and one
Here is my new, honest mission statement. I put it in orange because it is such a big deal to me, to finally write something true about my goals in becoming a teacher so long ago in 1977. It’s taken this long: My mission as a language teacher is to create a learning environment, in
For over 95% of our students, over all those years, being in my classes was little more for them than just a job, with little of the joy of communication, and too much memorization and focus on lists of words, semantic sets, thematic units, etc. They accepted it and I accepted it. As a result,
Yes. For most of my career, I can say that I, as a teacher, was more focused on myself and getting my own emotional needs met through teaching than trying to actually increase the acquisition of my students. It was all about me. I thought that I wanted to help my students learn French, but
