I knew, of course, that the barking noise I heard on the other end of the phone that day had no possible legal bite, but I shut the blog down since I was leaving the country anyway. I needed some time to think. On my trip, I reflected on the level of anger expressed in […]
In December, on the day before I was going to India for winter break, I received a telephone call from the irate (only word to describe it) principal of a Denver area high school. He told me, along with some unprintable things, to “cease and desist” from [messing with peoples’ minds] on this blog. He
Sharon needs our responses: As a part-time high school Spanish teacher with just two classes, I am facing a difficult spring semester with two new Spanish 1 classes. One class is huge with 32 students, and the other has just 9 students. I’m hoping the community can offer some advice to handle the following situation.
Report from the Field and Question – Sharon Reiter Read More »
Yesterday was the first advanced (levels 2-AP) Susan Gross workshop I’ve attended. It was crisp and very sharp. I highly recommend this workshop. Any teachers who may be trying to break through the dilemna of how to properly teach using comprehensible input at the upper levels would benefit from this workshop. Over the next six
I got this link from Beniko Mason. In it, Sy Ying Lee implies that reading is vastly underutilized by most if not all of us. We have Krashen’s research, but we don’t use it, even though we know that it is so powerful – that is what I draw from this most important message. I
Bryce recently posted this over on the listserve and I asked him if I could put it here too: POBRE ANA READING PLAN There is a lot that can be done with Pobre Ana. I have taught from the book for 11 years in HS, MS and college classes and it is still not old
Anne sent this with the comment: Oh my. Big fun here. I actually scripted this to go with one of Michael Miller’s short stories, but it’s worth doing all on its own. What A Handsome Boy! points at him what a handsome boy! looks like you may not go out with him Lyndsey and her parents
I took the “no blurting/talking over” rule out of my list of rules this year. I may need to add it back on there because I have one level 2 class that is just too chatty during stories. My recent thinking about the blurting issue has been that maybe if I slowed down more, there
I need to remember that my value as a teacher is not in how high my kids score on tests. It’s not really about how much they learn. Rather, it’s how they feel about themselves, about their ability to learn a language, upon leaving my classroom. Will I have helped them have confidence about themselves
Jim Tripp send me this excellent story and gave me permission to publish it here. It has everything except a plot, and shows how a lot of fun can be found in just the creation of images and not worrying so much about a problem with three locations (which most of us never get to anyway,
I’m republishing this old blog entry – slightly edited – from 2007. Amazingly, the core ideas in it remain applicable today: My stretching of the silly putty that is TPRS has taken many forms over the years, as I’m sure is true for all of us. I have tinkered and probed, laughed and gnashed my teeth,
