My two highlights this year were: – Staying positive with a girl who has experienced abuse all her life at the hands of her mother. She fought tooth and nail not to be included, for about five months, until, as per John’s comments about Pepe, a point was reached somewhere in January where she knew that […]
Teenagers are trapped. They can’t go back to the joys of their younger days, which were squeezed out of them somewhere between 4th and 7th grade. They can’t go forward either. They’re stuck. Oh, but what wouldn’t they give for a break in their day from the endless boring tasks that led Tolstoy to describe
This is a post that I want to keep front and center until we get moving on it. So I will keep it here as what they call a “sticky” post where it will appear first each time that you log on. We will do this for awhile. We don’t want to turn into designers of
My kids schooled me yesterday on a Susan Gross point. Susan has always coached us to make sure that we “believe the story” as it unfolds. I never worked at that. I was too busy with all that other stuff, right? But, one day last week, the kids made it plain that, even if I
Andrew’s blog entry made me think about next year again. The most effective CI that I do – and crucial to getting the year off on the right foot – is the Circling with Balls cards: https://benslavic.com/documents/Workshop-Handouts-1009.doc I said about a month ago here that I might just try to possibly go completely through the entire
It seems like a lot of the new CI based teachers are around 30. The other day, Diana and I found ourselves sitting at a table with some of our TCI group and Joseph (30), Jesse (29) and Erin (27) were sitting all right across from us. And now here is another blog bio from
Michele Whaley and Janice Gullickson have made available an excellent new resource: http://asdworldlanguages.ning.com/group/comprehensibleinputclass?xgi=383yXWRWHOX52a&xg_source=msg_invite_group You can also find this site in the list of links at the bottom of the right side column of this page as “Michele Whaley 2”. Other links are welcome – send ’em on!
Our table was right in front of the podium at the (U.S Congressman) Jared Polis Awards Banquet last night. Fifteen of the most effective teachers in Colorado were honored, among them a member of our Denver Public Schools TCI (Teaching with Comprehensible Input) team, Joseph Dziedzic. Paul Kirschling was there and also DPS World Languages
Ben, I am still working on the Rejoinder pieces. I dug this up the other day. These are the interview questions that we asked applicants for a Spanish teaching job at my school a couple of years ago. I wrote most of the questions and the committee took turns asking them. The committee consisted of
We must remember that, when we do PQA, we are trying to personalize the story that is waiting to be developed when the PQA is over. Therefore, we direct each PQA question directly at a student. This means that, if one of the three structures is “drinks”, after we have explained what it means and gestured
From Utah, a girl – sparkling four percenter – joined my French 1 class about two weeks ago. She had an A in her former school and, since we have been on a Susan Gross type of reading jag lately, had an A with me as well – she reads well. But each time that we took a spin into L2, I noticed
This was a comment that I just felt like making into a blog post: I was filming today my heavy hittin’ 6th pd. level 2 class (I’m trying to get as much video as I can for this blog). I noticed something. Whenever I would fire out something (way too fast, because SLOW is still
